This is the slideshow for my presentation at the Media & Learning conference in Brussels, Nov. 15, 2012

1. Greening Media Education
Antonio López
@mediacology

2. “This is more than an
environmental crisis: it's an
existential threat, and it should
be treated like one, without fear
of sounding alarmist, rather
than covered as just another
special interest, something only
environmentalists care about.”
A Convenient Excuse,
Wen Stephenson
http://thephoenix.com/boston/news/146647-convenient-excuse/
#ixzz2C7hgtXbx

3. All media are environmental education...
Teaching how we should value the environment and
coordinating behavior.

4. “Our climate crisis is an education crisis”
http://www.rethinkingschools.org/ProdDetails.asp?ID=RTSVOL25N3

5. Media gadgets in the US (2010):
• consumers spent $233 billion
• 3/4 own computers
• 1/2 own MP3 players
• 85% use cell phones
• four gadgets per person under
age 40
(Maxwell and Miller, 2012)

6. Media’s Ecological
Footprint:
• Conflict minerals
• Toxins used to make gadgets and
their impact on the health of workers
and their communities
• E-waste generated from built-in obsolescence/overconsumption
• CO2 emissions of fossil fuels needed to run our electronic
networks and the “cloud” (which is now equal to the global
aviation industry and will double in ten years)
(Alakeson, 2003; Greenpeace International, 2010; Leonard, 2007; Lewis &
Boyce, 2009; Tomlinson, 2010)

7. Media’s Ecological “Mindprint”:
• Corporate media propagates ideology of unlimited growth, view of
nature as separate from humans, marginalizes alternative ecological
perspectives, discourse surrounding climate change gamed by fossil fuel
industry.
• In 2001 63% of people got their information about the environment
from television. (Coyle, 2005)
• In 2005 $971 in ad dollars were spent per capita in the United States/
from 1900-2000 direct correlation between advertising dollars and
increased consumption. (Brulle, Robert J. and Young, Lindsay E., 2007)
• Marketing and pop culture promote unsustainable cultural beliefs with
pseudo-satisfier, dissatisfaction-manufacturing and convenience-
constructing discourses. (Stibbe, 2009)

8. Regenerative
mindprint:
Empathy
Connection
Coordination
Storytelling
Education

9. Why green media literacy?

10. Major Orientations

11. Critical Media Literacy
Critical literacy (about media/cultural citizenship,
fusion of critical pedagogy, cultural studies)
Digital Literacy
Functionalist literacy (with media/
skills-based ed for knowledge work and 21st
century skills, information literacy)
(Gutiérrez-Martín & Tyner, 2012)

12. “The essence of metaphor is understanding and
experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.”
Lakoff and Johnson, 1980

13. Three primary metaphors
that guide media literacy research:
• Environment (medium literacy)
• Conveyor belt/conduit (text/content literacy)
• Grammar (language literacy, i.e. film edits,
camera angles, sound cues, etc.)
(Meyrowitz, 1998)

14. vs.
Media ecosystems:
“Blogging and the media ecosystem”
John Naughton
http://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/fileadmin/documents/discussion/blogging.pdf
“Facebook ecosystem” “iPhone ecosystem”

15. “The media ecosystem is the ecologically
embedded sum of all our technologically
mediated interactions on planet Earth.”
The Media Ecosystem, Antonio Lopez

16. Ecomedia Literacy:
Green Cultural Citizenship

17. Green cultural citizenship:
Embodying sustainable behaviors and
cultural practices that shape and promote
ecological values.
Ecomedia Literacy:
An understanding of how everyday media
practice impacts our ability to live
sustainably within Earth’s ecological
parameters for the present and future.

18. Ecomedia Literacy goals:
•
to develop an awareness of how media are physiologically
interconnection with living systems
•
to recognize media’s phenomenological influence on the
perception of time, space, place and cognition
•
to understand media’s interdependence with the global
economy, and how the current model of globalization impacts
livings systems and social justice
•
to be conscious of how media impacts our ability to
engage in sustainable cultural practices and to encourage new
uses of media that promote sustainability

20. Ecomedia Literacy
four lenses:
• Environment (Earth
• Worldview system): the material
(phenomenology): media’s conditions of media, including
impact on our perception extraction, production, e-
of time, space and place waste, energy and emissions
• Culture (hermeneutics, • Political Economy (world
cultural studies): Text and system, critical theory):
discourse analysis of media ideological structure of the
texts; mapping cultural global economics system,
behaviors and attitudes paying attention to the reasons
why designers design what they
do

21. Ecomedia Literacy Themes:
• Challenge growth and consumerism
• Critically engage technological sublime
• Promote cultural commons, connectivity
• Highlight alternative media
• Explore topics like food systems, gadget
marketing, anthropocentric vs. ecocentric ideologies
• Explore discourses around nature, animals, climate
change, ecopsychology
•Climate change discourses

22. Ecomedia Literacy skills:
• Research gadget production (information literacy)
• Deconstruct gadget marketing (media content
analysis)
• Mindfully engage a media ecotone by demonstrating
attentiveness to what experiences media
environments afford (media mindfulness)
• Holistically inventory a media ecotone (systems
literacy)

23. Ecomedia Literacy
performance indicators:
• Create narratives of connection with digital storytelling tools
• Translate concepts between media and ecology disciplines using
ecological metaphors to describe media phenomena
• Perform crossovers with ways of knowing through participant
observation and social learning
• Develop an ethical framework in order act upon these understandings
and to make wise choices
(based on MC Bateson’s (2007) model for global responsibility)

24. References
Alakeson, V. (2003). Making the net work: Sustainable development in a digital society. Middlesex, England: Xeris Pub.
Bateson, G. (2000). Steps to an ecology of mind (University of Chicago Press ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Brulle, Robert J. and Young, Lindsay E. (2007). Advertising and individual consumption levels 1900 - 2000. Sociological Inquiry,
77(4), 522–542.
Coyle, K. (2005). Environmental literacy in america. Washington, DC: National Environmental Education & Training Foundation.
Greenpeace International. (2010). Make IT green - cloud computing and its contribution to climate changeGreenpeace. Retrieved
from http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/press-center/reports4/make-it-green-cloud-computing
Guattari, F. (2008). Three ecologies (continuum impacts) Continuum International Publishing Group.
Gutiérrez-Martín, A., & Tyner, K. (2012). Educación para los medios, alfabetización mediática y competencia digital. Revista
Comunicar, XIX(38), 31-39.
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by Chicago : University of Chicago Press, [c1980].
Leonard, A. (2007). Story of stuff, referenced and annotated script. http://www.storyofstuff.com/resources.html: Retrieved from
http://www.storyofstuff.com/resources.html

25. Lewis, J., & Boyce, T. (2009). Climate change and the media: The scale of the challenge. In J. Lewis, & T. Boyce (Eds.),
Climate change and the Lmedia (global crises and the media) (pp. 3-16). New York: Peter Lang Publishing.
Maxwell, R., & Miller, T. (2012). Greening the media. New York: Oxford University Press.
Meyrowitz, J. (1998). Multiple media literacies. Journal of Communication, (Winter), 96-108.
Stibbe, A. (2009). The handbook of sustainability literacy: Skills for a changing world. Totnes, UK: Green Books.
Tomlinson, B. (2010). Greening through IT: Information technology for environmental sustainability. Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press.

26. For more info:
http://EcomediaLit.com