On mediations and the environment: Material,spatial and epistemic considerations

Over the last decade and a half we have seen drastic changes in how climate change has impacted areas such as global food supplies and transportation, as well as how ordinary citizens around the globe experience everyday life. Events such as large-scale forest fires and extreme heat have brought the realities of climate change – already experienced for years in many areas of the global South – to the doorsteps of residents of the global North. This, in turn, has generated a significant volume of news coverage and representation in popular culture. In fact, since environmental communication entered into the field of media and communication studies, climate change has primarily been addressed (as a subject of research) by looking at its representation in these forums (journalism, TV, film). While a vital source of information, the focus of previous research on, for example, news should lead us to consider other communicative arenas that play key roles in mediating the environment. Agin and Karlsson (2021), amongst other researchers' studies that span various time periods, found that research on climate change communication from 1993 to 2018 overwhelmingly focused on news media, the general public and other media (such as social media platforms). These three elements alone accounted for just under 60% of all articles published during the quarter-century period. This narrow focus on news and audiences misses crucial objects of study such as ‘politicians, governmental agencies, non-governmental organizations, or multinational and transnational corporations’ (Agin and Karlsson, 2021: 443), groups the authors identify as, ‘primary drivers of global change in mitigation strategies and adaptation policies’, but also other highly crucial drivers of change such as diverse forms of communication from art, cinema, poetry and other forms of eco-criticism (2021: 443).

With this in mind, the thinking behind this special issue has been to move beyond the representation of the environment in news media and large-scale popular culture, and consider other informational outlets and spaces where environmental change is mediated and communicated. While mediatization has been an influential paradigm in media and communication studies, it has not addressed issues of, for instance, materiality in relation to the excavation, use, construction and discarding of communication technologies (Christensen and Nilsson, 2018). The article by Conway in this special issue on the role of oil in the history and manufacture of television is a good example of a widened focus, as it analyses interconnected areas of environmental communication rarely tackled in academic research. Thus, this special issue addresses the mediation of the environment on a broadened level, taking it beyond the ways in which media content alone represents environmental issues.

Themes and paradigms that incorporate an ‘environment lens’ have gained prominence in a wide range of research areas within cultural studies over the past two decades. The increased visibility of pressing questions such as environmental justice provided a positive push for historically Western-centric and positivistic disciplines in social sciences and humanities to pay greater attention to overlooked localities and epistemologies. While the urgency of the need for social transformation in areas such as climate change, marine pollution or deforestation is not yet matched with the expansion of disciplinary and geographic cross-breeding and transformative thinking in environmental sciences and environmental humanities, there is promising progress, albeit with deficits.

From a media and communication studies perspective, one such deficit is the limited centrality of research on environmental mediation and communication. While research in this area occupies a larger space in the field compared to a decade ago, it is still pursued as an autonomous area of study rather than being regarded as an issue that lies at the heart of media and communication research, of paradigms such as ‘mediatization’, especially given the materiality of media and communication technologies and the environmental consequences of that materiality in terms of the extraction of raw material used in the manufacturing and later the discarding of these devices. This cycle creates contingencies for the natural human and non-human environments that are mostly studied as spaces of narrativity (see Christensen et al., 2018) or mediating envrionments in media-centric studies. While the actual and virtual sites and locales (e.g. legacy media, museums, literature, film, music, archives, academic publications) where narrative and scholarly interventions materialize and constitute spaces of narrativity (Christensen et al, 2018) or, simply put, ‘mediating environments’, are located in or originate from predominantly western hubs, visibility of locally situated knowledge and content from ‘mediated environments’ (e.g. the Arctic, the Amazon, Pacific Islands, etc.) which experience the impacts of environmental degradation at a much higher degree are rendered peripheral (Christensen and Nilsson, 2017). The saliance of this outlook, from an agricultural standpoint, will be elaborated on shortly, as well as being scrutunized in the contribution to this special themed issue by Wickberg, with his insightful and critical notion of ‘environing media’. To date, most research in the various veins of humanities and media and communication disciplines address questions of the virtual and the discursive rather than, or in combination with, the actual.

Another deficit is that academic knowledge and publications produced in humanities and social sciences, including media and communication studies, still display a limited degree of inter-, multi- or trans-disciplinarity. Disciplinary provincialism continues to play a significant role in shaping research agendas as well as policy-making, despite the existence of different vulnerabilities. These are partly attributable to institutional and political reflexes to preserve clear boundaries: academia's (and other organizations’) political survival depends on such boundary protection in order to secure public and private funding for their autonomously, and some cases even singularly, defined territories. Another reason is the challenges that come with trying to cross such boundaries and/or merge historically distinct tropes of thought-production and conduct, such as scholarly paradigms and the research informed by these standpoints. As I remarked earlier (Christensen and Nilsson, 2018; Christensen et al., 2018), interaction between disciplines remains limited, despite clear signs that indicated the need for urgency. Yet, these are not small feats to accomplish in short time-spans. From observation to drafting to submission to publication, in academic terms, takes a very long time. As a researcher who has an interdisciplinary training background, and one who has worked in interdisciplinary teams for almost two decades, the struggle of crossing boundaries between different disciplinary priorities when it comes to the understandings of environmental change, and its causes and consequences for different regions and communities, is a challenge. But it is a challenge that must be overcome.

