ABSTRACT
This book addresses two major themes. First, the climate emergency demands that media educators respond with urgency to the planetary ecological crisis. The source of the crisis has deep roots in the Modernity, which serves as the dominant worldview governing modern education and global economics. Second, a holistic methodology for media education based on systems dynamics and eco-ethics is necessary to address the problem, but it needs to be clearly articulated and formulated. The aim of this book, then, is to offer a scholarly framework and to identify resources for media educators to incorporate ecology into how they teach media. This book’s introduction begins with an ecocritical critique of the metaphor of media and explores green alternatives, such as ecomedia and ecomediasystem. Drawing on the scholarship of ecomedia studies and related fields, this introduction offers a general overview of media’s ecological footprint (ecomateriality) and mindprint (culture, representations, and ideology) and how it can be addressed by systems dynamics and eco-ethics. A holistic methodology is introduced, called the ecomediasphere. This is established as a framework for the rest of the book, which encourages the exploration of ecomedia from four perspectives—lifeworld, ecoculture, political ecology, and ecomateriality.
