Mediating Nature

Nils Lindahl Elliot

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415391771
• eBook ISBN: 9781136012228
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Biological Sciences

Mediating Nature provides a history of the present nature of mass mediation. It examines the ways in which a number of discourses, technologies and institutions have historically shaped the current ways of imagining nature in the mass media. Where much of the existing research treats mass mediation as a matter of media technologies, texts, or institutions, this text adopts a somewhat different approach: it considers mass mediation as a historical process by means of which the members of audiences and indeed the public more generally came to be incorporated as observers in, and of mass culture. This approach allows the book to investigate the roles that a wide range of genres relating to nature played in constructing senses of nature but also of mass culture itself. The genres include landscape paintings and gardens, modern zoos, photography, early cinema, nature essays, disaster and 'animal attack' films, as well as wildlife documentaries on television. The investigation develops what Lindahl Elliot describes as a 'social semeiotic' approach that combines the semeiotic theory of Charles Peirce with a historical sociology of cultural formations.

Topical and timely, this fascinating book will be of great interest to students and researchers in the fields of media, sociology, cultural geography and environmental studies.

Part I

1
THE NATURE OF NATURE

Nature has the final victory over culture, customarily known as death.

Terry Eagleton

Ndoki (I)

In its 13 July 1992 edition,¹ Time magazine published what was to be the first in a series of major media representations about the ‘discovery’ of the Ndoki rainforest in the Republic of Congo.

The familiar red-bordered cover of Time magazine — first used in the 3 January 1927 edition to frame a drawing of the British imperialist, Leopold Charles Maurice Stennett Amery — featured a picture of a Western Lowland Gorilla. As the gorilla stared out at the magazine's readers, its head partly covered the ‘M’ of TIME even as a dramatic headline covered part of the right side of the gorilla's torso: ‘INSIDE THE WORLD'S LAST EDEN’.

In the cover story itself, Eugene Linden, an environmental journalist, described an expedition to the Ndoki rainforest led by J. Michael Fay, an ecologist working with the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS).² At the time that the expedition took place, the WCS was promoting the transformation of the Ndoki into a national nature park in order to preserve what the cover story described as the ‘pristine’ Ndoki rainforest. ‘Pygmies,’ Linden wrote, ‘have crisscrossed central Africa for thousands of years’ (Linden 1992: 63); but there was ‘no evidence that they have entered beyond the fringes of this 3 million-hectare (7.5 millionacre) expanse of virgin forest,’ a forest ‘about the size of Belgium’ (Linden 1992: 63–4). As far as Linden was concerned, this was a place that no human had ever seen before, ‘the rarest treasure on this crowded planet: an ecosystem as pristine today as it was 12,000 years ago, before humans began to transform the earth’ (Linden 1992: 63).

Three years after Time published its cover story, the National Geographic devoted the cover of its July 1995 issue to what was by then the newly established Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park. Echoing Time's cover, the National Geographic chose an image of one of the region's charismatic animals and framed it with a dramatic headline: ‘NDOKI: THE LAST PLACE ON EARTH’. But, where Time chose a rather conventional medium shot of a gorilla, the National Geographic selected a blurred image of an elephant whose eyes were transformed into silver and red dots by the photographer's flash. The image was reportedly taken at the very moment when the elephant charged at Michael ‘Nick’ Nichols, the National Geographic photographer. There was, however, an additional motive for choosing this form of representation: as Nichols puts it,

I'm just so bored with pretty pictures of wildlife. The last thing I would do is say go to the Serengeti and shoot a bunch of pictures of just beautiful wildlife. But I would like to go there and shoot a lot of pictures of lions killing things, and crocodiles killing things — as long as the edge is there. For me, the edge can be a combination of graphic elements, which is why I have a lot of movement in my pictures, and then the edge of survival, and what that means. So I strive and I shoot a lot of bad frames trying to get tension and movement and an edge. That's all graphic stuff, and colors, and underlying that is some kind of actual theme that's about conservation.

(Nichols in http://www.michaelnicknichols.com/article/philosophy/, accessed 25 September 2005)

Like Linden before him, Douglas Chadwick, the author of the National Geographic cover story, narrated the woes and wonders of visiting what he described as a kind of hellish paradise: a place teeming with gorillas and golden cats, forest elephants and ‘first encounter’ chimps, trigoni bees and leeches, toona flies and ‘nameless’ fevers (Chadwick 1995: 6). Chadwick's expedition was also led by Mike Fay, whom Chadwick described as ‘a modern version of the 19^th century Congo explorer Henry Stanley, the unstoppable force whom the natives called BulaMatari, “breaker of the rocks”’(Chadwick 1995: 10).

