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Abstract

The impetus behind this special issue of the Canadian Journal of Sociology on “Mediating Environments” is to bring together current Canadian scholarship interrogating the relationships among the environment, media, and evolving concepts of mediation. Using “mediation” as a way of conceptualizing the interaction of human and non-human actors – whether environmental, technological, social, political – opens up ways of understanding social relationships to include more-than-human agencies and to reconsider the relations that shape subjects, objects, and identities.
© Canadian Journal of SoCiology/CahierS CanadienS de SoCiologie 40(3) 2015 295
Mediating environMents
Petra HrocH
Mark c.J. stoddart
Keywords: Environment, Media, Carbon Tax, Climate Change, Social
Movements
Mots clés: Environnement, Médias, Taxe Sur Le Carbone, Changements
Climatiques, Mouvements Sociaux
introduCtion
The impetus behind this special issue of the Canadian Journal of Soci-
ology on “Mediating Environments” is to bring together current
Canadian scholarship interrogating the relationships among the environ-
ment, media, and evolving concepts of mediation. Using “mediation” as
a way of conceptualizing the interaction of human and non-human ac-
tors – whether environmental, technological, social, political – opens up
ways of understanding social relationships to include more-than-human
agencies and to reconsider the relations that shape subjects, objects, and
identities. Media ecology scholars Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska
posit in their recent book, Life After New Media: Mediation as a Vital
Process (2013), that a focus on mediation is a useful heuristic. For Kem-
ber and Zylinska:
Mediation does not serve as a translational or transparent layer or inter-
mediary between independently existing entities (say, between the produ-
cer and consumer of a lm or TV program). It is a complex and hybrid
process that is simultaneously economic, social, cultural, psychological,
and technical” (xv).
Kember and Zylinska’s intervention in media studies is similar in mo-
tivation to our own: to use mediation as a concept to expand beyond
representationalist approaches to media by engaging materialist and
post-humanist perspectives that emphasize the ways in which human and
296 © Canadian Journal of SoCiology/CahierS CanadienS de SoCiologie 40(3) 2015
non-human relations are complex, co-constitutive, and co-constructive.
Mediation as a concept enables us to see the ways in which human and
non-human entities not only interact, but also “intra-act” (Barad 2007).
That is, they not only relate “between” space but also in a “shared” space
as mutually imbricated and co-emergent phenomena (Barad 2007).
These co-emergences occur at various scales and across a panoply of
spheres including, but not limited to, the discursive, material, ecological,
economic, social, and political. When studying the relationships between
media technologies, humans, and “natural” ecologies, this perspective
allows us to create more complex accounts of the myriad of interactions
involving human and non-human actors or “actants” (Latour 2005).
underStanding the environment through media
A large body of research focuses on the ways in which cultural interpreta-
tions of the environment are shaped by media communication networks,
with an emphasis on the social and political ramications of these media
representations. In an article published in this journal, for example, Wall
(1999) examines shifting discourses about the environment communi-
cated by the popular CBC television show, The Nature of Things. In the
1960s, the show primarily depicted the environment as a resource pool
and dened environmental problems in human-centred, utilitarian terms,
requiring scientic innovation to provide solutions. By the 1990s, the
show shifted to discourses of the environment that focused on the holism
and moral purity of nature. This was positioned against a discourse of
nature under siege by human activity, with solutions to environmental
problems typically framed in terms of individualized, consumer-oriented
action on behalf of nature. Podeschi (2007) similarly examines shifts in
cultural images of the environment that circulated through U.S. general-
audience magazines from 1945 to 1980. Despite the 1960s emergence
of the modern environmental movement, Podeschi argues there is con-
tinuity throughout this period. Dominant discourses focus both on “bad
nature, ” such as natural disasters, and “good nature, ” with nature under-
stood as a haven from modern society or under threat by social forces.
Elliot also focuses on continuities in the history of mass media represen-
tations of nature and argues that mass mediation shapes the way in which
we observe “the nature of nature” (2006). While authors like Wall, Po-
deschi and Elliot focus on historical shifts in mediated understandings
of the environment, Shanahan and McComas (1999) posit that the main
role of entertainment media is the “symbolic annihilation” of nature, as
media representations of the environment make up a small proportion of
content overall and are often located in nature-oriented programming.
mediating environmentS: introduCtion 297
Other research focuses on the role of media outlets as public spaces
for engaging political debate about environmental issues. For example,
the sociology of climate change involves several analyses of mass medi-
ated climate change policy debate. Boykoff notes that journalists “con-
sult and quote ‘actors’ and gures such as political leaders, high-prole
scientists, government ofcials, environmental non-governmental or-
ganization (ENGO) gureheads and titans of carbon-based industry in
order to nd voices and perspectives that authoritatively ‘speak for cli-
mate’” (Boykoff 2011: 107). The amount and style of media coverage
given to climate change policy debate varies signicantly across differ-
ent countries, indicating that social interpretations of climate change are
the result of different media and political cultures, as well as responses to
ecological transformations (Anderson 2009, Boykoff 2011, Doyle 2011).
