Overview
The Environmental Media Initiative’s main goal is to improve our understanding and management of the many relationships between the environment and the media. The EMI will focus on understanding both how the environment is conceptualized, portrayed and communicated through media channels, as well as how media channels and components themselves are conceptualized, designed, controlled, implemented, evaluated, and have effects in terms of environmental issues. The initiative will involve multiple channels and content, such as courses, lecture series, media design, message evaluation, archiving of environmental images and content, traditional and newer interactive digital media, etc. The EMI intends to develop outreach and curriculum materials emphasizing ways to portray the environment, and environmental communication, that are accurate, contextualized, and culturally sensitive. Such materials may be especially useful as part of distance education programs. Social science and humanities research methods that conceptualize media in its multiple historical and contemporary forms will guide our approach to environmental media. The attached figure portrays the four main components of the EMI: Environment, Interdisciplinary and Community Collaboration, Environmental Media and Communication, and Environmental Policies and Social Issues.

Environment
“Environment” may be defined as “The ensemble of natural (physical, chemical, biological) and cultural (sociological) processes capable of acting on living organisms and human activities.” The word “environ,” in early Middle English, meant “to turn around.” “Environ” also referred to a compass, circuit, or circle, foregrounding the terms of a relational space. Thus the environment can be linked to media through the idea of how media can turn around the environment, or make it visible, creating the possibilities for a kind of visual environmental praxis.

Interdisciplinary and Community Collaboration
Understanding the complex interactions between the environment and media requires interdisciplinary and community collaboration. The EMI will engage faculty, researchers and students from the sciences, humanities, and social sciences, as well as professionals and the Santa Barbara community.

University
UCSB is renowned for its emphasis on interdisciplinary research, teaching and service. It will also integrate a wide range of research approaches, such as surveys, content and discourse analyses, case studies, user/audience assessments, literature reviews, site visits, focus groups, experiments, and field studies.

UCSB has an extraordinary range of expertise, faculty, research projects, and courses in environmental issues in the Marine Science Institute, the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, and the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis. In addition, the Geography Department does world-class research on environmental issues, using superb media portrayals to communicate the complex interactions among large-scale physical and chemical processes. That same extraordinary range can also be found in the humanities and social science researchers at UCSB, several of whom hold positions in the highly interdisciplinary Environmental Studies Program:

  • Film studies faculty are exploring how indigenous communities are using video technologies to document deforestation and defend land rights.
  • Film studies faculty joined with faculty from the Environmental Studies Program to create the pioneering course on “Films of the Natural and Human Environment.”
  • Communication researchers develop approaches to evaluate the credibility and effectiveness of Internet and other media campaign messages, ranging from politics to public health, including environmental issues such as pollution, littering, and water safety.
  • A sociologist develops a course called “Critical Thinking about Human-Environment Problems and Solutions,” which teaches students to analyze environmental issues and document them while developing appropriate problem-solving methods.
  • An anthropologist uses world-wide email surveys to understand the scientific and cultural milieu of plant breeding.
  • Another anthropologist studies everyday technologies and the Californian way of life, such as flush toilets, genetically-engineered tomatoes, and e-mail.
  • A political scientist tries to explain NIMBY (“Not in my backyard”) and other forms of public opinion toward energy and environmental issues.
  • A historian studies disease in the environment.
  • A medical historian takes an international and comparative look at environmentalism on other continents.
  • A political scientist studies the economics of climate change.
    See www.earthgate.ucsb.edu for a listing of UCSB environmental research, labs and departments. The broad and interdisciplinary range of environmental expertise across the campus will be highlighted when the results of the Task Force on Faculty Environmental Interests are released in fall 2004.

Community
Even a partial listing of environmental groups active in Santa Barbara shows that this community is highly involved in environmental issues:

The time is ripe for a cross-disciplinary Center to foster both the obvious and the latent synergies and common interests among these university and community interests.

Environmental Media and Communication

Environment in the Media
Media can be the channels for environmental communication (how media portray the environment, such as through science journalism, film treatments, web sites), and the content of environmental communication (how to design media and messages for affecting environmental policy, educating interested stakeholders about the environment, and improving access to environmental information and experiences).

Landscape painters, early photographers and filmmakers attempted to portray their surroundings in both formalized and unique ways. It was the wonder of reproducing environmental landscapes in early stereoscopes, panoramas, and serial motion photography that communicated a sense of spiritual reverence for the splendor and beauty of nature, as well as the will to behold and preserve it. As environmental institutions and organizations emerged during the last century, they have used various traditional and new media channels to communicate their concerns to the public. These messages have ranged from the U.S. Forest Service’s pithy Smokey the Bear public service announcements to IMAX films that bring the Alaskan wilderness or the Serengeti Desert in Africa into spectacular relief. On television there are now several cable networks dedicated to the coverage of environmental issues including the Discovery Channel, Animal Planet and National Geographic. Environmentalist groups from the Green Party to the Sierra Club actively use the web to distribute information about the environment and to maintain online communities and organize activist projects. And scientists such as meteorologists, geographers, and archaeologists use virtual imagery and computer modeling to study and manage changing environmental conditions.

Media in the Environment
The Environment can be the context for media (for example, how environmental conditions or policies affect use and effects of media), a component of media (for example, the extent to which media uses and materials affect the environment), and a manifestation of media (for example, pervasive music and advertisements, or virtual reality environments).

Just as the environment has become part of mediated communication, so too can media be understood as part of the environment, and as constituting communication environments. Media technologies such as film cameras, television sets, computers and cell phones populate landscapes and help to structure everyday life and societies of different communities across the planet. The technologies and channels of mediated communication not only help us to make sense of the natural world, they, at the same time, permeate and organize the environments of the workplace, the home, and the public sphere in untold ways. As part of the built environment, media play a role in determining how we make sense of our immediate surroundings and what lies beyond them. Indeed media transform the ways in which we orient ourselves within, move through, and understand the contours and limits of our environments.

Media have impacts on the environment in more direct ways as well. The manufacturing and disposal of media hardware, for instance, have substantial environmental effects. Media hardware can only be produced when particular natural resources are extracted from the earth. When media technologies wear out they become “electronic waste” and must be discarded carefully since they contain heavy metals. E-waste streams have increased dramatically in recent years because of the expanding digital economy and this issue has become a grave concern among regulators, electronics manufacturers and environmental advocacy groups alike. Finally, environmental media includes media content and presence, along with the production, use, and disposal of media hardware.

Environmental Policy and Social Issues
The EMI will focus on communicating, influencing, and evaluating environmental media in order to inform environmental policy and social issues. The EMI will take a “media literacy” approach -- that is, helping researchers, educators, policy makers, and the general population become more aware of how media play a role in representing and affecting the environment, and how the environment structures and manifests communication. Further, a social science evaluation component will be designed into every EMI activity, providing ongoing feedbackand new research elements to all projects.

Programmatic Dimensions
Possible EMI projects include:

  • Analysis of media representations of the environment
  • Archiving of environmental media (that is, filmic, televisual, website representations of, and research about, the environment)
  • Audience surveys related to environmental media
  • Consulting and research for producers of environmental media
  • Coordination of field research
  • Creation of interdisciplinary work models
  • Development and teaching of interdisciplinary courses
  • Historical studies of environmental media
  • Organization of film series and festivals
  • Production of environmental films, television programs, websites
  • Scientific data visualization

Environmental Media Initiative Start-up Faculty

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Carsey-Wolf Center for Film, Television, and New Media