Written by: Bronwin Patrickson
The original call for papers for this special edition on Eco-pedagogy and Digital Nature Connections began by noting young people’s growing frustrations with the escalating ecological crisis, reflected in the world-wide 2019 take up of Greta Thunberg’s impassioned climate strike initiative. The viral reach of Greta’s provocation also attests to the legacy impact of earlier initiatives, such as the 2015 global student climate strike, supported by Avaaz and 350.org, plus Suzanne Dahliwal’s/Tar Sands ongoing efforts to campaign for Indigenous environmental rights, and Ridhima Pandey’s 2017 legal action against the Indian government for failing to address climate change.
This special edition aims to acknowledge the ways that education (and re-education) efforts both within and beyond the walls of the academy can align with these sorts of grass roots actions. Eco-pedagogy (Åhlberg, 1998; Freire & Brasília, 2000) has always been linked to broader collective aspirations for a sustainable ecological and political future characterised by social justice, as much as environmental care. That broad view is similarly adopted in this special issue to include social change efforts in digital culture networks, assemblages and ecologies more generally. Our increasingly mediated world is characterised by a complex interplay of participation, sharing, curation, surveillance, subversion, exploitation, exclusion, inclusion and diverse individualism, as much as networked collectivism. Eco-pedagogy in these contexts can help to promote a balance between these various flows of influence. In order to fall into conversation with everyday culture however eco-pedagogy also needs to be flexible, which involves being structured and precise when required, but also perhaps less guarded and more open at times, informal, portable, personal, variable and even playful.
Although we currently face unprecedented challenges, the push for change is already underway. The ecological turn has been gaining ground in social and theoretical discourse since at least the 1970s. During that time environmental education has been a concept in progress. Early debates concerning the notion of eco-citizenship and even the definition of nature itself express the growing realisation that environmental stewardship in the age of the Anthropocene (a time defined by human impact upon the earth) is a multi-dimensional cultural project incorporating everything from emotional re-learning of nature connectivity, through to eco-media literacy training, scientific witnessing, philosophical/ economic reassessment and citizen action. Indeed, this special issue is intentionally interdisciplinary in order to help bring some related, but also different ways of thinking about these shared challenges together. Contributions come from education, life-science, gaming, media and culture theorists, futurists, digital artists and designers. This interdisciplinary encounter has also resulted in a further emergent sub-theme: Envisioning. Our current climate crisis is a potent prompt for re-imagining. Hopefully the more that we engage in these sorts of boundary crossing conversations, the more robust that vision becomes.
Seminal eco-media educational scholar Antonio López, who contributes the opening chapter of this volume, “Ecomedia literacy: Educating with Ecomedia objects and the Ecomediasphere”, reminds us that “environmental problems cannot be solved with the same kind of thinking (mental model, paradigm, or worldview) that created them”. (López, 2019). Consequently, he presents an holistic model for eco-media literacy that prompts students to engage with eco-media objects – which include texts, platforms, gadget and networked hyper-objects - as inter-connected parts of our closely networked living systems. In order to encourage students to consider both the networks of influence that these objects collaborate with, as well as their functions and impacts López models a multi-faceted method of analysis dubbed the eco-mediasphere. The eco-mediasphere is an integrative teaching and learning strategy that draws on systems thinking to encourage students to think about eco-media in a much more holistic, and ultimately relevant way.
As immersive factual media theorist Julia Scott-Stevenson discusses in her article, “Finding shimmer: Immersive nonfiction media and entanglements in virtual nature”, the shapes and forms of media are themselves transforming. Through her evocative review of a number of recent non-fiction immersive media works Scott-Stevenson explores how the sense of presence within immersive factual media can entangle us within nature, rather than apart from it. As she points out however, whenever those experiences are designed to inspire a sense of awe for nature they also risk inadvertently reinforcing a sense of separation from it. Instead, she proposes the virtues of more nuanced reminders of nature entanglements to evoke an experience of bewilderment, or shimmer. Scott-Stevenson’s thesis draws upon the idea that bewilderment involves partaking in a state of being wild (Berger, 2018), but in a way that also accommodates more room for complexity, ritual, wonder and ecology, by exploring the inherent shimmer of virtual and enhanced immersion, rather than always relegating participants to a state of overwhelm in the company of awesome experience.
