Concept: Ecology

Definition: (noun)

1. the relationship between different factors within the same environment
2. in humanities scholarship, the exploration of environments created by an object, idea, or theory

Related Terms: environment, interconnection, diversity, Anthropocene, aesthesis

Description:

Ecology, in the biological sense, refers to the relationships between organisms and their natural environments. From animal behavior to plant physiology, from pollution and conservation to habitat management, from population and evolution to the climate crisis, ecology covers a broad range of topics. An ecological perspective involves an understanding of the complex interactions that shape people’s ideas and actions. Areas of importance include cultural ecologies, ecological economics, political ecologies, feminist political ecologies, and most relevant to the Migration Mapping Project, media ecology as it pertains to borders, climate and environmental factors affecting migration.

During the first half of the 20th century, there was a rising ecological consciousness, as a result of fundamental reorderings of human knowledge following Darwin’s work, The Origin of Species, Marxist and other critiques of the social and environmental impact of industrial capitalism, and the effects of western colonialism in creating poverty and economic dependency in various parts of the world. Two world wars in the early 20th century also caused much ecological devastation and human suffering. For all these reasons, new approaches were needed to address an entirely new set of challenges facing humans. In his introduction to Perspectives on Culture, Technology and Communication, media ecologist Casey Man Kong Lum writes that “one may consider the rising ecological consciousness during the first half of the 20th century as a socioscientific catalyst for the emergence of multi- and interdisciplinary thinking in the academy, in the political sphere, and in the court of public intellectuals.”¹

The latter half of the nineteenth century was also a turning point for technological advances in media, particularly the telegraph and then radio, the latter used to great success in propagating Nazi ideology in the 1930s. Media as an ecology in its own right emerged as news and entertainment gained increasing prominence in public culture. Such thinking prioritized interconnectivity, a concept that each new generation of media users has since been redefining.

In 1968, Neil Postman formally established the term “media ecology,” based on Marshall McLuhan’s popularization of the idea of studying media as environments.² In his work, Postman emphasized that media itself were complex message systems and media ecology “was an attempt to unveil their implicit, intrinsic structures and impact on human perception, understanding, and feeling.”³ Since then, scholars of posthumanism such as Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway, and others have discussed ways of re-conceptualizing connections between animal and human, nature and human, the other and the (western male) human. Thus the idea of ecology functions at both horizontal and vertical levels: building lateral connections with other forms of existent life, and seeing our current state of environmental and social malaise as a direct result of anthropocentric thinking in the past. 

Heather Davis addresses this idea of ecology in her book, Art in the Anthropocene, introducing a collection of essays that surround the current geological epoch in which human activity has been the distinctive influence on Earth’s climate and the environment, known as the Anthropocene. She argues that “to approach the panoply of complex issues that are aggregated within and adjacent to the Anthropocene, as well as their interconnections and intra-actions, it is necessary to engage with and encounter art.”⁴ Davis centers art as the primary vehicle for human aesthesis in grappling with the complex issues within and around the Anthropocene, such as climate destruction, exploitation, brutality, and impoverishment.

Given the state of our planet’s health, and the interconnected human suffering and struggle, it is not surprising that both artistic and popular media are increasingly engaging with ecological issues. In Bong Joon-ho’s ecological exploration in his 2017 film Okja, we follow the journey of a young girl, Mija, who attempts to rescue Okja, her genetically modified and incredibly intelligent super-pig, from the powerful, multinational meat production corporation who incorporate horrific and inhumane genetic modification practices to increase pork production.⁵ In the film, Bong Joon-ho uses the super-pigs to communicate a primary ecological tension in the Anthropocene: how rapid technological development in a global capitalist context inherently contradicts with the sustainability of the natural world and non-exploitative labor and production practices. 

Chantha Nguon’s memoir, Slow Noodles, also revolves around humans’ sensorial and emotional engagement with the complex and multifaceted ecological issues of the Anthropocene.⁶ In the work, Nguon, and supporting author Kim Green, recount Nguon’s experience as a refugee during the 1975-1979 Cambodian genocide, using recipes as guideposts to map her migration path, as well as vehicles of aesthesis that detail how Nguon sensoraly and emotionally engages with her experiences as a refugee. 

The pivotal incorporation of food and recipes in the memoir adds great ecological dimension to Nguon’s critical engagement with the Anthropocene. In this current epoch that is dictated by humans’ impact on the environment, not only is access to food itself often restricted by complex political and social factors, but food production resources, such as legal access to land, farming equipment, and water, are also frequently inaccessible, especially for those existing in hegemonic power structures who hold marginalized identities at the intersection of race, class, gender, and nation. Nguon’s method of centering of recipes and food in her memoir poignantly communicates that at the center of humans’ experience of processing the complex (and often violent) natural and cultural environments of the Anthropocene, is the tangible reality that an individual’s physical survival ultimately depends on the natural environment, and thus the Anthropocene. In her memoir that explores ecology, migration, and food, Nguon is exploring the multifaceted relationship between human and nature within ecology.

The Migration Mapping project seeks to incorporate ecology at the intersection of media and migration in order to unravel how mediated forms not only make sense of migration as a human practice, but how mediated forms affect and influence the natural environment and the cultural ecosystem of migration itself. In the “Ecology” concept, we are calling attention to entries that highlight the key ecological principles of diversity and connectivity. Media images, representations, art, and commentary around migration shape our understanding, or mental maps, of migration. By studying the ecology of these media, we are studying the cultural and natural environment that they create.

M.M. & S.C. 2024

References:

¹ Lum, Casey Man Kong. 2006. Perspectives on Culture, Technology and Communication: The Media Ecology Tradition.  Hampton Press Communication Series. 15.

² Lum, Perspectives on Culture, Technology and Communication. 14.

³ Lum, Perspectives on Culture, Technology and Communication. 28.

⁴ David, Heather, and Etienne Turpin, eds. 2015. Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies. London: Open Humanities Pr. 4.

⁵ Ho, Bong Joon, dir. 2017. Okja. Action, Adventure, Drama. Kate Street Picture Company, Lewis Pictures, Plan B Entertainment.

⁶ Nguon, Chantha and Green, Kim. 2024. Slow Noodles: A Cambodian Memoir of Love, Loss, and Family Recipes. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: Algonquin Books.

Further Readings:

Toro, Guillermo del, dir. 2017. The Shape of Water.

Luiselli, Valeria. 2019. Lost Children Archive. First Edition. New York: Knopf.

Olesen, Thomas. 2022. “Greta Thunberg’s Iconicity: Performance and Co-Performance in the Social Media Ecology.” New Media & Society 24 (6): 1325–42. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820975416.

Zapf, Hubert. “Cultural Ecology, the Environmental Humanities, and the Ecological Archives of Literature.” Colloquia Germanica 53, no. 2/3 (2021): 121-40.

Soukup, Paul. 2023. “Media Ecology and Storytelling.” Communication Research Trends 42 (3).

“Media Ecology Association.” https://www.media-ecology.org/.