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1 Environmental literacy
An introduction
Overview
With a growing backlash towards climate change adaptation, greater emphasis has to be placed on promoting new modes of education and environmental literacy across all aspects of media and communications studies. At the outset, this study tends to endorse eco-literary scholar Greg Garrardās (2012) assertion that the definition of what counts as pollution, much less any major environmental issue, up to and including climate change, remains a cultural as well as a political and scientific question that depends as much on shifting values and priorities, as on actual emissions of toxic substances.
Environmental literacy and education is certainly not simply a top down process of disseminating correct attitudes, values and beliefs, but incorporates and facilitates a dialogue with audiences of different persuasions and at all levels of knowledge and engagement, to help highlight and at best co-produce consensual solutions to the major challenges of our time. Furthermore, it is affirmed that environmental education is not simply about āsaving the whaleā or indeed saving local habitatās but is equally about the development of an appreciation of the wonders and beauty of the world and provoking a sense of wanting to save it. Consequently, as suggested in Environmental Ethics and Film (Brereton 2016), the development of a deeper form of ecological media thinking, while recognising all aspects of environmental justice, alongside promoting increased levels of critical literacy, is essential in creating a robust, sustainable environmental citizenship and embedding a comprehensive strategy for activating effective solutions into the future.
This study will go beyond an examination of fictional films to also include documentaries, as well as recognising the proliferation of YouTube, video games and other new media platforms for engagement with environmental issues. Discovering what might be considered as best practice with regards to such digital media outlets demands extensive engagement with the most popular and effective media artefacts. To begin this process of examining environmental communication opportunities afforded by the newer interactive media that are flourishing across a wide range of such social networks, it is necessary to tease out their psychological and ideological influences, alongside the unique affordances of various forms of media, and at the same time uncover potential tipping points for audience engagement and hopefully transformation. Later chapters will concentrate on YouTube as a new media platform, alongside a study of (serious) video games like PokƩmon Go, which explicitly or implicitly address environmental issues, while helping to explore how they might assist in teaching and promoting critical environmental literacy (Rust et al. 2013). Such examples of transmedia and convergent formats in various ways speak directly to contemporary audiences and potentially invoke new modes of environmental literacy.
From media literacy to environmental literacy
Sonia Livingstone suggests that ādespite enthusiastic calls for new digital literacy programsā and the recent āembedding of media literacy requirements within national and international regulationā, there remains little agreement about media literacy or āhow to measure it, and therefore little evidence that efforts to improve it are effectiveā (Livingstone 2011). This assessment also rings true with regards to the development of environmental literacy.
If audio-visual media are to play a significant role in facilitating participation and the development of environmental education in the public sphere and towards promoting democratic values that cuts across inequalities at all levels, much needs to be teased out. In particular, far greater understanding of the power of mediated texts is needed, coupled with an exploration of how audiences consume such texts, together with an appreciation of such textual interaction with society, as they feed into a range of intersecting institutional tensions. Furthermore, policy around (environmental) literacy should be grounded in the experience of media use, learning, expression and civic participation among citizens, and at the same time should be developed and implemented through collaboration with academic stakeholders, schools, the media industry and civic society (see Livingstone 2011).
This form of productive and active literacy can also be extended and incorporated into a broad policy model to help develop new forms of environmental literacy and productive modes of eco-citizenship. Media literacy in general, and environmental literacy in particular, remains the most fruitful strategy to frame future media audience investigation and incorporate both an explanatory and a normative agenda, rather than provoking a divisive partisan and isolationist position, which unfortunately so much complex environmental debates tend to engender. Environmental scholars, I believe, should continue to go back to basics and ask well-established media questions, such as: what do citizens and consumers know about their changing media environment and, further, what should they know about the environment? And then, most critically, pedagogical analysis and curricular tools and protocols need to be explored to help tease out questions like: what does it matter if they donāt have this knowledge and, in whose interest is it if they do?
Methodological strategies
Alongside well-established textual analysis protocols used to examine film from an environmental and educational perspective (see Brereton 2005; Rust et al. 2016), such strategies will be re-applied and extended towards exploring a wide range of online media. For instance, later chapters on streaming Netflix televisual series, YouTube artefacts and environmentally predisposed video games will serve to extend and even problematise conventional feature length film analysis strategies around environmentalism, together with addressing eco-documentaries and other new media formats. All of these cross-platform and converging media outlets are being extensively colonised and re-appropriated by growing new-generational audiences in particular. Reception and psychological studies of audience behaviour and trigger points that address environmental issues will be explored in Chapter 2. For instance, highly tuned āuses and gratificationā and other research tools for audience engagement have been successfully used across so many contemporary studies in striving to address the inter-connection between mediated texts and audiences and these can be re-applied to explore new forms of online media, while capturing their potential for developing effective modes of environmental literacy.