Prior to COVID-19 the growing ubiquity of digital culture fuelled immense concern. In Last Child in the Woods (2008) Richard Louv blamed the rise of digital screen culture for what he calls children’s ‘nature-deficit disorder’. His alarm may have eased during 2020 when digital networks emerged as the lifeblood of our times. As it turned out, digital screen culture offered a comforting support for many daily routines. Nevertheless, at the same time the contemporary urban sense of disconnection with nature is likely to have intensified. Long before social isolation, a 2013 RSPB study had previously revealed that only 1 in 5 UK children felt sufficiently connected with nature (rspb.org.uk/connectionmeasure), raising the question of potential consequences for those 40% of the world's species already at risk of extinction and reliant upon human passion and dedication to save them.
In research terms, connection to nature encompasses all the ways that we relate with the natural world, including how natural species and atmospheres make us feel, how spending time with the elements affects our bodies and living conditions, the ways that we understand the natural world, and the extent to which we identify with nature. Thus far, much nature connectedness research has tended to focus on the virtues of outdoor rewilding programmes, rather than also exploring the virtues of nature themed digital entanglements. Exceptions to this include research undertaken as part of the University of Derby and University of Sheffield’s recent collaborative efforts (McEwan, Richardson, Sheffield, Ferguson, & Brindley, 2019) to help design and test a smartphone wellbeing intervention “Nature Notes” within the iOS app Go Jauntly. By prompting people to make a daily habit of noticing three good things in urban nature, engagement with the application has been shown to improve quality of life, particularly for those who have previously not felt particularly well connected with nature. Whilst this is a heartening result much more research is required if we are to develop rigorous and in depth understanding of the ways that nature connectedness efforts can collaborate with contemporary digital cultures.
With this in mind, interdisciplinary researchers Alexia Barrable and David Booth collaborate on a study of the nature connectedness effect of a short term nature themed mobile phone intervention in an educational context. In their article, “Green and screen: Does mobile photography enhance, or hinder our connection to nature?” Barrable and Booth explain that fifty-seven undergraduates from the University of Dundee were asked to take a short walk in urban nature, with the instruction to proactively notice and photograph three beautiful things about their environment. Results from a survey of the participants’ nature connection state taken both before and after this activity indicate that although there was an overall positive effect on participant’s connection to nature, the technology neither enhanced, nor hindered it. This result not only reinforces the value of even short interventions, it also answers previous fears about the inherent, alienating effects of mobile technologies, particularly the impression that mobile phones might somehow by default degrade, or detract from nature connection efforts outdoors. Although the way that people use functionalities of mobile phones such as instant messaging, portable and personalised media production, and automated tracking capacities have broad based cultural and social implications (Ling, 2004) nevertheless those functionalities are also the result of design decisions – and design cultures. Mobile applications can be chosen and/or designed to prompt people to engage with nature in order to impact nature connection states either positively, or negatively.
Intriguingly, the worldwide youth climate strikes contrast with another phenomenon unearthed in recent nature connection research. From 10 years of age, there is a stark decline in nature connectedness; teenagers can take 20 years, or more to recover the levels of nature connection they enjoyed as children (Richardson, 2019).
In a bid to better understand this paradox, Miles Richardson who leads the Nature Connection Centre at the University of Derby, conducted a comparative review of the content of Greta’s powerful speeches (sourced from www.fridaysforfuture.org/greta-speeches ) versus the contents of his own nature connections research blog (findingnature.org.uk), where he regularly updates research results. A 5000 word sample of Greta’s speeches features words like climate, people, crisis, emissions, children, future, countries, leaders and carbon, plus 6 references to extinction, omitting words like nature, wildlife and biodiversity. By contrast, the most frequent words (168 to 11 uses) identified in a 5000 word sample of Richardson’s own nature connections research blog are nature, connectedness, relationship, connection, human, research, people, behaviours, sustainable and future. Climate and biodiversity have 8 uses, wildlife 7. Even despite the age and culture disparities of the two authors, the difference in focus is apparent:
“The youth climate strikes rightly focuses on the threat to their future and the need for change to reduce carbon emissions. Nature connection is about our relationship with nature – important as the current climate and biodiversity crises stem from a failed relationship with nature and part of the change required is a new relationship, one that increases pro-nature behaviours and can help lead to a new concept of a ‘good life’. The climate strikes are about the threat to our future, nature connection helps describe what a future relationship with the natural world needs to look like.” (Richardson, 2019)
As reflected in Smith’s 2018 study, “Taking The Children: Children, childhood and heritage making” children are often taken to heritage (and nature) sites in a bid to educate them, but also to simultaneously condition them for parental approval, which can create the impression that both heritage and the environment cater to family identity rather than individual youth identity. This is likely to be a crucial concern once young people reach teenage years. Which is to say that although nature connection projects and youth climate activism both seek to ensure the future survival of the planet, they also have a distinctly different focus. We can bring these two different focus areas into closer conversation in venues such as this, but it appears that their differences also involve identity work and perhaps even the perceived need for differentiation, as much as conversation.
