- Home
- A-Z Publications
- Journal of Environmental Media
- Online First Listing
Journal of Environmental Media - Online First
Online First articles will be assigned issues in due course.
-
-
Only reflecting the industry or critical reporting? News coverage about sustainable finance in Germany
Available online: 03 October 2024More LessWith the increasing need to channel financial capital to reach the sustainable development goals, various actors (political, financial and NGOs) are trying to place their perspectives in the public sphere. Previous research has mainly focused on the coverage of climate change in the news media, whereas the financial aspect of transitioning our society to a net-zero future has often been overseen. This study manually content-analysed 479 news articles in Germany to find out about the main topics, actors and representation of sustainable finance (SF) in the news media. Findings show that media coverage has steadily increased since 2019, with a strong focus on European politics and political actors in Germany. Whereas differences across news outlets were identified, SF was overall mainly presented in a positive tone with advantageous characteristics, pointing out the positive performance of sustainable investments. The findings imply a predominance of neo-capitalistic representations of SF in the news that forego a more critical, differentiated and diversified discussion of the role of finance and the economy in transforming our society towards carbon-neutrality.
-
-
-
Government-funded productions in ecological civilization: Promulgating environmental terms, deflecting blame and sending visual instructions in China’s green campaign
By Shijie LuoheAvailable online: 25 September 2024More LessThis article delves into two types of government-funded video productions within China’s Ecological Civilization movement: eco-documentaries produced at the highest level and eco-feature films produced at the provincial and sub-provincial levels. Both types of productions focus on environmental topics, but environmental awareness and behaviours are often not prioritized. This article aims to situate China’s green campaign in a centre-local relation and to demonstrate how this campaign is portrayed through government-funded moving images. The article concludes that moving images are utilized by different levels of government to promulgate new green terms, shift blame among different levels of authorities and individuals, and guide grassroots officials’ behaviours in the nation’s brand-new environmental vision.
-
-
-
Counter-hegemonic digital environmental communication to survive the extinction internet: The Environmental Ideologies Map website
Available online: 13 September 2024More LessDigital screen cultures play a fundamental role in shaping ways of thinking about the environment. Yet, digital media are highly problematic not just for the massive footprint of technological development, server maintenance, e-waste and the reproduction of the colonial extractive relationship but also for an increasing web architecture monopolized by the big-tech platforms in content creation. Nonetheless, several scholarly and activist digital practices are creatively dealing with the urgency posed by the environmental crisis, showing massive potential in challenging anthropocentric global ecoculture. Through a discourse theoretical approach to digital communication, this article offers an interpretation of selected experiences of digital communication practices as counter-hegemonic tactical communication that dislocates anthropocentric ideologies shrouded in the web informational overload. Through a narrative of the construction of one of these digital experiences, the Environmental Ideologies Map (EIDmap) website, the article discusses and calls for the multiplication of creative art-based research practices able to dislocate dominant environmental ideologies circulating in the ‘extinction internet’.
-
-
-
ENGOs and environmental communication: Examining communication strategies of one Brazilian and one US American ENGO
Authors: Beatriz Sprada Mira, Troy Elias and Cheryl Ann LambertAvailable online: 12 August 2024More LessThis cross-national study draws from the GPDS framework to explore the outreach strategies of two environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) – one in Ohio, United States, and the other in Paraná, Brazil. The study examined and compared ENGOs’ targeted communication practices and their efforts to engage with racial/ethnic and socio-economic minorities within charged political climates. Semi-structured qualitative interview results with ENGO employees and board members show similarities in public outreach strategies, challenges operating in politically charged environments and intentions to address the needs of low socio-economic and minority members of local communities. Many of the communication strategies described as being used by participants correspond to the social marketing theory (SMT) framework. However, ENGO employees reported low levels of confidence in effectively engaging their audience, mostly due to lack of strategic communication training and resources.
-
-
-
How to praxis after the end of the world with more than so-called humans?
