Ecomedia Literacy

Integrating Ecology into Media Education

Antonio Lopez

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351399265
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Teaching Language Arts
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book offers a focused and practical guide to integrating the relationship between media and the environment—ecomedia—into media education. It enables media teachers to "green" their pedagogy by providing essential tools and approaches that can be applied in the classroom.

Media are essential features of our planetary ecosystem emergency, contributing to both the problem of and solution to climate chaos, biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, deforestation, water contamination, and so on. Offering a clear theoretical framework and suggested curriculum guide, the book provides key resources that will enable media educators to apply ecomedia concepts to their curricula. By reconceptualizing media education, this book connects ecology, environmental communication, ecomedia studies, environmental humanities, and ecoliteracy to bridge media literacy and education for sustainability.

Ecomedia Literacy is an essential read for educators and scholars in the areas of media literacy, media and communication, media and cultural studies, environmental humanities, and environmental studies.

PART I
Ecological Worldviews and the Ecomediasystem

1
ECOCULTURAL WORLDVIEWS

Decolonizing Media Education

There is an account from the first contact between Spanish conquistadors and the indigenous Hopi people that illuminates divergent ecocultures. As the story goes, in 1540, the Hopi first encountered the cross-bearing Castilians in what is now northern Arizona in the Southwestern region of the United States.¹ Without any prior knowledge of the Roman Catholic Spanish, as a means of gaining deeper insight into these peculiar interlopers, they had to rely on interpreting their primary symbol, the crucifix. The Hopi deciphered the cross from a defamiliarized perspective, performing what we might call in contemporary visual studies, a gestalt visual analysis. In the grid of the cross, they saw a form of linear thinking that represents skilled engineering and manipulation of the material realm, but they also recognized the symbol reflected an unbalanced and dangerous worldview because it lacked one key element—a circle. By contrast, the medicine wheel, a common emblem among North American First Nations peoples, has an encircled cross, which represents a holistic map of the cosmos. The four quadrants indicate not only the cardinal directions but also the associated psychological and spiritual states encountered during the lifecycle. The circle gestures the motion of the seasons and the cyclical nature of the time. To the Hopi interpreters, a cross with no circle signified a lack of balance with the forces of the living planet, indicating separation from the cosmic patterns of everyday life. As they foresaw, the Spanish were the spearhead of a centuries-long colonial enterprise across the Americas that continues today in the form of coal operations, uranium mining, oil pipelines, fracked gas, and a legacy of regional contamination.

The story of conflicting cosmologies between the Hopi and Spanish offers a cautionary tale. The Hopi reading of the cross predicted the current ecological crisis, which now culminates the trajectory of conquest, colonization, and globalization shaping modern techno-industrial society. This story alerts us that symbols are like alchemist sigils: They are magical doorways to deeper insights about how particular worldviews function in the world through its stories. Likewise, ecomedia objects—whether texts, gadgets, or hyperobjects—are gateways to ecocultural worldviews. This chapter surveys the historical context that produced particular ecocultural paradigms, allowing us to address how our media and gadgets have emerged from a particular cosmology. By exploring the deepest level of the iceberg of systems thinking, we start with the concept of a “cognitive history of humanity” to probe how language and worldviews are shaped by particular historical narratives. Next I explore the most commonly discussed origin story of our environmental crisis, the Anthropocene, and the colonial origins of the concept. I then discuss the paradigm of Modernity that underlies our global system and how it is reflected in Cartesianism, mechanism, and monoculturism, and the stories we tell about these. This “origins story,” so to speak, helps set up how to position ecomedia literacy into a situated, historical context of racial-colonial logics at the root of environmental destruction that continue to operate today.

Cognitive History of Humanity

According to Stibbe (2015, p. 6), ecolinguistics understands discourses as the use of language to express “stories-we-live-by”: “stories in the minds of multiple individuals across cultures.” He identifies “language as existing in a symbolic ecology, where different languages interact with each other in a given location … [and] language is part of a sociocultural ecology where it shapes societies and cultures” (p. 8, emphasis original). The “story” becomes a mental model for how we see the world, and in particular environmental issues, becoming “standardized ways that particular groups in society use language, images and other forms of representation” (p. 22). Discourses, it’s important to note, are multimodal, that is, they are composed of “language, still images, music or moving images” (p. 34).

