This document discusses how media such as television and film shape narratives about nature and humanity's relationship to the natural world. It argues that mass media has promoted a narrow view of nature as something to exploit and be in conflict with. Indigenous cultures are portrayed trivialized, while nature documentaries often sensationalize and prioritize "apex" predators. The document suggests media encourages passivity and disconnect from nature, in contrast to indigenous cultures that traditionally lived in harmony with the environment. It frames current environmental issues like climate change as consequences of modern values diverging from indigenous perspectives.

1. Media and the Nature
Narrative: Television and
Cinema
Media and the Nature Narrative:
Television and Cinema
Created and presented by
Ukumbwa Sauti, M.Ed.

2. Context:
• the human spiritual relationship with
nature has been degraded by modern
cultural values
• mass communications media has narrowly
defined human and natural characteristics
and deepened estrangement from nature
• media narratives are influential and
suggestive
• nature narratives are few and problematic

3. Larger Context:
• Indigeny (indigenous cultural thought and
practice) has sustained an organic and
harmonious relationship with nature for the
majority of human development
• Climate change has been created outside
the indigenous experience by modernity
• Indigenous people are most immediately
susceptible to effects of climate change

4. Disney
• “pioneered” the nature documentary
– often manipulated nature with captive animals
• lemmings do not jump off of cliffs!
• EPCOT center represents aggrandizement of
human physical technologies with nature as an
exploitable resource, corporate context (Mander,
1991)
• nature represented in conflict with industry
(Clarke, New Industrialist magazine)
• trivializes indigenous cultures

5. QuickTime™ and a
TIFF (LZW) decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
• Program line-up dominated by “sensational”,
“reality”, “extreme” nature narratives
• “apex” predator focus (bigger/dangerous is better)

7. “Lost Tapes”

9. Steve Irwin

10. Jeff Corwin

11. “Inconvenient Truth”

12. “Planet Earth”

13. Mander cont. -
• Television –
– “encourages passivity, isolation, confusion,
addiction and alienation”
– “shuts out alternate visions”
– creates viewers who are “less creative, less
able to make subtle distinctions,..., more
interested in things
– “redesigns us to be compatible with the
[electronic, technology-dominated] future”.

14. George Gerbner
• traditional social communications were
organic, culturally validating and produced
by the cultural container of the consumer
• modern, electronic communications
modalities are owned and controlled by
those who share few values with the
consumer
• values are cultivated through persistent
usage and consumption