Green Media and Popular Culture

An Introduction

John Parham

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781350306639
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This comprehensive survey of green media and popular culture introduces the reader to the key debates and theories surrounding green interpretations of popular film, television and journalism, as well as comedy, music, animation, and computer games. With stimulating and original case studies on U2, Björk, the animated films of Disney, the computer game Journey, and more, this engaging text reveals the complicated and often contradictory relationship between the media and environmentalism. Examining the ways in which green media can influence the public's awareness of environmental issues, this innovative textbook is a critical starting point for students of Media, Film and Cultural Studies, and anyone else researching and studying in the rapidly growing field of green media and cultural studies.

Chapter 1

Embracing Contradiction: Green Popular Culture

This opening chapter elaborates a framework for green media and popular culture under three headings: rationale; characteristics; niche. Parallel lines of ‘ecology’ and ‘media ecology’, which are not coincidental, form the basis of this study. For one of the central ways we shape our relationship to other animals, our place on Earth, and the social structures that arise from these understandings is through media and culture.

The second section identifies green media and popular culture’s chief characteristic, most particularly in mainstream texts, as contradiction. By suggesting globalisation as the context for this, two further things are argued. First, that popular culture’s contradictory nature is a central part of its usefulness; it provides a foreground and allows us to confront overriding contradictions framed by globalisation – most particularly, that we both romanticise and consume nature. Second, that in doing so popular culture can offer not just ‘glimpses’ of ecology (to borrow Andrew Hageman’s phrase) but, in places, genuine and complex ecological representation. Subsequently, the closing section will propose that media and popular culture’s niche is to translate ecological philosophies and principles into forms that engage the audience and make these ideas meaningful to their lives. In doing so, the final section will sketch out some of the key methods of communication and rhetoric by which popular culture makes this happen.

Green media and popular culture: a rationale

Ecology and media ecology

Green media and popular culture is governed by the complexities of ecology itself. For an ecocritic the fact that there exists, independent of green thought, a field of research called ‘media ecology’ is intriguing. Lance Strate, noting Neil Postman’s reference to ‘the study of media as environments’, positions media ecology as a theory of interrelated networks of media and communication (2006: 17). Sean Cubitt argues that

the principle attraction of ecology for a media scholar is that it is a systems-oriented mode of practice and analysis where, as in media, the communication between the elements of a system is even more important, and precedes, the elements themselves. (2005: 2)

This perception, that the link between media ecology and ecology is more than metaphorical (see Ross 1994: 172), existed from the beginning. Walter J. Ong, describing the emergence of the theory, consciously acknowledged in 1977 that media ecology invokes both a new ‘ecological concern’ and the Darwinian idea of ‘open interaction between individuals and environment’ (see Strate 2006: 15, 16–17). Similarly, for Brian L. Ott and Robert L. Mack, the purpose of media ecology

is to study the interaction between people and their communications technology. More particularly, media ecology looks into the matter of how media of communication affect human perception, understanding, feeling, and value; and how our interaction with media facilitates or impedes our chances of survival. The word ecology suggests the study of environments: their structure, content, and impact on people in their daily lives. (2010: 62)

Over the last few years, critics have gradually responded to Andrew Ross’ frequently cited statement that ‘images of ecology’ need to be considered in relation to the ‘ecology of images’ (1994: 171). Regarding this ‘ecology of images’ – i.e. production, text, audience etc. – the general consensus has been that textual analysis overly dominates green media and cultural studies (Maxwell and Miller 2012: 9) and, conversely, that audience research and media production have been under-emphasised. With regard to the latter, several critics agree that any assessment of the ‘aesthetic possibilities for presenting an ecological agenda’ (Brereton 2013: 228) ought to take into account the ‘predisposition of the viewer’ (Ingram 2013: 47), something which can only be properly measured through detailed ethnographical study (Brereton 2013: 228). Yet, aside from a handful of audience studies into prominent texts – The Day After Tomorrow, Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, the computer game SimCity 4, or Shanahan and McComas’ work on television audiences – this hasn’t been done. The difficulty, as Pat Brereton points out, is that comprehensive audience research would be a ‘long-term project [that] requires commitment of resources and the assistance of a broad range of scholars over a sustained period’ (2013: 228). Exceeding the scope of this particular project, the question of reception – of how, exactly, green media or popular cultural texts affect audiences, cultivate environmental awareness, or engender activism – remains largely untested (see also Bousé 2000: xiv; Ingram 2009: 83; and see Meister and Japp 2002: 2).