In 1998, the WCS took a more direct role in the mass mediation of the Ndoki region by opening a 6.5-acre simulation of the Congo rainforest in New York's Bronx Zoo, its own ‘flagship’ park. The zoo's website described the exhibit as a ‘lush mosaic of shady forest, treetop lookouts, rock promontories, stream sides, bamboo thickets, sunny meadows, forested pathways, wading pools, and retreats’ that provided the animals with ‘a great variety of habitat’ (http://congogorillaforest.com/congointro/congohabitat, accessed 16 August 2005). A walk through this space was designed to emulate a walk through the Congo rainforest itself; and indeed, during a visit to the display, I helped to reassure a young family that a snake lying close to the walkway was make-believe and would not attack their children.

The Congo Gorilla Forest website eventually added a link to a National Geographic website, established a few years after the Bronx Zoo opened its new display, which described another of J. Michael Fay's expeditions. The website described a 15-month trek — the ‘Megatransect’ — taken in 1999–2000 by Fay across central Africa, during which he used digital cameras and a lightweight computer system to document his travels with dispatches to the website. Amid the sounds of a rainforest, a headline in the Congo Trek website quoted J. Michael Fay as saying ‘I literally want as many people on Earth as possible to see this place and fall in love with it’ (www.nationalgeographic.com/congotrek, accessed 16 August 2005).

Some two years after Fay began his trek, the BBC broadcast the Congo trilogy, an award-winning series produced by the independent TV production company Scorer Associates. The first two episodes of the series echoed the discourse of the representations found in Time, the National Geographic and indeed the Bronx Zoo: the Congo was described as one of the world's last great wildernesses and the programmes included a wealth of stunning footage of the flora and fauna of the region.

But the third episode had a surprise for its audiences. It reported that the Ndoki region might not be what it appeared to be. Whilst flying over the region in a small aircraft (presumably the ‘air cam’ built especially for the National Geographic article, and which the magazine noted that it had donated to the park), Mike Fay discovered ancient crop marks south of Lac Telle, north of the Ndoki River. He also discovered remnants of pottery along the beaches in several rivers in the region. If any doubt remained, Fay reported that several of the rivers in the region had large numbers of oil palm nuts lying at the bottom of their beds. As Fay put it whilst wading through one of the streams on the edge of the Nouabalé-Ndoki Park,

[picking up some of the nuts]: It's kind of strange because you think what are these palm nuts doing here … cultivated species, and there's not a palm tree for miles and miles and miles around, so you think, what's going on? And then, we started collecting them, and we found that the oldest are 2300 years old, and the youngest ones are 900 years old, and nothing's younger. Thousands of creeks have them, just about every single one has them, immediately as you walk into the creek, you don't have to look, you don't have to excavate, you just look down and there they are in abundance, so it's not elephants bringing them in or birds.

(Fay in BBC Congo documentary, Episode 3, 2001)

Fay's research into the history of the oil palm in Africa suggested that the dates of the oldest palm nuts coincided with a time when migrating farmers might well have introduced the palms to the region. This prospect, along with the other evidence mentioned above, made it clear to him that, far from being an ‘untouched’ rainforest, the Ndoki had been inhabited in ancient times. If the Ndoki ever was an Eden, it was, by the time it was ‘discovered’, very much a garden gone wild.

Naturalist, culturalist and postmodern natures

In the introductory chapter, I suggested that the problematization of the nature of nature constitutes a central aspect of the problematization of the nature of mass mediation. In that same chapter, I began to suggest that two general stances — the ‘nature-naturalist’ and the ‘nature-culturalist’ — establish the grounds for a dualistic interpretation of the nature of nature. In this chapter I shall provide a more detailed account of each of these stances, which I shall characterize as discourses of nature. This characterization — and indeed the introduction of a third discourse — will serve as a prolegomenon to the consideration of the nature of mass mediation.

I shall begin with what I describe as a naturalist discourse of nature. From the perspective of this discourse, nature is the collectivity of the non-human natural objects and processes, that is to say those objects and processes not produced by humans. It is also the nature whose sheer presence — whose absolute present — cannot be doubted: the nature that scratches and bites, the nature that grows and flows, the nature that gives birth and kills. It is, finally, a nature that is premised on a separation between the human and non-human nature, between nature and culture. This separation or insulation is what allows conservationist photographers such as the National Geographic's Michael ‘Nick’ Nichols to specialize in the representation of nature, and to describe themselves as ‘wildlife’ photographers. More generally, it is a classification that has long justified the distinction between the social and the natural sciences. Social scientists deal with the social (human) world, and natural or physical scientists — the expression is telling — deal with the non-human world.

