Journal of Environmental Media - Volume 1, Issue 2, 2020

Drones are airborne sensing technologies that transform how we see from above and respond to crises on the ground. Nowhere does the drone revolution have more potential applications than in Australia’s ocean sciences. Drones give oceanographers fast, safe, mobile, high-definition and affordable ways of seeing, identifying and monitoring endangered marine species such as sharks, whales and corals. They are used in Australia to document the rate of coral death in the Great Barrier Reef, the health of humpback whales and the presence of great white sharks near swimmers. However, scientific data collected by drones has, thus far, failed to translate into effective environmental policy. Understanding how seeing informs science – and why or why not science influences policy – has serious consequences for how Australia’s oceans are sustainably managed. This is not only important for the survival of marine species but also renovates central debates about sensing and political action within science and technology studies. I will briefly outline a research agenda that would hope to make contributions to the seeing and management of the sea and advance our knowledge of seacultures – the convergence of the sea and the culture.

Widely circulating textual and visual discourses that represent communities shape public perception and awareness. This article discusses a research collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers and artists to reflect on co-creating the Reimagining Attawapiskat project with youth artists. Attawapiskat is an Indigenous community that became the focus of widespread media attention following several State of Emergency declarations due to factors ranging from inhabitable housing conditions to escalating suicide attempts. Informed by Indigenous storytelling research methods and arts-based community-engaged research, the mixed-media storytelling approach advanced here aims to challenge and interrupt mainstream media narratives that frame Attawapiskat as a troubled community constantly in crisis. This collaboration contends with the shadows of Canada’s settler-colonial context through community stories that counter hegemonic portrayals. Reimagining Attawapiskat sheds light on the nuances of community health in Attawapiskat through a collection of youth voices and place-based digital stories that centre Cree life, well-being and culture.

This article examines print and screen media produced and circulated by groups and organizations that promote Canadian oil from self-described positions of distance from the oil and gas industry. Offering the term ‘petroturfing’ to describe their collective efforts, I argue that the media produced by these groups and organizations advance their aims to consciously shape our collective energy imaginaries by mirroring the new media strategies and structures of progressive environmental non-governmental organizations. I ultimately show how petroturfing is a ‘permanent campaign’ for Canadian oil that obscures the fundamentally uneven distribution of social and ecological costs and benefits of fossil fuel extraction, foreclosing the possibility of imagining and, in turn, working towards a future beyond the dominant fossil fuel energy regime.

Games are increasingly proven to be effective learning tools through a multitude of methodologies and approaches and this is no different for issues relating to the environment and the place of humans within it. We collaborated with the Eden Project to create a mobile game addressing some concerns on the ecological awareness of visitors that they raised with us: a mobile garden management game with a plant recognition technology. Such a project proved a valuable opportunity to understand how a game for smart devices might promote short-term ecological awareness for a general audience. Using a research creation methodology, we analyse, document and run a limited empirical study through user experience testing on players to investigate if the game had an effect on their ecological awareness.

The Green New Deal (GND) aims to cultivate a ‘just transition’ from an economy based in fossil fuel production to an economy based in sustainable production. Its fate is not just dependent on a material struggle for power, but also what mediates this struggle. In addressing America’s historically ambivalent relationship with governmental media, this article links, historicizes and re-theorizes these mediated relations to cultivate a sustainable media practice for the GND. In doing so, it looks to the memory of the New Deal, critiques mid-century debates over media regulation and offers a path forward underwritten by public entertainment and information media production for a GND imaginary. By bringing these themes into a dialogue with the overlapping political economic and legal traditions of neochartalist (Modern Monetary Theory) and constitutional theories of money, this article roots the modern West’s flawed conception of state ‘intervention narratives’ to ‘states of nature’ conceptualized in classical liberal philosophy.

On 15 November 2018, Newfoundland experienced its largest oil spill. The disaster saw the SeaRose platform disperse 250,000 litres of oil into the Atlantic. Despite the accident’s unprecedented nature, Husky Energy (the company responsible for the spill) minimized the public’s perception of potential ecological risks by transforming the disaster into an everyday fact of life. Focusing on Husky’s mediation of the spill, this article shows how Husky’s visual representation of small offshore spills erases their actual impact as cumulative environmental hazards. The regularity of ‘minor’ oil spills, I argue, forms a category of chronic disasters obscured by an ‘emergency frame’ that defines ecological catastrophes as acute, traumatic and exceptional. Unlike eruptive and explosive spills, Husky visualized the SeaRose spill as a benign event, drawing attention away from the ongoing and incremental nature of oil pollution. In this way, Husky’s representation of the spill produced more public relief than alarm.

This article explores the potential for an online database to facilitate modes of environmental communication above and beyond the collection and display of scientific data. That database is Xeno-canto (https://www.xeno-canto.org), a website where users upload and share recordings of wild birds. I consider Xeno-canto as a platform for what Jonathan Bate calls ‘ecopoetry’, through a focus on one of Bate’s key examples: the poet John Clare, a writer known for the close description of birds. In this multimodal project, I develop a dialogue between ecopoetry, as defined by Bate and enacted by Clare, and the architecture of the Xeno-canto platform. The project is multimodal in that it takes the form of a critical essay that works in tandem with a user account on Xeno-canto that I set up under the name ‘John Clare’.