Furthermore, the study will tentatively suggest how audiences might tease out meanings and interpretations, alongside exploring how new forms of literacy might evolve. Yet, as evident for instance through large-scale Eurobarometer surveys over the years, it remains difficult to gauge the effectiveness of filmic, much less other media stimuli on audienceās perceptions of environmental issues (see Nisbet et al. 2018). While it remains difficult to tease out such concerns, at the same time there is a danger of harking back to early effects debates (see Payne Fund research in the USA from the 1920s onwards) and its reductive assumptions around hypnotic media and passive audiences. The literature and methodological tools have thankfully become much more sophisticated of late, taking on broad notions of active audiences, alongside empirically applied psychological methodologies of investigation around human behaviour, as outlined in Chapter 2.
In essence, this study will strive to achieve its limited goals1 by:
1Criticising and analysing new digital online artefacts, together with a corpus of popular films, documentaries and televisual series that can ostensibly provoke a range of environmental issues and debates.
2Applying the literature used in traditional audience and reception studies to tease out what might be considered the most effective tipping points and especially highlighting particular narrative stimuli in developing effective environmental media results.
3Addressing the textual analysis protocols and potential reception of environmentally focused productions, delivered through online and so-called legacy media.
4Identifying specific content and production possibilities that serve to enhance audience responses and most especially promote environmental learning protocols.
Environmental literacy as a new mode of learning
The concept of environmental literacy first appeared in a 1969 article by Charles Roth, in response to the then frequent American media references to environmental illiterates who were polluting the environment. Little attention was paid to the essay until a year later, when President Richard Nixon used it in relation to the passage of the first National Environmental Education Act.
Environmental literacy as a goal of general education is constituted by a number of precepts which include:
ā¢all sustainable human activities are dependent upon a clean, healthy and productive environment
ā¢it is the environment that provides the materials and energy to meet our basic needs and desires
ā¢the nature of particular environments sets parameters for many human activities and establishes risks for those activities
ā¢all human activities have consequences for the environment both positive and negative
ā¢Environmental literacy is essentially the capacity to perceive and interpret the relative health of environmental systems and take appropriate action to maintain, restore, or improve the health of those systems.
(Roth 1968: 10)
Formal environmental education began to emerge as a distinct field in the mid-1960s. It has its roots in a variety of related fields, including conservation education, nature education, resource-use education, outdoor education, geographic education and of course science education. It draws its strength from an examination of several macro issues including:
ā¢the interrelationships between natural and social systems
ā¢the unity of mankind with nature
ā¢technology and the making of choices
ā¢developmental learning throughout the human life cycle.
(Roth 1992: 17)
Although the pedagogical and communications relationship between cognitive components, affective components and overall behaviour is complex and not necessarily linear, researchers have ostensibly shown that increasing an individualās environmental knowledge through study results in more positive attitudes towards the environment (Bradley et al. 1999) and in turn can help to create more responsible environmental behaviour. While a number of caveats must be added to such a broad ranging assertion, most especially the pervasive need for large scale systematic change, nonetheless this still remains the general goal of many environmental programmes. Knowledge of course remains a critical component of environmental literacy. But as we discover this on its own is not a sufficient precursor for responsible environmental behaviour (see Nisbet et al. 2018).
In particular, the engagement and valuing of personal agency has become essential as a prerequisite, while the environmental problem grows exponentially more acute and by all accounts remains beyond the scope of individual actions. As will be constantly affirmed, heroic narrative engagement across environmental concerns is needed to serve as a constant reminder of such potentiality. Nonetheless, apathy and various forms of fatalism often seep in very quickly when addressing the broad sweep of environmental issues. As conceptualised by social scientists, one of the tools developed to measure environmental attitudes is the New Environmental Paradigm (NEP) scale, developed by Dunlap and Van Liere and later revised as the New Ecological Paradigm Scale (see Dunlap 2008) to address contemporary issues in the environmental debate.
The NEP represents an ecocentric (pro-environmental) worldview that among other aspects, recognises the intrinsic value of nature (i.e. anti-anthropocentrism), the fragility of natureās balance, limits to economic growth, and most importantly the possibility of future ecological crisis. Such a procedure allows researchers to track whether values and attitudes towards nature are changing over time and to gauge the contribution of environmental education to changing environmental attitudes (Peer et al. 2007: 47). As this book highlights, long-term cross-national audience research is needed to constantly test and access the potency of mass mediated texts. While this is the most effective strategy and lens to use, this remains a broad-church, inclusive framework of environmentalism.
Media literacy has become one of the key qualifications for taking an active part in contemporary society. As media technology apparently becomes more intuitive and media and other social practices intertwine more and more, this book uses numerous aspects of literacy to better understand what makes someone media literate, as well as how this influences social development. Media literacy has been effectively defined as the ability āto access, analyse, evaluate and communicate messages in a variety of formsā (Aufderheide and Firestone 1993: xx). Other scholars highlight the concept of information literacy (Koltay 2011), digital literacy (Hobbs 2011), ICT literacy (Friemel and Signer 2010), new media literacies (Jenkins 2006) and most recently, social media literacy (Livingstone 2016). Today communication scholars stress that both the mediaās offerings, coupled with social interactions play a crucial role in understanding an ever-evolving mode of (digital) media literacy (Livingstone 2016). Following theoretical considerations around developing robust models of democracy, media l...