Producing ecology

More work has now, belatedly, been done around production. Notably, recent studies by Miller and Maxwell (2012), Bozak (2012), Kääpä (2013), and Starosielski (2015) have focused on the material ecologies of the technologies by which media or popular culture texts are produced. Such work has concentrated upon the resource impact of production, distribution and exhibition, in terms of energy use, pollution or waste, or the use and consumption of land or the negative environmental consequences of (say) film locations. Taking these in reverse, Sue Beeton has remarked that, within the film industry, ‘There is no evidence of initial site selection being based on any long-term community impacts, positive or negative’ (2005: 7) while Don Gayton has suggested that the substitution of one environment for another, in the selection of film locations – e.g. ‘Canadian settings doubling for American ones’ – encourages the treatment of place as ‘a mere commodity, to be traded and substituted at will’ (1998: 8). Correspondingly, Bozak has argued in The Cinematic Footprint that ‘Embedded in every moving image is a complex set of environmental relations’ (5).

The most comprehensive analysis, however, is Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller’s Greening the Media (2012). They identify the foremost contributory factors in the negative environmental impact of media products: massive media consumption; a further acceleration in waste and pollution created by ‘planned cycles’ of obsolescence (e.g. in 2007 only 18% of all cell phones, televisions and computer products were recycled in the US); and toxic risk (most obviously to industry workers) from dismantled and discarded components such as hard drives, cathode ray tubes, wiring, heavy metals etc. Their analysis also demonstrates the ongoing ecological consequences of supposedly low impact new media such as information and computing technology, consumer electronics, and digital or virtual media (see Chapter 6). Given such comprehensive analyses, I will not here be focusing, in the main, on the material ecologies of media production.

Maxwell and Miller’s study was preceded, in some ways, by Jhan Hochman. His unforgettable opening to Green Cultural Studies (1998) is damning about the culture industries’ exploitation of nature and natural resources. Cultural acts of writing, filming, and recording damage (Hochman contends) the natural world: ‘Animal skin is made into vellum and parchment. Trees, standing or pulped, are carved and written upon – their cellulose flesh processed into celluloid’; while

Mined metals and petroleum products – raw materials for which (eco) catastrophic wars are fought and people and nature less sensationally sacrificed on an ongoing basis – are turned into consumer goods, specifically, recording instruments such as computers, cameras, audio, and printing equipment. (1998: 1)

What this amounts to is that, ‘In terms of nature, representation is a caustic enterprise’ (1). Moreover, the consequences are multiplied, Hochman argues, because this ‘human ob-literation’ is matched by its ‘representational’ equivalent, resulting in a two-fold ‘literation’ (1):

Even as nature is destroyed and served up as the material on which and with which culture uses to write itself, nature is also conceptually cooked in a cultural cauldron, an often toxic brew releasing scenic to horrific phantasms of represented nature. And this amalgam of cultural concepts about nature created out of nature’s flesh breeds further cultural concoctions and protean chimeras [. . .] representation is unavoidably mis-representation, and taking, mis-taking. (1)

For Hochman, the material conditions of production translate into the form of representation. The examination of that relationship is central to green media and popular culture, something both Bozak and Maxwell and Miller acknowledge. Bozak, for instance, notes the close relationship between ‘material resource’ and ‘image resource’ (2012: 13). Maxwell and Miller advocate a ‘macrosociological approach’ that would encompass ‘physical’ production, distribution and consumption, political economy, text, regulation, subsidy, profit, as well as ‘anthropological’ questions such as access to cultural production, patterns of consumption and reception, and the generation of meaning (see 2012: 17–18). Accepting that no book can do all these things, I will primarily examine the connections between production and representation. However, seeking to develop Ross’ contention that ‘The most useful critiques of media culture remain those that focus on the economic organization of information technologies’ (1994: 175), I’ll focus chiefly on the less commonly regarded extent to which the political economic (rather than material) dimensions of production impinge on the text. This, though, will be qualified in two ways, encompassing additional aspects of Maxwell and Miller’s ‘macrosociological approach’: the possibility (in certain cases) of a more optimistic assessment of the relationship between production and text; and a modification and extension of the ‘media ecologies’ approach via a ‘circuit of culture’ model taken from cultural studies.

