Mediating Nature: Environmentalism and Modern Culture (International Library of Sociology)

Offering a cultural history of the present forms of imagining nature and the environment, this fascinating book focuses on the relationship between the emergence of environmentalist practices, and the development and consolidation of a variety of forms of mass-mediation.
Where existing research has mostly focused on the mass media, Elliots latest work which will be of great interest to students of media, sociology and environmental studies, examines the role of mass-mediation, understood as a cultural pedagogy of modernity. This pedagogy involves a complex, and changing ensemble of institutions, discourses, technologies, and media: an ensemble which includes newspapers, photography, film and television, and which also came to include zoos, landscape gardens, trains, cars, and nature theme parks. The pedagogy in question helped to institute the modern nation-state and the forms of social practice that were eventually to give rise to the contemporary ecological crisis, but paradoxically, it also enabled the emergence of the characteristic forms of communication employed by environmentalists to express changing sensibilities to nature, and to resist the excesses of capitalism.