ABSTRACT
With so much complex theorising around environmental ethics, it remains difficult to anchor, much less differentiate, so many ideas and concepts. Consequently the core preoccupation of this and subsequent chapters is focused around concrete textual analysis of a wide range of contemporary popular films, in an attempt to illustrate and flesh out such ethical debates. Each subsequent chapter will feature a number of narratives that ostensibly speak to various themes and areas of investigation as set out in Chapter 1. This chapter begins this process by setting up how eco-cinema can be read as emphasising divergent environmental registers, across a broad section of mainstream popular cinema. Within this burgeoning sub-discipline of ecocinema and also drawing on environmental media communications discourses in general, more robust and in-depth textual methodologies can be developed towards understanding and hopefully assessing the broad range of pleasures provided by audio-visual media.
