I’m preparing my abstract for ASLE and wondered if anyone has reading suggestions. As media ecocriticism has developed it has not yet directly confronted its relationship with the field of media ecology – which was developed by Marshal McLuhan, Neal Postman, and Walter Ong and dedicated to the study of the ‘ecological’ relationships between different types of media. The field started by borrowing metaphors of ecology to describe the material relationships between various media (for example the evolution of film into television, or the rhizomatic nature of the internet).
One of the leading figures today in media ecology, Robert Logan, has recently argued that “media are emergent phenomena and may be regarded in a certain sense like organisms that interact with each other like living biotic agents in an ecological system.” Logan argues this in a recent essay he calls “The Biological Foundation of Media Ecology.” Logan is making one of his field’s first attempts to move past a metaphoric use of ecology toward a ‘biologically’ based theory. My hesitation with this kind of ‘media ecology’ argument is that in tends to mask the material,ecological aspects of media production and consumption and the representation of environmental ideologies and actions. Essentially I want to argue that media ecology should join the bigger tent of ecomedia (aka environmental media) criticism if we really want to engage the full breadth of media ‘ecology’.
So my question is: are there key readings in literary ecotheory that might help me approach Logan’s basic claim (pro or con) that we should study media (or literary texts for that matter) as ‘organisms’?
Logan’s approach is rooted in the “medium is the message” mentality that eschews content based approaches. His work connects to literary criticism because it is based off the work of a guy named Christiansen, who has argued: “Language exists only because humans can learn, produce, and process, them. Without humans there would be no language. It therefore makes sense to construe languages as organisms that have had to adapt themselves through natural selection to fit a particular ecological niche: the human brain.”
I realize I’m opening a giant can on worms here but if you have any suggested starting places in terms of two or three key works in ecocritical theory that would help me get at this issue further I’d really appreciate it.
This ASLE paper will form the last section of my third chapter on animated animals so my frame for getting into this is through Haraway’s breakdown of the machine/animal dichotomy in her “Cyborg Manifesto” which I’m tying to a reading of of “rubbish” and the digital in Wall-E and Slumdog Millionaire – suggesting that a reading of the ‘content’ in the films can inspire shifts in perception about media and ecology that “media ecology” overlooks. I should have this chapter drafted by the end of the month.
I hate that we’ve approached a built in ‘rhetorical’ problem to contend with, but ‘media ecology’ is already an established field with their own journal.
Steve
Recent issues of Screen and Screening the Past include compelling essays on cinema and environment.
In “The Sound of Sunlight” in the Summer 2010 issue of Screen Sean Cubitt argues, “In films as disparate as The Garden of Allah (1935), Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Kingdom of Heaven (2005), sunlight is given an aural presence of considerable distinction. Perhaps only the tradition of the nocturne has acquired such a recognizable audio palette. This paper investigates the types of sounds used to characterize heat and light, with special reference to desert scenes.”
In “The End of Life on Earth?: Discourses of Risk in Natural History Documentaries” in the September 2010 issue of Screening the Past, Peter Hughes “examines the shifting discourses around human impacts upon the natural world from the work of David Attenborough in Life on Earth to the more recent An Inconvenient Truth arguing that the former contributed to establishing the grounds against which the Gore film was received, pointing to the development of a more explicitly environmental discourse in popular documentary.”
In the same issue, Gregory Stephens argues in “Koyaanisqatsi and the Visual Narrative of Environmental Film” that “Godfrey Reggio’s non-verbal film Koyaanisqatsi can be seen, in retrospect, as a pioneer both of the emergent environmental film genre, and of certain tropes of visual narrative that have come to dominate popular culture. This essay argues that the film articulates a critique of the inability of “anti-natural man†to distinguish between the “natural†and the “artificial.—
Please comment if you know of other recent articles we can add to our ecomedia bibliography.
In a discussion with students this summer, several of them pointed out that District 9 could be read as a clear metaphor for apartheid rule in South Africa. However, I hope to revisit that discussion with other students in the future to ask whether the film got them thinking about the AIDS epidemic in Africa, which has recently complicated my own reading of the film and is a powerful reminder that we must always be attuned to multiple approaches to any movie or media text. I guess what I mean is that while my students and I immediately jumped on the film’s racial and international implication, our focus on this reading drew our attention away from the film’s queer ecology and the idea that the Aliens can represent current HIV patients w/in Africa who are alienated from their own social and ethnic groups as a result of their illness.    In particular, I want to talk more with students about the film’s relevance for contemporary African concerns that ask us to interrogate our western gaze. The recent effort to establish a death sentence for homosexual acts in Uganda, for example, has added another layer of complication and consideration to my reactions to the film.
