Climate, Creatures and COVID-19: Environment and Animals in Twenty-First Century Media Discourse

This special issue of Networking Knowledge was first conceived of in 2020, at the start of the first UK lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic. It was a time during which the freedoms and spaces for movement of humans all over the world were radically altered in endless ways daily routines and professional lives disrupted, and family and social relationships inflected by the sudden necessity of digital communication. COVID-19 had, and continues to have, a profound effect on collective and individual health and physical and mental wellbeing, relationships, and politics and economies, all over the world. Inequality became further entrenched during the pandemic (Jenkins 2021; Coy 2021). It cost lives and livelihoods (World Health Organisation 2021; Sundaram 2020; Russon and Smith 2021), and the precarious circumstances in which many people already lived were exacerbated. COVID-19 has been characterised by loss of many kinds.