Similar identity differentiations have historically been apparent within the various discourse specialisms of the digital environmental humanities and conservation research, which is why this special issue also proactively seeks to engage (traditionally outdoor focused) nature connection research in conversation with ecologically themed digital culture and education research (much of which has emerged from literary eco-critical traditions and still champions this approach). As well as celebrating these diverse traditions, their associations also deserve to be highlighted. As the variety of perspectives in this special edition reflect, with more researchers entering the field, the role that digital culture plays in this crisis is also in flux. Büscher’s (2016) concept of Nature 2.0 to describe the emerging digital representations of nature and networked engagements with the natural world points to the growing research interest in eco-digital cultures. Indeed, as Dobrin (2014: 205) observes, digital environments are “themselves natures … environments in and with which humans and non-humans forge relationships”. The ways that digital culture and nature are becoming increasingly enmeshed invites more discussion, particularly in relation to the role that eco-pedagogies play within these social and material assemblages. Recent provocations include Fletcher’s (2017) discussion of the “environmental values behaviour” gap between the mediated appreciation for nature, versus the lack of societal commitment to conservation action. Whilst nature-relatedness research (Richardson 2015, 2018) indicates that in order to build a joyous connection with nature, children in particular will often need to do so by focusing on the positives, free from the impending fear of environmental collapse.
“Redesigning design for culture change: Theory in the Anthropocene”, the latest peer reviewed article in this special issue, reflects Human Computer Interaction designer and scholar Ann Light’s growing awareness that her design research is as much about culture, as it is about form, or aesthetics. In an effort to effectively respond to the challenge of climate crisis, Light’s research work increasingly engages with grass roots social change efforts. Her design work is now part community gathering, part collective (re)education, (re)envisioning and call to action combined. To develop a theory for such transformative work, Light draws upon a wide range of cultural theorists which she uses to frame previous, collaborative thought experiments from her research repertoire such as World Machines, which connects people and data in case study imaginings of new technologies; or On Some Other World workshops that create alternate present times through a multi-layered re-worlding process. Having seen Light present this call to redesign design itself at the 2019 Design Research for Change symposium I invited her to redistribute the accompanying article electronically within this volume in order to help speak to the many social changes unfolding across a wide range of digital nature-culture and eco-pedagogy contexts at present.
In a bid to open the Digital Culture and Education journal up to a broader range of voices, including the contributions of emerging scholars and cultural commentators, the journal has recently invited a range of new content types including more informal conversations and work in progress presentations. This special issue continues that initiative by also including an artist’s talk, an interview, a book review and a video conference presentation.
I am delighted to be able to include an artist’s talk from Anishinaabe digital designer and researcher Beth LaPensée, showcasing one of her recent works Along the River of Spacetime, a virtual reality game which shares Anishinaabeg teachings relating to land practices, star knowledge, and quantum physics in an interactive non-linear journey. The beautiful game combines 360-degree video and audio with interaction and art from an Indigenous design lens, taking participants on a spacetime journey to care for the rivers. First proposed and developed during LaPensée’s 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship, the game debuted at Science Gallery Detroit in Detroit, Michigan in June 2019, and was launched in full in June 2020. In this video presentation LaPensée shares numerous highlights from the game, whilst also reflecting upon her creative intentions and subsequent learnings throughout the developmental process.
Equally, it is such a great pleasure to be able to include an interview with futurist, design thinker and speculative fiction author Bruce Sterling in this special issue. Many people may already be familiar with Sterling’s penchant for playful disruption, whether that be through cyberpunk subversions of orthodox futures, or his infectious and speculative designs for new multi-featured, sustainable, programmable, enhance-able and uniquely identifiable gizmos called spimes. Less may be aware that Sterling has also previously spearheaded a green design movement, but not any old green. Sterling’s electric green effort was dubbed Viridian and intentionally opposed to carbon polluters. This reflective chat with Sterling about the time when he too became an environmental activist before eventually passing the baton on to the next generation provides a welcome, and idiosyncratic historical context to our present moment.
