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Journal of Environmental Media - Online First
Online First articles will be assigned issues in due course.
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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.
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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.
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