ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the problem of scale in environmental communication, specifically in the use of visualization technologies to promote ecoliteracy and communicate massive environmental issues to public audiences. It explores how Bruno Latour’s concept of networks offers methodologies for place-based writing practices which function outside the bifurcated relations of zoom. MEmorials engage networks in ways that illustrate trans-scalar approaches to writing with/in environments and counteract the deranged subjectivities that form from viewing the world only in relation to human scales. MEmorial mapping allows writers to access what Zach Horton terms “thick ecology,” engaging with sites of large-scale disaster beyond the rigid boundaries of scale. The ecocritic Lee Rozelle refers to aesthetic scale effects in environmental literacy as the “ecosublime.” The album responds to Landsat’s remote-sensing technologies and considers how individuals scale to the level of national disasters. The song grapples with the rhetorical problem of scale and the resulting production of anomie, derangement, nationalism, and isolation.
