States of Media+Environment: Editors’ Introduction

Abstract

Media and the environment, media and environments, media and environment... Each of these terms presupposes something a little different. And one could add the terms media environment—often an industrial or a marketing concept; mediated environment—the technologizing of a place such as the public library or the deep sea; and environmental media—a pairing used to denote both humanistic explorations of environmental themes and issues in movies, television programs, games, and so on, and, in scientific usage, categories of material such as air, water, and earth. Exemplifying the latter usage, a US Environmental Protection Agency (2018) webpage employs the heading "Contaminated Media at Superfund Sites" to list—as media—mine lands, sediments, groundwater, and soil. Let us take the first case: media and the environment. In it, the latter term is clearly identifiable as an object—of concern, of study, of measurement, and of management. It is a conceptual construct of the mid-twentieth century, forged out of multiple strands including "nature" (in contrast to culture) and "natural history," "ecology" as a field of study focused on evolving biophysical relationships, and physical and biogeochemical processes sliding along from the most local to the most global of earthly scales. Yet to the extent that it is singular (the environment), it is all the more separated from the human species that is assumed as its counterpart. "The environment" today registers most commonly as a set of issues (of climate change, deforestation, desertification, ecological