Analyses of American media coverage describe how journalistic norms
of balancing opposed positions results in coverage for climate skeptics
disproportionate to their prevalence or standing among climate scientists
(Freudenburg and Muselli 2010, Knight and Greenberg 2011). Compara-
tive research suggests that climate skeptics are given more coverage in
the United States than in other countries, that American media coverage
is more event-driven and cyclical than elsewhere, and that media in coun-
tries like India, New Zealand, Finland or Germany reect the scientic
consensus on climate change to a greater degree (Billett 2009, Brossard
et al. 2004, Dispensa and Brulle 2003, Grundmann 2007). Within the
Canadian context, Young and Dugas (2012) compare French-language
and English-language Canadian newspapers, nding that French-lan-
guage media were more likely to articulate the IPCC scientic consensus
and to focus on the ecological dimensions of climate change. They were
also more likely to position climate change as an international issue and
to link climate change to social justice concerns.
As Manuel Castells (2009) argues, social movements must intervene
in networks of communication power – including both traditional mass
media and newer forms of digital media – in order to engage opponents
and governments in the “symbolic politics” of public debate. Another
key line of inquiry focuses on the strategies environmental movements
use to access the media sphere on behalf of the environment. Environ-
mental movements are often successful at negotiating media access and
serving as key news sources in dening environmental issues, while
newer digital media tools help mitigate power imbalances between en-
vironmental movements and mass media gatekeepers (Andrews and
Caren 2010; Cottle 2008; Hansen 2010; Hutchins and Lester 2006; Les-
ter and Hutchins 2009; Stoddart and McDonald 2010). Environmental
movements often access media by appealing to media logics that priv-
ilege conict and spectacle by using civil disobedience or dramatic
298 © Canadian Journal of SoCiology/CahierS CanadienS de SoCiologie 40(3) 2015
forms of protest. Greenpeace has been particularly successful at using
theatrical protest events to work with media logic to gain coverage for
its campaigns (Doyle 2003; Elliot 2004). Celebritization is another key
tactic for gaining media access, as celebrity support for environmental
movement campaigns plays off the celebrity-focused nature of mass
media (Boykoff and Goodman 2009; Brockington 2009; Dauvergne and
Neville 2011). At the same time, there are debates about whether these
strategies of spectacular protest or celebritization produce sufciently
complex mediated engagements with environmental issues, or whether
these tactics produce coverage that focuses on conict at the expense of
conveying movement claims to audiences (Boykoff and Goodman 2009;
Cormier and Tindall 2005).
These lines of inquiry run throughout existing scholarship on media
and the environment. While this body of work has increased our under-
standing of media/environment dynamics it generally falls within the
bounds of “representationalism, ” which is unsettled by Kember and Zy-
linska’s focus on mediation. Representationalism risks solidifying binary
approaches to nature-society relationships. The alternative approach to
mediation does not position nature outside or against its media represen-
tations, but asserts that media “perform” or “enact” social-environmental
relations. This focus on mediation, performance and enactment ts well
with parallel projects in actor-network theory, technonatures, or nature-
cultures that emphasizes co-constructions of humans-technologies-
environments (Franklin 2006; Haraway 2008; Latour 2005; White and
Wilbert 2009).