Green media and cultural studies have considered the political economics (and associated ideological framings) of popular texts, primarily with regard to the more ideological media considered in Part I of this book. In news journalism, for example, there has been a great deal of research on the political, ideological and economic factors that ‘frame’ the production of news stories. For example, Derek Bousé points out, the economic and institutional agendas of ‘a competitive, ratings-driven industry’ (see 2000: xv, 1) means that in television nature programmes ‘social and environmental issues’ are marginalised because they ‘could alienate some viewers, make it difficult to sell a film overseas, or, worst of all, prevent rerun sales by dating the film’ (2000: xiv). While there’s no shortage of textual analysis in this area, often that tends towards a form of critical ideological scrutiny, neglecting the type of close reading which, Brereton rightly argues, might ‘unpack the richness and polysemic nature’ (2005: 37) as well as the complex, contradictory relations in which texts are produced (see Gustafsson and Kääpä 2013: 6). Likewise, while green media and cultural studies have considered the relationship between political economy and text, it has tended to neglect the wider possibilities of both. For example, Hochman’s connection between production and representation is valuable, but his associated paradigm of a dual ‘literation’/‘ob-literation’ seems too one-sided. Here, then, I’ll follow Ross’ more balanced view. His linkage between ‘images of ecology’ and an ‘ecology of images’ is founded on the same relationship. Yet Ross suggests that any discussion of how ‘image production and image consumption diminishes our capacity to sustain a healthy balance of life in the social world of our culture’ ought to be balanced with a consideration of how far ‘images of ecology’ could ‘be used to activate popular support for the repair of our local and global ecologies’ (1994: 175) (a ‘repair’ which might, in the circular nature of media ecologies, ultimately encompass better media production practices).

The circuit of culture

Any consideration of these possibilities should also encompass the wider circuits in which cultural production occurs. In one of the first ‘green media’ books, Alison Anderson suggests that ‘news media needs to be situated within a complex web of culture, politics and society’ (1997: 203). The ‘circuit of culture’ paradigm emphasises not only the meanings and values that we can draw from culture but also the practices that make it up (see du Gay et al. 1997: 3–4, 23). This model has conventionally been connected to de Certeau’s conception of a politics of the ‘everyday’ and focused around consumption and the active audience. This has connected to ecological representation through audience theory, for instance, in work cited above on the reception of mainstream texts like The Day After Tomorrow or An Inconvenient Truth. Here, I will consider the implications of the fact that the circuit of culture model also encompasses the existence of, relatively speaking, more autonomous patterns of cultural production. Three particular elements within this can expand our sense of what green media and popular culture is and what it might achieve.

First, there is the potential of what Simon Cottle has called ‘differentiated production ecology’ (2004: 97) which, in this book, encompasses the extent to which new (digital or web-based) production modes and/or independent or localised media may have expanded media production and introduced more varied (e.g. ecological) perspectives. Second, is the more traditional role played by art, folk and countercultural texts. De Certeau seems slightly dismissive of what he sees as, analytically speaking, ‘often privileged’ countercultural groups (see 1988: xii). Yet given that many forms of popular culture can and do circulate widely, there is certainly scope for studying how the resources of an alternative popular culture might help nurture a popular environmentalism. Last, I will explore one of the key ways in which, perhaps, a grassroots environmentalist popular culture is nourishing the mainstream – namely, the complex cultural circuits by which these autonomous cultural products are, in some cases, forming interconnections with the media industries. Examples here will range across social networking, art film, independent music and ‘tactical’ computer games. If the discussion above signals the extent to which, in a cultural ecology, popular forms might well be engaging with, and engaging us with, ecological ideas, we can only gain a clearer sense of what types of text might emerge by first establishing what we mean by ecology.

