Sustainable Media ─ Critical Approaches to Media and Environment

This exciting new book places its critical focus at the intersection of environmental textual meanings and media ecologies. While existing volumes on environmental media have very often concentrated on a single genre or media format, this anthology construes "media and environment" as an expansive rubric. Contributors explore the questions: what is a green, environmental, or sustainable medium and what are the environmental questions that need to be posed to the field of media studies if we are to contribute to this urgent discussion about the earth in balance? Organized around three general approaches to understanding media and the environment--"Media Environments and the Geographic Imagination," "Sensing, Measuring, and Modeling," and "Environmental Media Processes"--essays in the book foreground a set of new methodologies, analytics, and critical approaches, which will hopefully open up new directions in the study of media and the environment.

Janet Walker is Professor of Film and Media Studies and co-convener of the Environmental Media Initiative Research Group of the Carsey-Wolf Center at UC Santa Barbara. With research specializations including documentary film and media, trauma and memory studies, and media and environment, Walker is author or editor of five books and numerous published essays, includingCouching Resistance: Women, Film, and Psychoanalytic Psychiatry (1993), Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust (2005), and Documentary Testimonies: Global Archives of Suffering (2010).

Nicole Starosielski is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. She received her doctorate in Film and Media Studies from UC-Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on the global distribution of digital media, and the relationships between technology, society, and the aquatic environment. Her current book project,Media under Water: Friction, Flow, and the Cultural Geography of Undersea Cables (under contract with Duke University Press) examines the cultural and environmental dimensions of transoceanic cable systems, beginning with the telegraph cables which formed the first global communications network and extending to the fiber-optic infrastructure that carries almost all international internet traffic.