ABSTRACT
Living in the Epoch of the Anthropocene, in times of climate change and other severe environmental problems, addressing and challenging cultural conceptions of nature and wildlife is crucial for facilitating development towards environmental sustainability. In modern society, mass media are central arenas for communicating stories of nature and wildlife. This chapter introduces media aesthetic methodologies as an analytical tool suitable for very different instances of communication, useful for researchers and others aiming for uncovering cultures of nature in popular storytelling. The method provides deep qualitative content analysis, forming a solid basis for informed reflections on nature aesthetics. Concrete ‘walk-through’-analyses demonstrate how the method can be applied: The concrete cases are photographer Steve Bloom’s wildlife photography with accompanying texts (some by Jane Goodall) and the BBC’s and Attenborough’s popular non-fiction nature television. The analyses show that anthropomorphism, romantification, exotification, nature–culture-separation and genderization is widespread in nature stories. Connections to Western colonialism and natural history tradition are traced and possible implications of this framing of nature are discussed. The chapter calls for nature stories that function as cultural carriers for sustainability and suggests storytelling based on the concept of social nature, a reframing of nature stories towards exploring nature–culture interfaces, taking cross-species interdependence more seriously.