Environmental and ecological theory

In two books published 10 years apart David Ingram offers different definitions for green popular culture. Green Screen he describes as centred around films ‘in which an environmentalist issue is raised explicitly and is central to the narrative’ (2000: vii). In The Jukebox in the Garden, an ecocritical study of American popular music, this becomes ‘more or less explicit representations of either ecology or the natural world’ (2010: 18). In extending his focus to ‘nature’ generally, Ingram’s competing definitions alert us to the fact that what is meant by ‘green media and popular culture’ is complicated not only by the complexity of ‘media ecology’ but also by that of ‘green’ theory. I have retained in my title, and throughout the book, the word ‘green’. In the second (2011) edition of his book Green Voices, Terry Gifford regards various, competing terms – ‘green poetry’, ‘ecological poetry’ and ‘ecopoetry’ – as broadly synonymous but prefers ‘green poetry’ precisely because it presumes neither an understanding of scientific ecology nor any didactic, social purpose (2011: 8). Likewise, the nebulous quality of ‘green’ fits perfectly with the diversity, dialecticism and contradiction that characterises both ecology as a concept and ‘media and culture’. Nevertheless, in terms of understanding just how a media or popular cultural ecology can illustrate and help determine the ecological conditions of our existence, we’ll need greater precision and clarity.

Environmental and ecological texts

‘Green’ texts broadly fall into two categories, environmental or ecological. A great deal of debate, differentiating the two, has occurred in disciplines ranging from environmental science to political theory. The fundamental distinction, outlined by Michael Allaby, is between an emphasis on the immediate physical environment and a more systemic, paradigmatic way of thinking. When we talk about the environmental, we are referring either to scientifically informed studies of the actual physical habitats in which animals and humans live or, correspondingly, to changes wrought by humans on those environments and/or campaigns to protect or preserve particular areas (2000: 2). In terms of representation, environmental texts are, therefore, those that either depict or evoke, without (necessarily) any particular scientific framework, a landscape or environment – e.g. the Hollywood film A River Runs Through It – or that document the threats (usually human) to those places. The scientific model, ecology regards all living beings, and the Earth, as systemically interconnected (Allaby 2000: 9). Species co-exist with each other, and are dependent on factors such as the atmosphere or water cycle. As an equivalent social or political model, ecology emphasises a reconstruction of society that recognises humanity’s material dependence on and interconnectedness with ‘nature’. It concerns itself, Allaby argues, not with ‘piecemeal reform’ but with a more systematic and ‘radical restructuring of society and its economic base’, premised on principles such as the sustainable use of energy and natural resources (2000: 9). An ecological representation might then be texts that suggest the systemic connections and interrelationships (webs or networks) that shape a given environment, or indeed the Earth as a whole. This could be anything from the ‘circle of life’ motif in Disney’s The Lion King to the philosophical systems theory that (discussed below) informs the art films of Chris Welsby. In social terms, one could look at documentaries which trace and critique the patterns and ecological impact of our food and energy supply (H2Oil, Gasland, Our Daily Bread) or pragmatic computer games, such as SimCity 4, EnerCities, or the multiplayer World Without Oil, which allow the gamer to simulate running societies on an ecological basis.

In differentiating environmental from ecological, I am not making a qualitative distinction. Paula Willoquet-Maricondi has made a contrast (as we’ll see in Chapter 2) between ‘environmentalist’ film, that uses environmentalism mainly for entertainment purposes, and an alternative, activist ‘ecocinema’ that can motivate and educate people. Yet she makes this distinction without ever really grounding these terms in the scientific, philosophical and socio-political meanings established through many years of ‘green’ theory. Certainly, given ecology’s more profound systemic interconnectedness, an environmental perspective ought, at some point, to give way to the ecological. Nonetheless, ‘environmental’ texts – characterised by their greater sense of place, belonging, or home, and/or a more grounded awareness of the mutual interconnections of human and nonhuman – carry affective properties that might, in the context of the mainstream media industries, inform a global ecological awareness. These range from John Denver’s music, for instance denoting West Virginia as ‘almost heaven’, to the anime director and co-founder of Studio Ghibli Hayao Miyazaki’s rendering of land, water, trees, and plants from ‘fragments of landscapes I had seen in Japan’ (2009: 350, 352), into the enchanted woodland environment of My Neighbour Totoro. Yet such works can also foster in any of us a sense of the ties that ‘encompass...