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Volume 5, Issue 2

Volume 5, Issue 2, 2024

  • Full Articles

      • The ecologistics of carbon tracking: Environmental accounting software and industrial media practices

        https://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2102/10.1386/jem_00113_1

        Environmental monitoring and sustainability efforts are increasingly entangled with commercial and industrial software programs. Professionals working to make environmental changes within their industries must articulate their claims in relation to the existing workflows and operational capacities of digitized industry. The use of software to track and quantify embodied carbon costs across the life cycle of timber buildings illustrates this new paradigm of ecologistics, where optimization across supply chains and environmental objectives meet. Describing architects and engineers in the Pacific Northwest of North America who are working to lower the embodied carbon of the built environment, the article theorizes their use and development of software to this end as engaging in a kind of distributed industrial rhetoric. It details how some of these people understand the constitutive impossibility of reducing either ecological complexity or environmental politics to this calculative register, and how, as a result, they self-consciously develop environmental accounting methodologies to transform (rather than merely index) current practices. Neither the logics of capture and interoperability nor normative environmental goals are decisive here. By looking at how they interact, I highlight the role of commercial digital software in structuring how environmentalism is expressed and the role of subjective socioecological concerns in the development of new data infrastructures and methodologies.

    • Only reflecting the industry or critical reporting? News coverage about sustainable finance in Germany

      https://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2102/10.1386/jem_00132_1

      With the increasing need to channel financial capital to reach the sustainable development goals, various actors (political, financial and NGOs) are trying to place their perspectives in the public sphere. Previous research has mainly focused on the coverage of climate change in the news media, whereas the financial aspect of transitioning our society to a net-zero future has often been overseen. This study manually content-analysed 479 news articles in Germany to find out about the main topics, actors and representation of sustainable finance (SF) in the news media. Findings show that media coverage has steadily increased since 2019, with a strong focus on European politics and political actors in Germany. Whereas differences across news outlets were identified, SF was overall mainly presented in a positive tone with advantageous characteristics, pointing out the positive performance of sustainable investments. The findings imply a predominance of neo-capitalistic representations of SF in the news that forego a more critical, differentiated and diversified discussion of the role of finance and the economy in transforming our society towards carbon-neutrality.

    • Framing the wild: A qualitative analysis of environmental news coverage during the 2020 coronavirus lockdowns

      https://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2102/10.1386/jem_00104_1

      News media coverage of the natural world frames perceptions and policies related to the environment. Studying its reporting brings insight for how meaning is assigned to humanity’s relationship with nature and wildlife. Through qualitative content analysis, this study examines digital articles on the environment, published from March to December 2020, amidst mass lockdowns due to the 2019 coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Claims about the impact of humanity being locked down were analysed using framing theory. Findings revealed four major frames generated in connection to (1) wildlife behaviour, (2) a new normal post-COVID, (3) climate change being displaced and (4) human–nature symbiosis. The results of qualitative inquiry offer a more nuanced understanding of how media frames the complex human–nature relationship, which tends to feature negative and hostile associations. This furthers the notion that such framing can limit perspectives, even if unintended, and arguably weakens viewing our relationship with nature as symbiotic.

    • Planetary health: Sickness, the environment and air in film

      https://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2102/10.1386/jem_00103_1

      The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic reminds us that human and more-than-human health is connected to environmental (un)health. This article explores the linkages between health and the environment in cinema. It draws on such issues as pandemics, pollution and air to illustrate how films like Wolfgang Petersen’s (1995), Todd Haynes’s (1995), M. Night Shyamalan’s (2008), Steven Soderbergh’s (2011) and Colm McCarthy’s (2016), each in their unique ways, address the problem of planetary health. Airborne zoonoses, monstrous plants, toxic fungi and pollution – the films tackle all these issues to emphasize invisible danger, toxicity and sickness that surround humans and more-than-humans alike. Connecting the ideas of health and well-being to the environment and illustrating how this nexus becomes visible in film, specifically through air, this article calls for justice, consideration and care of planetary health. Explicating the tight linkages between pandemics, climate change and environmental degradation at large, as depicted in the selected cinematic examples, this article claims that the recognition of humanity’s dependence on and responsibility for more-than-humans is crucial in times of environmental and health crises.

  • Short-Form Articles

      • Missing targets: Engagement metrics and digital organizing in the climate movement

        https://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2102/10.1386/jem_00133_1

        Despite limitations and uncertainties, digital media platforms are integral to mobilization and organizing in the climate movement. Their appeal and utility for public engagement is largely attributed to direct interactions among users, increased visibility, and the ability to measure and validate these interactions through quantified engagement metrics. While the affordances of specific platforms and their influence on social movements have been extensively studied in existing scholarship, the relationship between engagement metrics and climate activism requires further attention. Therefore, this article focuses on the relationship between ubiquitous engagement metrics on digital media platforms and digital organizers in the climate movement. It highlights the different kinds of internal and external stakes for digital climate activists as well as the challenges and compromises that occur when platform affordances – especially their tendency to flatten and quantify interactions – come to be entwined with organizing. The article suggests that future scholarship needs to look beyond perspectives that exclusively emphasize either the technical hostility of platforms or the interpretative flexibility of users that currently define scholarly understanding of the relationship between metrics and users. This can be achieved by paying greater attention to sociopolitical conditions, such as internet access, regulatory frameworks and national climate politics that influence the experiences of digital organizers in the climate movement. These insights can support strategies relevant to different regional, technical and temporal constraints that are so crucial to achieving effective climate action.

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