Media and the Ecological Crisis is a collaborative work of interdisciplinary writers engaged in mapping, understanding and addressing the complex contribution of media to the current ecological crisis. The book is informed by a fusion of scholarly, practitioner, and activist interests to inform, educate, and advocate for real, environmentally sound changes in design, policy, industrial, and consumer practices. Aligned with an emerging area of scholarship devoted to identifying and analysing the material physical links of media technologies, cultural production, and environment, it contributes to the project of greening media studies by raising awareness of media technology’s concrete environmental effects.

Media and the Ecological Crisis is a collaborative work of interdisciplinary writers engaged in mapping, understanding and addressing the complex contribution of media to the current ecological crisis. The book is informed by a fusion of scholarly, practitioner, and activist interests to inform, educate, and advocate for real, environmentally sound changes in design, policy, industrial, and consumer practices. Aligned with an emerging area of scholarship devoted to identifying and analysing the material physical links of media technologies, cultural production, and environment, it contributes to the project of greening media studies by raising awareness of media technology’s concrete environmental effects.

A potent new book examines the overlap between our ecological crisis and video games Video games may be fun and immersive diversions from daily life, but can they go beyond the realm of entertainment to do something serious—like help us save the planet? As one of the signature issues of the twenty-first century, ecological deterioration is seemingly everywhere, but it is rarely considered via the realm of interactive digital play. In Playing Nature, Alenda Y. Chang offers groundbreaking methods for exploring this vital overlap. Arguing that games need to be understood as part of a cultural response to the growing ecological crisis, Playing Nature seeds conversations around key environmental science concepts and terms. Chang suggests several ways to rethink existing game taxonomies and theories of agency while revealing surprising fundamental similarities between game play and scientific work. Gracefully reconciling new media theory with environmental criticism, Playing Nature examines an exciting range of games and related art forms, including historical and contemporary analog and digital games, alternate- and augmented-reality games, museum exhibitions, film, and science fiction. Chang puts her surprising ideas into conversation with leading media studies and environmental humanities scholars like Alexander Galloway, Donna Haraway, and Ursula Heise, ultimately exploring manifold ecological futures—not all of them dystopian.

Sustainable Media explores the many ways that media and environment are intertwined from the exploitation of natural and human resources during media production to the installation and disposal of media in the landscape; from people’s engagement with environmental issues in film, television, and digital media to the mediating properties of ecologies themselves. Edited by Nicole Starosielski and Janet Walker, the assembled chapters expose how the social and representational practices of media culture are necessarily caught up with technologies, infrastructures, and environments.Through in-depth analyses of media theories, practices, and objects including cell phone towers, ecologically-themed video games, Geiger counters for registering radiation, and sound waves traveling through the ocean, contributors question the sustainability of the media we build, exchange, and inhabit and chart emerging alternatives for media ecologies.

This book examines the concept of liberty in relation to civilization’s ability to live within ecological limits. Freedom, in all its renditions – choice, thought, action – has become inextricably linked to our understanding of what it means to be modern citizens. And yet, it is our relatively unbounded freedom that has resulted in so much ecological devastation. Liberty has piggy-backed on transformations in human–nature relationships that characterize the Anthropocene: increasing extraction of resources, industrialization, technological development, ecological destruction, and mass production linked to global consumerism. This volume provides a deeply critical examination of the concept of liberty as it relates to environmental politics and ethics in the long view. Contributions explore this entanglement of freedom and the ecological crisis, as well as investigate alternative modernities and more ecologically benign ways of living on Earth. The overarching framework for this collection is that liberty and agency need to be rethought before these strongly held ideals of our age are forced out. On a finite planet, our choices will become limited if we hope to survive the climatic transitions set in motion by uncontrolled consumption of resources and energy over the past 150 years. This volume suggests concrete political and philosophical approaches and governance strategies for learning how to flourish in new ways within the ecological constraints of the planet. Mapping out new ways forward for long-term ecological well-being, this book is essential reading for students and scholars of ecology, environmental ethics, politics, and sociology, and for the wider audience interested in the human–Earth relationship and global sustainability.

Drawing on a range of international examples, Libby Lester invites readers to develop a nuanced understanding of changing media practices and dynamics by connecting local, national and global environmental issues, journalistic practices and news sources, public relations and protests, and the symbolic and strategic circulation of meanings in the public sphere.

Illustrates how the notion of an ecological society remains a decisively political question. The global ecological crisis is upon us. From global warming to the long-term implications of ocean acidification, air and water pollution, deforestation, and the omnipresent dangers of nuclear technology the future of our planetary home is threatened. Yet in the midst of the unfolding crisis, the conventional ideologies of the twentieth century and their representations of nature remain unchallenged by both the defenders of capitalism and capitalism’s most radical critics. The Distortion of Nature’s Image illustrates how the anti-naturalism of late capitalist society, in which nature is reified into the emptiness of mere matter, simply a thing to be dominated, is subtly complemented by the failure of the Left to go both beyond the historic limitations of Marx’s nineteenth-century viewpoint and beyond anarchism’s blind faith in “natural law.” However, an alternative for comprehending nature and the ecological crisis as historical and socialphenomena remains open in the dialectical naturalism of Western Marxism and Murray Bookchin’s social ecology. By examining in closer detail how Bookchin’s social ecology politicizes the concept of nature, as well as how precursory models in Western Marxist thought provide a foundation for this, Damian Gerber illustrates how the notion of an ecological society remains a decisively political question. “There are very few studies that bring anarchism into conversation with an ecological focus. Gerber’s book does this in extraordinary form, offering a critical but balanced overview.” — Simon Springer, author of The Anarchist Roots of Geography: Toward Spatial Emancipation