Publications
Film and Television Production in the Age of Climate Crisis : Towards a Greener Screen
This volume brings together a range of voices from across the global environmental media community to build a comparative international set of perspectives on ‘green’ film and television production. Through this, it provides a necessary intervention in environmental media studies that actively foregrounds media infrastructure, production, policy, and labour – that is, the management and practice of media production cultures.
Due to its immense sociocultural influence and economic resources, the global screen media industry is at the forefront of raising awareness for the political and social issues resulting from accelerated environmental instability. However, the 21st century relationship between screen media and the environment has another face that demands urgent scrutiny. The advent of the digital age and the vast electrical and Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) infrastructures required to support digital production, distribution, and archiving has resulted in the rapid expansion and diversification of the industry’s resource use, infrastructure construction, energy dependency, and consequent waste and emissions production. Addressing these structures is essential to alleviating their environmental and social impact and ensuring that the industry’s rhetoric on environmental responsibility is reflected in its practice.
As a mitigating counterbalance to the above trends, there has been a heightenedpush for sustainability measures along various lines of industry management, policy, and practice. These initiatives—including the cultural values they reflect, the political economies that form their logic, the managerial and marketing tactics that orchestrate them, and the environmental realities of their implementation—form the central object of inquiry for this collection.
In recent years the widely held misconception of the media as an ‘ephemeral’ industry has been challenged by research on the industry’s significant material footprint. Despite this material turn, no systematic study of this sector has been conducted in ways that considers the role of the media industries as consumers and users of a range of natural resources.
Filling this gap, Environmental Management of the Media discusses the environmental management of the media industries in the UK and the Nordic countries. These Nordic countries, both as a set of small nations and as a regional constellation, are frequently perceived as some of the ‘greenest’ in the world, yet, not only is the footprint of the media industries practically ignored in academic research, but the very real stakes of the industries’ global impact are not comprehensively understood. Here, the author focuses on four key areas for investigating the material impact of Nordic media: (1) resources used for production and dissemination; (2) regulation of the media; (3) organizational management; and (4) labour practices. By adopting an interdisciplinary perspective that combines ecocritical analysis with interrogation of the political economy of the creative industries, Kääpä argues that taking the industries to task on their environmental footprint is a multilevel resource and organizational management issue that must be addressed more effectively in contemporary media studies.
This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of media, communication and environmental studies.
In an era when many businesses have come under scrutiny for their environmental impact, the film industry has for the most part escaped criticism and regulation. Its practices are more diffuse; its final product, less tangible; and Hollywood has adopted public-relations strategies that portray it as environmentally conscious. In Hollywood’s Dirtiest Secret, Hunter Vaughan offers a new history of the movies from an environmental perspective, arguing that how we make and consume films has serious ecological consequences.
Bringing together environmental humanities, science communication, and social ethics, Hollywood’s Dirtiest Secret is a pathbreaking consideration of the film industry’s environmental impact that examines how our cultural prioritization of spectacle has distracted us from its material consequences and natural-resource use. Vaughan examines the environmental effects of filmmaking from Hollywood classics to the digital era, considering how popular screen media shapes and reflects our understanding of the natural world. He recounts the production histories of major blockbusters—Gone with the Wind, Singin’ in the Rain, Twister, and Avatar—situating them in the contexts of the development of the film industry, popular environmentalism, and the proliferation of digital technologies. Emphasizing the materiality of media, Vaughan interweaves details of the hidden environmental consequences of specific filmmaking practices, from water use to server farms, within a larger critical portrait of social perceptions and valuations of the natural world.