In a recent interview on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross, Dartmouth professor of Creative Non-Fiction Jeff Sharlett spoke about his recent Harper’s Magazine article on the anti-homosexuality bill recently introduced in the Ugandan parliament. Among the proposals in the bill: “prison terms for Ugandans who fail to report a homosexual within 24 hours; lifelong prison sentences for a single homosexual act; and the death sentence for a range of acts, including having gay sex while HIV-positive, having gay sex with a disabled person or being classified as a “serial offender” — that is, someone who has gay sex more than once.”  On a recent visit to Uganda interview David Bahati, who authored the bill, Sharlett found “overwhelming popular support for the measure.” If it passes Uganda will join a growing list of states condemning men and women to death for homosexual acts, including Iran, Mauritania, Saudi-Arabia, Sudan, Yemen, and Nigeria.
More disturbing yet, Sharlett discovered that Bahati is one of the Uganda leaders of an American evangelical movement called the Fellowship, or the Family — the secretive fellowship of powerful Christian politicians who wield considerable political influence, both in Washington and abroad. Sharlett describes the relationship as “very direct”.
Sharlett throws into sharp relief the means by which homophobia as a cultural phenomenon can be cultivated by political propaganda:
“We’ve seen a real up tick in the political uses of homophobia. And I do emphasize that the political use of homophobia – we dont want to make that mistake of saying Africans are somehow more hateful than anybody else. It’s a political moment right now, where a lot of government in Africa are seeing that they can deflect the public from the really serious issues that they face, by drumming up this sort of fear of an alien contagion that builds on this traditional taboo.”
Renaissance artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s 
portraits remind us of the pleasures of blurring the lines between human and animal, vegetable, and mineral.
It’s always been hard for me to resist any titbits on Werner Herzog and his movies. So, I had to post a link to the NPR story this morning. Herzog chats on Morning Edition about his film school and its required readings and screenings.
Listening to his categorical statements (for example, about Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers) conjures up scenes from so many of his own films, where the certainty of his point of view is so absolute its terrifying. Think of that scene in Grizzly Man towards the end, inter-spliced in with the death scene unfolding where Herzog lets us linger on Treadwell’s footage of a close-up of a grizzly, its head taking up the full screen. Here voice-of-Herzog comments: “And what haunts me, is that in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. To me, there is no such thing as a secret world of the bears. And this blank stare speaks only of a half-bored interest in food.”
Perhaps one has to be so categorical to be a director of Herzog’s caliber and to generate the dialogue that his films demand. For those interested in readings just on Herzog’s Grizzly Man, consider the handful of articles all published in the few years since the film premiered (a google search reveals more and Paula Willoquet’s edited collection includes a chapter too):
Jeong, Seung-Hoon and Dudley Andrew. “Grizzly ghost: Herzog, Bazin and the cinematic animal.” Screen (2008) 49 (1): 1-12.
Ladino, Jennifer K. “For the Love of Nature: Documenting Life, Death, and Animality in Grizzly Man and March of the Penguins.” Interdisciplinary Study of Literature and Environment (2009) 16 (1): 53-90.
Neimanis, Astrida. “Becoming-Grizzly: Bodily Molecularity and the Animal that Becomes.” PhaenEx, 2.2 (2007)
White, John. “On Werner Herzog’s Documentary Grizzly Man: Psychoanalysis, Nature, and Meaning.” Fast Capitalism, 4.1.
The Onion at its wry best:
Breaking News: Series Of Concentric Circles Emanating From Glowing Red Dot
Jim Carey h
as recently signed on to star in an adaptation of Mr. Popper’s Penguins. Written by Richard and Florence Atwater, Mr. Popper’s Penguins was first published in 1938 and tells the story of a house painter who receives an Adelie penguin in the mail from Admiral Drake’s Antartartica explorations. One penguin turns into 12 the Poppers decide the only way to keep them all is to turn the penguins into performers. More at Deadline Hollywood Daily (including some great comments).
Meanwhile production on continues on Happy Feet 2 in 3D (George Miller). Animal Logic, which next month will release Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole (Zach Snyder), is currently completing key animation in Santa Monica while George Miller’s new Dr. D Studios is wrapping up voice animation and preparing to render the film in Australia. While Elijah Wood and Robin Williams will return in voice roles, Brittany Murphy (who voiced Gloria) passed away earlier this year. In late January her husband went on NBC’s Today and blamed her death on Warner Brothers because the studio pulled her from the remake a week before her death. Gossip aside, films such as Happy Feet 2 continue to raise important questions about the responsibility of ecocritics to hold media producers accountable for sustainable production practices. In a recent article for the Data Knowledge Center, John Rath explains why Miller’s new supercomputer ranks on Australia’s Top 500 list. Whether or not this ultimately lowers the film’s ecological footprint, however, remains unclear.  Happy Feet 2 is slated for a November, 2011 release when it will go up against the next installment of the Twilight franchise. Penguins vs. Vampires!
Pitch in to fight pollution if you’re headed to the beach or forest this weekend.
The Bandon, Oregon based Washed Ashore Project is documenting plastic pollution in the Pacific Ocean. The film is sponsored by the Artula Institute for Arts and Environmental Education, featuring retreats and residencies in the small coastal city of Bandon, as well as arts education for all ages using reclaimed and waste materials. Click the image to view the trailer.