By Elia VargasAvailable online: 12 August 2024More LessThis article is a meditation on the relations between praxis, art and posthumanism. Particularly, it is an attempt at a kind of practice of meaning-making that entangles multiple theoretical fields with my own critical creative practice. The article utilizes the feminist methodology of diffraction to read multiple frameworks through each other without privileging one over the other. It explores a speculative potential in relation to meaning-making and utilizes three specific examples of my artworks that examine what it means to practise concepts that perform change. These artworks – and the theoretical orientations I argue for – take a posthumanist view of media, crude oil, water and sheep. I call this work ‘Heliotechnics/Heliotechniques’: solar practices. These include my recent work Carbon Loops (2022), a dual 16-mm projection installation of crude oil film loops that were soaked in crude oil for one month; and a revisiting of the experimental videos Signal Works (2017) and grass wool signal scan (2016). I build a kind of relation to posthumanist practices through the feminist philosopher River (Karen) Barad. While I emphasize the artworks, it is the kinds of non-representational practices and concepts that I explore in this meditation. My goal is to think through words and doings to enact concepts that perform change.
-
-
-
The ecologistics of carbon tracking: Environmental accounting software and industrial media practices
Available online: 02 August 2024More LessEnvironmental monitoring and sustainability efforts are increasingly entangled with commercial and industrial software programs. Professionals working to make environmental changes within their industries must articulate their claims in relation to the existing workflows and operational capacities of digitized industry. The use of software to track and quantify embodied carbon costs across the life cycle of timber buildings illustrates this new paradigm of ecologistics, where optimization across supply chains and environmental objectives meet. Describing architects and engineers in the Pacific Northwest of North America who are working to lower the embodied carbon of the built environment, the article theorizes their use and development of software to this end as engaging in a kind of distributed industrial rhetoric. It details how some of these people understand the constitutive impossibility of reducing either ecological complexity or environmental politics to this calculative register, and how, as a result, they self-consciously develop environmental accounting methodologies to transform (rather than merely index) current practices. Neither the logics of capture and interoperability nor normative environmental goals are decisive here. By looking at how they interact, I highlight the role of commercial digital software in structuring how environmentalism is expressed and the role of subjective socioecological concerns in the development of new data infrastructures and methodologies.
-
-
-
Framing the wild: A qualitative analysis of environmental news coverage during the 2020 coronavirus lockdowns
Available online: 20 March 2024More LessNews media coverage of the natural world frames perceptions and policies related to the environment. Studying its reporting brings insight for how meaning is assigned to humanity’s relationship with nature and wildlife. Through qualitative content analysis, this study examines digital articles on the environment, published from March to December 2020, amidst mass lockdowns due to the 2019 coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Claims about the impact of humanity being locked down were analysed using framing theory. Findings revealed four major frames generated in connection to (1) wildlife behaviour, (2) a new normal post-COVID, (3) climate change being displaced and (4) human–nature symbiosis. The results of qualitative inquiry offer a more nuanced understanding of how media frames the complex human–nature relationship, which tends to feature negative and hostile associations. This furthers the notion that such framing can limit perspectives, even if unintended, and arguably weakens viewing our relationship with nature as symbiotic.
-
-
-
Planetary health: Sickness, the environment and air in film
Available online: 06 March 2024More LessThe ongoing COVID-19 pandemic reminds us that human and more-than-human health is connected to environmental (un)health. This article explores the linkages between health and the environment in cinema. It draws on such issues as pandemics, pollution and air to illustrate how films like Wolfgang Petersen’s Outbreak (1995), Todd Haynes’s Safe (1995), M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening (2008), Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion (2011) and Colm McCarthy’s The Girl with All the Gifts (2016), each in their unique ways, address the problem of planetary health. Airborne zoonoses, monstrous plants, toxic fungi and pollution – the films tackle all these issues to emphasize invisible danger, toxicity and sickness that surround humans and more-than-humans alike. Connecting the ideas of health and well-being to the environment and illustrating how this nexus becomes visible in film, specifically through air, this article calls for justice, consideration and care of planetary health. Explicating the tight linkages between pandemics, climate change and environmental degradation at large, as depicted in the selected cinematic examples, this article claims that the recognition of humanity’s dependence on and responsibility for more-than-humans is crucial in times of environmental and health crises.
-