Green Visual & Cultural Studies 
 

Over the past 15 years or so, ‘ecocriticism’ has established itself reasonably well within literary scholarship. But it has yet to do so in the other arts. What would a ‘green’ film and visual scholarship look like? It may ask questions of the relationship between visual representation and social and ecological reality (such as Gregg Mitman’s and  Derek Bouse’s studies of wildlife documentary); it may seek to delineate ‘positive’ versus ‘negative’ images of nature, of environmental activism, and of human-environment relations (see David Ingram’s Green Screen); or it may probe both the limitations and potentials offered by film and visual media – including the potential to expand awareness, empathy, and understanding across species and across socio-ecological cultural differences (see Scott MacDonald's The Garden in the Machine, Jonathan Burt’s Animals in Film, and recent work on ethnographic cinema, ‘cultures of vision,’ etc.). It would deal with what Andrew Ross has called "images of ecology" - those familiar images of  

belching smokestacks, seabirds mired in petrochemical sludge, fish floating belly-up, traffic jams in Los Angeles and Mexico City, and clearcut forests; on the other hand, the redeeming repertoire of pastoral imagery, pristine, green, and unspoiled by human habitation, crowned by the ultimate global spectacle, the fragile, vulnerable ball of spaceship earth (Ross, Chicago Gangster Theory of Life, p. 171)

- but also with the "ecology of images," that is, the ethics, politics, economics, and ‘ecologics’ of the ways images are produced, circulated, and consumed in our society. The latter might best be thought of as consisting of three interconnected dimensions or levels: the material, the perceptual, and the social. Cinema's (and photography's) material ecologies, or its ecologics, concern the technologies by which images are made and the ecologies from which resources are extracted to make them, and to which waste materials return following their use. Its perceptual ecologies, or its epistemologics, concern its effects on perception and on culture, including changing aesthetic and visual cultures as these affect and shape philosophies and ideologies relating humans to the nonhuman world. Finally, its social ecologies concerns questions of differential access to production (including its production costs in human and environmental health), consumption, and interpretation and control.


Green film studiesGreen visual studiesMusic & soundscape studies
And see the web site for my course Ecopolitics & the Cinema.