Before delving into the specifics of the articles in this special issue, I would like to address a topic that is absolutely central to environmental communication (and the entire field of media and communication studies), but not represented to a significant level in this special issue: de-Westernizing academic research. Given the clearly disproportionate human and material impact of climate change on the global South, and the call for greater disciplinary, methodological and theoretical diversity in communication research, this is a topic that should be of concern to all scholars. In their study of academic research on climate change communication from 1993 to 2018, Agin and Karlsson (2021) found that there has been a steady growth in the volume of research on the topic, with 95% of articles published between 1993 and 2018 coming after 2008, and 62% after 2014 (438). Yet, over half (54%) of all articles published focused on the US and Europe, and first authors based in the US and Europe accounted for an overwhelming 86.8% of all articles, regardless of regional focus. Contrast this with Africa, which was the content for data collection for just 2% of articles published during the 25-year period and host to just 1.5% of first authors. The authors also found that studies focusing on geographic regions with the highest volume of data were also those that were cited most often, and disproportionately so (Agin and Karlsson, 2021: 440–1). The potential consequence, as noted by the authors, is a ‘self-perpetuating spiral’ where studies on a limited set of nations prove to be popular, leading to even fewer studies from ‘other’ regions being produced (2021: 443). The impact is greatest on countries in the global South, ‘which, ironically, are considered to be the countries that are hardest hit by climate change’, and ‘home to plenty of natural resources which need crucial protection’ (2021: 443). A look at the Table of Contents for this special issue will show a clear dominance of scholars writing about, and/or located in, the global North. Attempts to bring in work from scholars located in other regions, particularly those impacted by climate change, proved to be extremely difficult. This is an outcome that I regret, and a topic that I feel needs far more serious discussion and debate. Issues such as language and the political economy of academia (little research funding, time for writing, travel costs, and lack of funding for translation services by international journals) have impacted the ability of highly qualified academics from the regions of the globe hardest hit by climate change to network and engage with a global readership. This in no way diminishes the outstanding work of the scholars published in this special issue, but is a reminder of the great amount of work still to be done in our field.

The purpose of this themed journalissue is to explore a variety of themes, topics and visions in the study of the environment in cultural studies in general, and media and communication studies in particular. Studies of environmental narratives in some fields, such as literature and film studies (eco-criticism, by way of an example, is an inherently interdisciplinary field), philosophy and history, have displayed ingenuity and awareness of geographic diversity, and there is room and need for greater spill-over to disciplines such as media and communication studies where analyses of environmental news and electronic content have reigned supreme. One starting point for this themed issue is the idea that environmental narratives are incessantly and precipitously transformed as they traverse diverse media and scales. At a time when our mediation and communication channels (from literature, film, legacy media, social media platforms to museum exhibitions, visual and audio-art installations and music) are unprecedentedly complex and interconnected, bold and innovative research agendas that address the ‘mediated environment’ with an eye toward creating cross-breeding within cultural studies are needed (Nilsson and Christensen, 2019). The second standpoint that underlies the crux of the themed issue is the essential need to bring in knowledge and perspectives from communicative (and not just geographic) localities that remain on the margins in terms of their visibility in academic studies.

As mentioned at the start of this introductory article, environmental communication needs to occupy a more central position within the broader field of media and communications studies. The relegation of the topic to a subgenre, or considering it to be nothing more than a ‘niche’ interest, exemplifies not only an underestimation of the radical physical crisis facing the planet but also an unwillingness to confront the role both media content and the hardware of communication technologies play in exacerbating that crisis in the form of, for example, mass consumption and e-waste. In other words, it is of paramount importance to foreground the concept of materiality in environmental communication. Environmental communications research reminds us that many of the concepts and theories that are central to media and communications studies in the 1960s, 70s, 80s and 90s – World Systems Theory, Core–Periphery, Cultural Imperialism, Globalizationt (and Critique of Globalist takes), to name but a few – remain not only salient, but vital. The mediatization paradigm, as it has progressed and is conceived today, leaves us thinking we need much more to fill in the gaps there. Filling in the gaps opens up a space for much-needed new intellectual territories.

The structure of the themed journal issue

The opening article in this special issue, ‘Towards inclusive international environmental communication scholarship: The role of Latin America’, by Bruno Takahashi, is a good starting point as he offers an important overview of scholarship on environmental communication from Latin America. Rather than reinforcing a praxis of geographic exclusivity within environmental communication, Takahashi notes that Latin America has made significant contributions to our understanding of environmental communication that can ‘expand epistemic consider that global North researchers should consider’, while taking note of both the methodological and theoretical connections and disconnections between research from the Latin American region the global North. Importantly, Takahashi also reminds readers of the role of the political economy of academia – from the high cost of conference participation, to the dominance of English, to limited research funding – as obstacles to integrating global research on the environment.