It is nonetheless the case that this discontinuity between culture and nature is contradicted by a certain continuity between the two categories, at least on the level of representation. An examination of the language used by Nichols to describe the nature of his photography reveals that his discourse is structured by metaphors that suggest an ontological or ‘existential’ continuity between human and non-human nature, or at any rate, between representation and what is represented, between the observer and what is observed. The practice of taking pictures is commonly described precisely as a matter of taking pictures, or of capturing a certain image with the camera. And indeed, as Nichols explains in his website, ‘the lust for capturing the images has got to be what drives you’ (www.michaeln-icknichols.com/article/adventure, accessed 25 September 2005, emphasis added). I shall consider the gendering and sexualization of nature in due course. Here I simply wish to note that the notions of ‘taking’ and ‘capturing’ pictures suggest that representation is a matter of grasping a material object, in much the way that Nichols — or indeed a gorilla — might grasp a walking stick.³ Where the human/non-human nature distinction suggests a fundamental discontinuity between nature and culture, the metaphor of capture suggests that, at least from the point of view of representation, there is, by contrast, a fundamental continuity between the two categories. Representation is — however paradoxically from an environmentalist perspective — a matter of setting metaphorical ‘traps’.⁴

Such a discourse may seem to be appropriate in the context of photography; as I shall explain in a later chapter, photography has long been represented as a matter of the production of indexes: representations that, in the manner of weathervanes, have a real and physical link to reality. But the metaphor of capture is also widely employed by scientists describing the epistemological basis for — the ‘theory of knowledge’ that underpins — their work. For example, E.O. Wilson, a renowned myrmecologist, begins his Pulitzer prize-winning The Diversity of Life with a moving account of a storm breaking over a part of another great rainforest, the Amazon. As Wilson describes the extraordinary beauty of the setting, he ruminates on the problem of finding ideas that might ‘capture’ the processes at work in what he calls ‘the nonhuman world’ (1992: 9). Paraphrasing the ideas of the nineteenth-century chemist Berzelius, Wilson suggests that:

We search in and around a subject for a concept, a pattern, that imposes order … We hope to be the first to make a connection. Our goal is to capture and label a process, perhaps a chemical reaction or behaviour pattern driving an ecological change, a new way of classifying energy flow, or a relation between predator and prey that preserves them both, almost anything at all. We will settle for just one good question that starts people thinking and talking: Why are there so many species? Why have mammals evolved more quickly than reptiles? Why do birds sing at dawn?

(E.O. Wilson 1992: 8, emphasis added)

In the following paragraph he adds:

These whispering denizens of the mind are sensed but rarely seen. They rustle the foliage, leave behind a pug mark filling with water and a scent, excite us for an instant and vanish. Most ideas are waking dreams that fade to an emotional residue. A first-rate scientist can hope to capture and express only several in a lifetime.

(E.O. Wilson 1992: 8, emphasis added)

This statement maintains a degree of ambiguity about the site where concepts are to be ‘captured’. But elsewhere Wilson makes it clear that he is referring to the mind. He also makes it clear that all human minds are utterly determined by material nature. Wilson is the founder of sociobiology (see Wilson 1980), arguably the most positivist form of naturalism, and in an interview with fellow sociobiologist Steven Pinker he suggests that ‘everything that's in the body, including the brain and the action of the mind, is obedient to the laws of physics and chemistry as we understand it [sic]’. According to Wilson, ‘there is a unity of the sciences’ — a ‘consilience’ — ‘through a network of cause and effect explanations in physics, biology and even the lower reaches of the social sciences.’ In the same interview, Wilson suggests that he is intent on conducting a re-examination of ‘the basic theory and contents of socio-biology, beginning with insects and eventually coming back to humans’ (Wilson in www.edge.org/3rd_culture/wilson03/wilson03/wilson_p3.html, accessed 28 July 2005).⁵

As Wilson's account begins to make clear, the contradiction noted in the context of photography also permeates the discourse of sociobiologists. In The Diversity of Life, Wilson speaks of the ‘nonhuman world’. But in the interview, he also makes it clear that, in some if not most respects, ants are very much like humans. From this perspective, it makes about as much sense to speak of the ‘nonhuman world’ as it does to speak of the ‘non-ant world’.

The naturalist discourse of nature thus takes nature, in some if not all respects, for granted: nature is a ‘first principle’ that can be observed, studied and indeed questioned in a ‘scientific’ sense, but not in a ‘metaphysical’ sense: nature not only exists, but is.

I shall now consider a second discourse on the nature of nature, a discourse that is premised on what might be described as a culturalist perspective, and indeed a ‘meta-discourse’: a discourse that is explicitly about another discourse. By this account, nature is first and foremost a cultural concept, a discourse of nature. Nature was formed not billions of years ago, but in the seventeenth century, when European natural philosophers started to treat the term as an abstract singular: as a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• INTERNATIONAL LIBRARY OF SOCIOLOGY
• Full Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I
• PART II
• Epilogue: climactic change
• Appendix: the nature of Peirce
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index