Pointing to this difference in theoretical approach is not to suggest
that paying attention to forms of representation is not important – in
fact, it is quite the opposite. Thinking through what we might call the
“thick” lens of relation rather than representation enables us to consider
the ways in which our understanding of representation can be complexi-
ed. In other words, mediation as a concept invites us to see the even
the “lens” of representation itself as a more-than-representational appar-
atus. This approach moves us beyond representation in a non-dualistic
way by expanding our scope to include what Latour calls the “matters
of concern” – the processes of meaning-making – within all “matters of
fact” of meanings made (Latour 2004: 95). Mediation, then, is a way
of conceptualizing the way in which media, environments, and human
actors intra-act in a shared space of relation in which materialities and
meanings are made and re-made. In what follows, we briey bring con-
temporary debates in media studies and environmental studies together
as a way of thinking about the concept of mediation.
mediating environmentS: introduCtion 299
media aS “environmentS
In their most basic denitions, there are resonances between the con-
cept of media and the concept of environment. Media and communica-
tion studies scholar David Morley (2005) sketches out the way in which
the denition of a communication medium began to move, in the 18th
century, toward a “notion of an environment as a surrounding or envel-
oping substance through which signals can travel as a means of com-
munication” (211-212). Although this denition presents a spatial view
of media, it reproduces a dualism by understanding media environments
as neutral “channels” through which content is transmitted rather than
as co-constructive of media messages. Canadian media scholar Marshall
McLuhan adopts the latter position, when he posits provocatively that
the “medium is the message” (1995: 233).
Indeed, McLuhan (1995) refers to media technologies as
“environment[s] of electric information” (236). This “environmental”
characteristic of media, he argues, is what makes them difcult to see.
For McLuhan, one’s contemporary mediascape is “always invisible”
because it “saturates the whole eld of attention so overwhelmingly”
(1995: 236). He likens our relationship to the media environment to be-
ing like “sh in water”: we oat unaware of our invisible but immersive,
all-pervasive, media environment (1995: 235). For McLuhan, though
media environments may be invisible, they are anything but neutral;
rather, they are so instrumental in shaping messages that he argued em-
phatically that they “are” the message and also the “the massage” (1995:
233). For McLuhan, “media – in and of themselves and regardless of the
messages they communicate – exert a compelling inuence on man [sic]
and society” (1995: 233).
Though his work can be criticized for its nostalgic view of previous
epochs, orientalism, elitism, androcentrism, anthropocentrism, idealism,
and technological determinism, McLuhan attempted to offer an intra-
active way of understanding the co-constructive agency of media. That
is, he acknowledged that media were both “extensions of human abilities
and senses” and that, once created, “they inexorably [reshape] the soci-
ety that created that technology” (1995: 234). Although, McLuhan does
not succeed in thinking beyond the oppositional notion that we either
control the media or media control us, he does “thicken” the lens through
which we view media. For him, media are not empty channels for con-
tent, but also active shapers of content. Thus, though his work advocates
a technologically determinist stance, we can also read it as an attempt
to re-engage our “human abilities and senses” in order to remind us that
we as humans have an active role in the ongoing processes of the media
300 © Canadian Journal of SoCiology/CahierS CanadienS de SoCiologie 40(3) 2015
environment and that we can (and do) shape and re-shape the technolo-
gies that shape society.
McLuhan’s oeuvre – also known as medium theory – troubles ways
viewing media as simply carriers of messages and broadened the horizon
of media studies beyond style critiques based on representationalist ac-
counts of content and related discussions of media “accuracy, ” journal-
istic “bias, ” “spectacle”-style critiques of power in society, audience ef-
fects, or institutional structures and ownership. His work opens up media
studies to a “media ecology” approach that thinks of media as environ-
mental and also conceptualizes media itself as a mediation of intra-acting
agencies that include, but are not limited to, the aforementioned forces.
That is, media ecology approaches create space to consider the intra-
actions among non-human agencies, such as media, technologies, and
other agencies, actors, or “actants” (Latour 2005). Indeed, media ecol-
ogy approaches often take inspiration from the natural world for ways of
understanding media metaphors and materialities (Fuller 2005, Parikka
2010) and also consider the impacts of media technologies on the en-
vironment (Maxwell and Miller 2012). By approaching media through
a materialist and post-humanist lens, we account for nonhuman agen-
cies, but also the ways in which “we” as humans have, as Kember and
Zylinska point out, “never [ourselves] been separate from mediation”
(2012: xv).
environmentS aS “media
Environments or ecologies have a similar history of being thought of
as a kind of “mediation.” Barry Commoner posits for example, as a
“First Law of Ecology” that “everything is connected to everything else,
” indicating an understanding of the “natural” environment as includ-
ing but also exceeding humans as part its networks of relations (1971).