The second article, ‘Environing media and cultural techniques: From the history of agriculture to AI-driven smart farming’, by Adam Wickberg, is a call to add nuance to our understanding of how mediation impacts perceptions and use of the environment by presenting the theoretical concept of ‘environing media’. Wickberg writes that the use of the verb ‘environing’ moves us toward, ‘a processual understanding of the environment as a constantly changing and shifting phenomenon’ rather than treating it as a static object. This shift toward process, he writes, requires that we ‘develop new analytical tools and concepts to account for the ways humans transform the planet in the Anthropocene’. More than merely a processual focus, however, Wickberg also calls for highlighting the mediated nature of the environment: something that is all the more critical as ‘datafication and digitization penetrate evermore deeply the fabric of life’. Technology, Wickberg writes, is a double-edged sword. While on the one hand offering a promise of possible sustainability, if technology remains under corporate control (‘Big Tech’), the result will likely be the maintaining of status quo power relations and what Wickberg calls ‘extractivist logic’.

Wickberg's work on the relationship between human transformation of the environment, media, technology and the dangers of an ‘extractivist logic’ is an excellent lead-in to a trio of articles addressing, in diverse ways, the petroleum industry. In the first article, ‘Reading oil (back) into media history: The case of postwar television’, Kyle Conway reveals, ‘the hidden role of oil […] in media history, specifically television in the United States in the years immediately following the Second World War’. Conway gets to the heart of materiality, media and the environment by, for example, addressing the role of oil (and oil products) in the material production of television sets. This role of oil, he notes, has been all but invisible in media and technology studies, and he proposes that, ‘if scholars want to understand the role of media in climate change, as material objects that convey ideological content, they need a greater understanding of their own implication in that relationship’.

In the second piece on oil (‘The rise and fall of the Synthetic: The mediatization of Canada's oil sands’), Patrick McCurdy examines the shifting mediatization of the oil/tar sands in Alberta, Canada, and how this process has impacted ‘petroculture’. Using the lens of ‘the Synthetic’ (used in relation to the production of synthetic oil requiring more money and a ‘more intensive environmental footprint’ for production), McCurdy investigates three ‘mediated moments’ in order to delve into what he describes as oil's ‘materiality and omnipresence tangled with its representation and broader media logics’: (1) the banned 1976 CBC docudrama The Tar Sands, (2) the short film Synergy produced for Expo ’86; and (3) the March 2021 Bigfoot Family controversy involving Alberta's Canadian Energy Centre.

Finally, in Megan Green's ‘Danger, no exit: Relationships to “remains” and “petromelancholia” on the landscape of the oil sands’, the author connects what she describes as ‘the cultural currency of taxidermy to oil’ in the Canadian West by using objects and narratives to ‘contextualise oil-sands mining in its geo-cultural landscape’. The mistrust felt by mining communities toward institutions, scientists and academics, the author notes, could perhaps be alleviated by an increased focus on the labour and intimacy involved in the production of ‘petrochemical products’.

In the sixth piece in this collection of articles, ‘We are not raised by wolves: Decentring human exceptionalism in nature’, Chandler Classen and David Monje address the co-optation of the wolf in popular culture as a symbol of savagery, violence and Darwinism. Its contemporary uptake in media, the authors note, ‘also serves as a prop for white supremacist orientations to the myth that reassert the primacy of “human” life, while always determining who counts as human’. Classen and Monje argue that if environmental theories allow themselves to fall into the trap of placing human experience at the centre of ecological thinking, then we are ‘bound to reproduce the violence that comes with this mythos’. And, in the final article of this special issue, Patrick Burkart interviews filmmaker, activist, prankster and performance artist Professor Igor Vamos, member of The Yes Men and Professor of Art at Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute, New York. In the interview, the two discuss ‘the ecological dimensions of Igor Vamos’ approach to performance art and activism’, and the evolution of his thinking in relation to free speech, activism, art and environmental communication.

Read together, the research and the resulting articles that constitute this themed journal issue address core questions and put forth key perspectives that should guide our reconsideration of the field of media and communication studies and paradigms such as mediatization therein vis-à-vis the place ‘environmental communication’ should occupy in this realm of scholarship. I have noted a couple of key perspectives and ensuing questions in this introductory article. First, we need a paradigm that brings the natural environment and planetary contingencies to the centre of media and communication studies and that embeds those considerations into prominent tropes such as mediatization research. And a second line of thinking pursued here has been to consider the primacy of materiality of media and communications, from extraction of resources to the magnitude of energy burned by use (data centres being an example) to the eventual discarding of communication artefacts that turn into e-waste. Given the multitude of significant planetary transformations impacting upon all life forms, such considerations and shifts in research and scholarship could revitalize the field and bring forth a diverse variety of progressive and transformative scholarship.