Jeremy Lent’s (2017) cognitive history of humanity is a useful interpretive framework for understanding how culture and values are shaped by cognitive structures of the human mind (represented by worldview on the systems thinking iceberg model discussed in the Introduction). According to Lent, “The worldview of a given civilization—the implicit beliefs and values that create a pattern of meaning in people’s lives—has … been a significant driver of the historical path each civilization has” (p. 19). He asserts that humans initially developed a particular cognitive niche that included cooperation, so hominids could collectively change their environment, develop tools, and learn how to process foods. As language and symbolization evolved, the cultural traits that emerge from particular interactions with the environment became imprinted through language, which has a “patterning effect on cognition” (p. 22). Metaphors shape and are shaped by cognitive structures, setting up “cognitive frames” (patterns of thought) that guide how we view and act upon the world. Thus, when

European thinkers began to conceive of the world as a complex machine, this inspired them to discover how the machine worked in order to manipulate it more effectively for their benefit, leading ultimately to our present era of genetic engineering and synthetic biology.

(p. 23)

According to the cognitive history framework, universal abstractions (or what scholars call “real abstractions”) such as “Reason,” “Progress,” and “Truth” (often capitalized as absolutes) are cultural constructions rooted in paradigms that deeply influence “the direction of society [but] are not permanently fixed” (Lent, 2017, p. 20). Significantly,

These abstractions make statements about ontology—What is?—and about epistemology—How we know what is? Real abstractions both describe the world and make it… . Real abstractions aren’t innocent: they reflect the interests of the powerful and license them to organize the world.

(Patel & Moore, 2018, p. 47, emphasis original)

The overarching agenda to emerge from Modernity has four major transitions—from oral to written, local to general, particular to universal, and timely to timeless. This constituted a shift from practical to theoretical, with the net result being,

from 1630 on, the focus of philosophical inquiries has ignored the particular, concrete, timely and local details of everyday human affairs: instead, it has shifted to a higher, stratospheric plane, on which nature and ethics conform to abstract, timeless, general, and universal theories.

(Toulmin, 1992, p. 35)

As Thomas Kuhn (1996) observes in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, paradigms change when there are too many anomalies that can’t be explained by a particular model of thinking. To the dominant worldview that governs our global economic system, the present-day climate emergency is a whirlwind of anomalies. In response, Lent suggests that worldviews can transform over one or two generations:

the relationship between cognition and history is not one-way but reciprocal. The cognitive patterns of humans living their day-to-day existence are continually affected by what goes on around them, and the consequent actions they take are continually affecting whatever is around them. It’s a perpetual, bidirectional feedback loop.

(Lent, p. 20)

Consider how cultural attitudes and policies about smoking, gay marriage, and drug legalization (just to name a few) have changed substantially in the past 40 years. As Giddens’ (1986) structuration theory tells us, there is a dynamic interplay between social structures and individual agents (a kind of structural coupling discussed in Chapter 3). Feminist standpoint theory also argues that groups of people and individuals co-construct and transform knowledge. This is where ecomedia literacy comes in. By inquiring into the dominant paradigm governing our global system through the investigation of media and gadgets, we actively change and propose new modes of engagement, such as transitioning from fragmented, linear modernist thinking to more complex and nuanced modes of analysis that’s nonlinear, holistic, and eco-ethical.

One point of intervention is the stories we tell. As noted by Beach et al. (2017, p. 1) in their discussion of climate change and English Language Arts, “Humans have always been storytellers, and it has long been known that those who tell the stories control the future,” a variation of Plato’s credo that “those who tell the stories rule the society.” Riffing on Paulo Freire, they argue that student learning should be about critically reading the world. As such,

In every discourse whether that be of science, the mass media, or literary, or cultural artifacts, climate change is a story, and the plot, the characters, and how that story has different variations (Gaard, 2014). The way a story is told makes a difference in how we understand it and respond to it.