Ecologists, biologists, and cellular and molecular biologists also think
beyond anthropocentric notion of “communication” by broadening this
concept to include non-human interactions such as animal, plant, fungal,
microbial, and cell-to-cell signaling whether in regular ecosystem func-
tioning (von Uexküll 2010) or in the spread of viruses and pathogens
(Demuth and Lamont 2006). Mediated communication occurs among
and between species through modalities including calls, pigmentation,
scent, taste, touch and various other acoustic, visual, olfactory, gusta-
tory, tactile, or even electro-magnetic signs. Examples of intra- and
interspecies communications include those occurring between: microbe-
plant (Nautiyal and Dion 2008); plant-plant (Ohgushi, Craig, and Price
2007, Baluska and Ninkovic 2010); plant-animal (Schaefer and Ruxton
mediating environmentS: introduCtion 301
2011); plant-soil (Crespi 2012), and animal-animal (Searcy and Nowicki
2005, Bradbury and Vehrencamp 2011, Stegmann 2013). Canadian so-
ciologist Myra J. Hird’s work on bacteria and microbial communication
as well as her emphasis on “symbiogenesis” among bacteria and humans
in The Origins of Sociable Life: Evolution After Science Studies simi-
larly argues for post-anthropocentric approaches to notions of not only
communication but also “communities” and indeed, what constitutes the
“social” (2009).
What we might call “mediated” approaches to understanding ecolog-
ical and evolutionary human-nonhuman intra-action are also evident in
popular titles ranging from Tompkins and Bird’s 1989 New York Times
bestselling book, The Secret Life of Plants: A Fascinating Account of
the Physical, Emotional, and Spiritual Relations Between Plants and
Man to USA Today science writer Tim Friend’s Animal Talk: Break-
ing the Codes of Animal Language (2005). Among popular documenta-
ries, Michael Pollan’s 2002 bestselling book-turned-feature length PBS
lm Botany of Desire: A Plant’s Eye View of the World focuses on the
ways we as humans shape plants and how plants shape us (Pollan 2002,
Schwarz 2009) and PBS’s Nature: What Plants Talk About (2013) details
the role of communication among plants in their competition, co-opera-
tion, and plant sociality.
Indeed, we can even think beyond the reciprocal relations among liv-
ing entities and consider also the ways in which non-living entities – the
mineral and geological elements of the earth, ows of fuel, re, and en-
ergy, water, oxygen and carbon dioxide, and other organic and inorganic
matter – mediate life on earth and constitute and construct the environ-
ment that surrounds and sustains all social activity. All relationships in
social-ecological systems are a kind of mediated relation. Ecology as a
study of ows of matter and energy exchange attunes us to the ways in
which the material environment is a form of mediation.
“mediating” environmentS: an introduCtion to the artiCleS in
the SpeCial iSSue
Let us turn now to the articles in this special issue, which demonstrate
ways of thinking media-environment relations through the “thick” lens
of “mediation.” Stephanie Sodero’s work in “Greenhouse Gas Emis-
sions, Pine Beetles and Humans: The Ecologically Mediated Devel-
opment of British Columbia’s Carbon Tax” mobilizes Actor Network
Theory (ANT) to follow the intra-acting ows of human and non-human
actors in the development of British Columbia’s carbon tax policy. In
her article, Sodero sets the stage for what Raymond Murphy calls the
302 © Canadian Journal of SoCiology/CahierS CanadienS de SoCiologie 40(3) 2015
“dance” of intra-action to unfold among an ensemble cast of charac-
ters including: prices, pine beetles, policy publications, political cli-
mates, public relations strategies, CO2 pollutants, and people. Telling
the story of the implementation of the carbon tax from the perspective of
the various motivations and actions of the human and nonhuman “danc-
ers” draws our attention to the dramatic complexity of the unfolding
of these events. Focusing on six pivotal phases of climate tax develop-
ment, Sodero’s analysis troubles “traditional anthropocentric approaches
to policy development” by foregrounding the “role of the non-human
environment in shaping, rather than being shaped by, policy”. Sodero’s
article demonstrates how ANT enriches our understanding of “British
Columbia’s carbon tax specically” and “the mediated character of the
natural environment generally.”.
Raymond Murphy’s work in “The Media Construction of Climate
Change Quiescence: Veiling the Visibility of a Super Emitter” unveils the
way in which the framing of media discourses about Canadian bitumin-
ous oil sands extraction are instruments of the perpetuation of extraction.
