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

We are living through momentous times as we confront issues surrounding digital cultures and communications about climate change. There is urgency derived from our recognition that climate change is ‘here and now’. Inequalities of power and access – in both digital cultures and in a changing climate – disadvantage individuals and communities who seek to take actions in the face of climate threats. Via digital cultures, creativity is expanding rather than retracting from the challenge of meeting people where they are on climate change in the twenty-first century. Amid signs of progress and hope, there is much more work to be done.

This short article focuses on the interrelation of two seemingly invisible phenomena that have a growing influence on our daily lives: on the one hand, our intimate relationship with devices and practices mediated by technology, which make up our media life, and on the other, the great impact that our way of life has on the planet that we inhabit, which invites us to think about our role in the Anthropocene, a new geological era in which human activity is the main agent of change in the Earth’s ecosystems. Regarding these key trends as closely connected gives us the opportunity to find accessible solutions to our daily concerns on environmental issues. In other words, considering our media life in the Anthropocene means to be aware of the challenges that we face while asking ourselves how to claim a responsible use of technology that – in line with our humanity – will help us to confront them.

Today, environmental issues are not only communicated by traditional mass media, but they are also posted, shared and discussed in social media. This raises the question of the extent to which social media use also influences real environmental engagement. Using original survey data collected among young adults in Germany, this study demonstrates that social media use is clearly associated with stronger engagement in green lifestyle politics. Further, regarding different motives and forms of social media use, the findings of the study show that active use of social media for informational purposes predicts green lifestyle politics.

At this critical crossroad of climate crisis, environmental advocates have turned to projection mapping (also known as ‘guerrilla projections’, ‘digital graffiti’, etc.) to foster an ethic of care. This article focuses on two 2015 projection mapping events: one in Vatican City and the other in Paris. Although imperfect, projection mapping may orient attention, transform locations into public spaces for political engagement and cultivate collective imaginaries. By rethinking environmental media between climate crisis and care, we may define the agenda of this journal as not only centred on critique but also regenerating creative communication for a just and vibrant future.

Impactful communication remains a vexing problem for climate science researchers and public outreach. This article identifies a range of moving images and screen-based media used to visualize climate change, focusing especially on the Arctic region and the efforts of the United Nations. The authors examine the aesthetics of big data visualization of melting sea ice and glaciers made by NASA and similar entities; eye-witness, expert accounts and youth-produced documentaries designed for United Nations delegates to the annual COP events such as the Youth Climate Report; Please Help the World, the dystopian cli-fi narrative produced for the UN’s COP 15; and Isuma TV’s streaming of works by Indigenous practitioners in Nunavut.

Through an overview of historical medals, logos, poems, paintings and engravings, imagery that picks at the gap between the persistence of the local and the deracination of the global enterprise, the article focuses on the visual imaginaries employed to mythologize and to make sense of the reach and power of global media, noting in particular the reduction of land and sea to blank canvases on which communication media superimpose their networks. The article serves as a genealogy of Internet cartography and infographics, attending to the problematic relations between text, numbers, diagrams and pictures and their displacement of environments and localities.