(p. 10)

Critical media literacy has been one such effort to challenge the hegemony of dominant worldviews to enable students to explore the difference between storytellers and selling stories (Kellner & Share, 2019). Ecomedia literacy extends this effort to address the ecological crisis by encouraging students to critically evaluate fossilized stories that colonize the present, but also to envision new stories, because if we cannot imagine a common destiny beyond our current predicament, we will live in someone else’s planned future.

The (White) Anthropocene Story

Increasingly, the Anthropocene label is slapped onto conferences, journal themes, and book titles to signal an ecological turn across disciplines. Triggered by the emerging alarm of looming threats of the climate crisis, extinction shock, and pandemics (among a long list of environmental dangers), this evolving environmental attention by a variety of academic disciplines is welcome, but the careless and uncritical application of the term, Anthropocene, is perhaps less so. This is not to deny the legitimate grief, hopelessness, depression, fear, angst, and cause for concern the term invokes, but world ecologist scholars Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore (2018) argue that using Anthropocene as a marker for the human-altered environment (as it is commonly conceived of in geology and in popular discourse) assigns blame to humans being humans and misidentifies what is actually the results of particular human activities governed by the structure of capitalism.

Responding to the ways that environmentally destructive “activities” are often rendered through computer graphics and animations that veil corporate behavior, Demos (2017, p. 18) asks, “What ideological function does the word ‘Anthropocene’ serve—terminologically as well as conceptually, politically, and visually—in relation to the current politics of ecology, and how does the expanded imagery of what was once ‘photography’ abet or complicate this function?” In answer to his own question,

Anthropocene rhetoric—joining images and texts—frequently acts as a mechanism of universalization, albeit complexly mediated and distributed among various agents, which enables the military-state-corporate apparatus to disavow responsibility for the differentiated impacts of climate change effectively obscuring the accountability behind the mounting eco-catastrophe and inadvertently making us all complicit in its destructive project.

(p. 19)

As a subject area for ecomedia literacy, the Anthropocene can be studied as a kind of hyper-ecomedia object with associated visual and discursive texts. The digital and Anthropocene are both “networked, material and abstracted spaces… . The ‘digital Anthropocene’ is an idea that emphasises the digitization of human–environment relations and changing power relations” (McLean, 2020, pp. 159–160).

Patel and Moore (2018) advocate using “Capitalocene,” because it’s not just an economic system but “a way of organizing the relations between humans and the rest of nature” that is the source of our planetary ecological crisis (p. 3). The Anthropocene narrative equalizes the infinitesimal contributions of its primary victims—the majority of humans that did not create the planetary ecological crisis—with its main perpetrators at the center of global power. Just 100 companies and their investors are responsible for 71% of global emissions (Riley, 2017), and according to Oxfam (Gore, 2015),

The poorest half of the global population are responsible for only around 10% of global emissions yet live overwhelmingly in the countries most vulnerable to climate change—while the richest 10% of people in the world are responsible for around 50% of global emissions… . The average footprint of someone in the richest 1% could be 175 times that of someone in the poorest 10%.

Furthermore, climate heating exacerbates inequality (Diffenbaugh & Burke, 2019).

Many scholars argue that slavery and the plantation system prefigure capitalism and our current global economic structure, so “Plantationocene” is a more accurate label. As Donna Haraway explains in a 2019 interview with Le Monde,

[Plantationocene] describes the devastating transformation of different types of pasturage, cultures and forests into closed, extractive plantations, which are founded on the work of slaves and other forms of work that involve exploitation, alienation and generally spatial displacement… . [It reminds us that] this model of establishing plantations on a large scale preceded industrial capitalism and allowed it to develop, accumulating wealth on the back of human beings reduced to slavery. From the 15th to 19th century, sugar cane plantations in Brazil, then in the Caribbean, were closely linked to the development of mercantilism and colonialism.

(quoted in Kodjo-Grandvaux, 2020)

Other terms that have been proposed—some tongue and cheek—include Chthulucene, Petrolcene, Plasticene, Misanthropocene, and...