That is, Murphy’s article demonstrates the way in which the struggle
over meaning is deeply entangled with material consequences. He shows
how “concern about emissions is dampened and quiescence socially
constructed” and explores the “mediation between scientic warnings of
danger and social practices by media communication power.” Murphy’s
attention to media framing connects to current discourses on communi-
cation power in media and communication studies as well as to contem-
porary debates in STS research that focuses on the way in which the
lenses through which phenomena are viewed are always co-constructing
the phenomena they observe. Murphy’s work underscores that although
frames, lenses, and representations may be difcult to see they are never
neutral in their construction of meanings or their material impacts. In the
particular case of the Canadian oil sands industry, he demonstrates the
way in which the “invisibility” of these emissions is constructed through
mass media discourses despite the fact that these emissions appear as
scientically documented changes to the composition of the atmosphere
and effects on global climate.
Using a Bourdieusian methodological approach, Howard Ramos
maps the social eld of environmental movement organizations, with a
focus on Greenpeace International, Greenpeace Canada, the Sierra Club
U.S. and Sierra Club Canada, which are large, well-established organiza-
tions that play a central role in eco-politics. While Sodero and Murphy
take an issue-centred approach, Ramos takes environmental organiza-
tion press releases about a range of issues as data, providing an analysis
based on 2, 236 press releases issued from 2006 to 2010. Building upon
Nancy Fraser’s typology of social movement orientations towards eco-
mediating environmentS: introduCtion 303
nomic redistribution, cultural recognition, and political representation,
this eld analysis illustrates the heterogeneity of these environmental or-
ganizations in terms of their campaigns, the political scale of their inter-
ventions, and the repertoire of tactics they use. While many studies of
environmental movements and media focus on the ways in which mass
media represent environmental movement claims, Ramos’ analysis of the
environmental movement eld provides insight into the ways in which
environmental organizations work as key mediators of the environment
as they attempt to represent non-human nature and articulate the mean-
ings of environmental problems within mass media and political spheres.
ConCluSion
The three papers in this special issue capture different facets of the en-
vironment, media, and notions of mediation. Interestingly, but perhaps
not surprisingly, two of the articles in this issue deal directly with climate
change, and focus on carbon as a mediating materiality, whether in the
earth as bituminous oil, in us as living organisms, and in the atmosphere
as emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, while the third addresses
climate change alongside other the complex environmental issues of
the 21st century, including “depletion of natural resources, and the en-
dangerment of ecosystems and biodiversity” (Ramos 2015). Following
the ows of carbon through these articles, and indeed, through the car-
bon ecology and economy, demonstrates the intra-active and reciprocal
nature of relationality. This approach moves analysis of mediating envi-
ronments beyond representationalism towards thinking of how social-
ecological relationships are enacted and co-constituted by media.
We will conclude by returning to Kember and Zylinska’s Life After
New Media, where the authors argue that the concept of “mediation” can
do important theoretical work as
a “key trope for understanding and articulating our being in, and becom-
ing with, the technological world, our emergence and ways of intra-acting
with it, as well as the acts and processes of temporarily stabilizing the
world into media, agents, relations, and networks” (Kember and Zylinska,
2012: xv).
This reconceptualization of mediating environments suggests new ana-
lytical and political questions, including: How can we – and how can
various media technologies – best participate in ongoing efforts to medi-
ate well with the environment? The three papers in this special issue
demonstrate a few of the possibilities for moving this project forward.
304 © Canadian Journal of SoCiology/CahierS CanadienS de SoCiologie 40(3) 2015
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Petra Hroch completed her PhD in Sociology (Theory & Cultural Studies) at
University of Alberta, where she held a SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship
and Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Scholarship. Her interdisciplinary research
on art and design, environmental ethics and politics, and new materialist and
posthumanist theory appears in MediaTropes (2013), Demystifying Deleuze
(2013), Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy (2013), Deleuze & Guattari, Pol-
itics, and Education (2014) and the forthcoming special issue of Deleuze Studies:
Deleuze and Design. She is currently studying medicine at McMaster University
where she is Chair of the Environmental Health Advocacy Committee.
www.petrahroch.com
Mark C.J. Stoddart is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at
Memorial University, with research interests in environmental sociology, social
movements, and communications and culture. He is the author of the book, Mak-
ing Meaning out of Mountains: The Political Ecology of Skiing (UBC Press).
His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Global Environmental Change, En-
vironmental Politics, Nature & Culture, Organization & Environment, Mobil-
ities, Society & Natural Resources, International Review for the Sociology of
Sport, Social Movement Studies, and Human Ecology Review.
mstoddart@mun.ca
308 © Canadian Journal of SoCiology/CahierS CanadienS de SoCiologie 40(3) 2015
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