As founding editor in chief of the Environment and Media journal, Alenda Y. Chang has already made a substantial contribution to the growing field of digital nature connection studies. The book version of her thesis, Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games argues that video games need to be understood as part of a cultural response to the growing crisis. In this review, gaming theorist Darshana Jayemanne (author of Performativity in Art, Literature and Videogames, Palgrave MacMillan, 2017) outlines how Chang’s unique ecocritical approach to videogame analysis offers new ways to re-vision game taxonomies, with new terms and theoretical frameworks inspired by the environmental sciences.
Finally, I have included a copy of one of my own video conference papers previously presented to a small room of attendees at the ASLE-UKI 2019 conference in Plymouth, UK. The conference paper entitled “Agency and inter-species connection during play-through of the video-game Shelter” explores tensions between the desire to reconnect with nature and the pursuit of human agency expressed through video game-play. My review of these tensions is grounded within a contextual analysis of the ways that young people respond to the opportunity to role-play a mother badger in the wild trying to lead her cubs to safety in the videogame Shelter. The video replay of this conference paper below includes a montage of performative Let’s Play videos of the game, together with an exploration of related commentary and reviews. This video evidence is so central to my argument that nature themed computer games can provide compelling nature connection pathways, even despite the likelihood that those playful applications may still involve conditioned, enculturated expressions of the Anthropocene, that I have chosen to highlight it within this volume. I am regularly enthralled by the depth and breadth of the growing corpus of environmental works and associated eco-critical analyses, including examples like Alenda Y. Chang’s artful monograph introduced in the paragraph above. Nevertheless, I hope that this video argument encourages more researchers to also explore the broader contexts of engagement that equally characterise our daily lives. Whereas I delivered my oral commentary live in 2019, my narration in this follow up presentation is instead pre-recorded (and slightly modified). A copy of the original abstract is included in the footnotes below.
Digital nature connections research is increasingly pertinent for our times. The need to better understand the role that digital eco-pedagogy plays regarding these sorts of tensions is as pressing now, as it is developmental. With that in mind, the Digital Culture and Education journal will keep this Eco-pedagogy and Digital Nature Connections themed issue open for further, follow up submissions. In order to support continued knowledge exchange in this field we welcome future submissions relevant to digital eco-pedagogy and digital nature connection research and encourage you to send your findings to editor@digitalcultureandeducation.com.
Footnotes
Let’s Play videos are so popular on YouTube that a number of presenters are able to monetise their output. This genre is similar to live-stream game-play events with more curation, often incorporating creative post-production techniques. Produced by players, the game-play screen recordings provide a way to perform, document and share the presenter’s subjective game-play experience. Whilst these performative constructions are inspired by, and often hammed up for this public context, nevertheless their exaggerated presentation also reflect the social contexts of play and help to indicate how YouTube’s (primarily young, primarily Western) community responds to the game.
Agency and inter-species connection during play-through of the video-game Shelter Transitioning away from the dominant, extractive nature stance associated with the Anthropocene and the environmental devastation it has created, to instead embrace a more appreciative sense of inter-connectedness with nature is a cultural project that demands constant reassessment. Without deeper reflection, for example, even the call to embrace environmental caretaker roles risks the repeat assumption of human dominance. At the same time too however, is it worth asking whether the need to reconnect with nature is necessarily at odds with the pursuit of human agency?
This paper explores nature connectivity in a medium that almost fetishizes agency: Video games. My focus is upon player engagement with Shelter (Might and Delight, 2013), the first edition of a popular indie nature video game series which challenges players to take on the virtual avatar character of a badger mother trying to protect her cubs from the wild.
Cremin (2016) has previously applied Deleuz and Guattaris’ notion of becoming-animal to an analysis of the ways that co-emergent video game-play with virtual avatars allows players to experience a sense of becoming something more. Yet, how transformative is such an experience if that game-world is also an expression of the Anthropocene? Tyler (2013) argues that the pixelated, smellovision mode in Dog’s Life (for Playstation 2, Frontier Development, 2003) which represents a necessarily simplified visualisation of dog’s heightened sense of smell, nevertheless effectively signals that there is more than one way of viewing the world. Yet, how are players interpreting these signals? A recent study of Let’s Play recordings shared on social media of a religious themed game, for example showed that players do not tend to engage with the overt world themes, like religion (Radde-Antweiler, Waltemathe, & Zeiler, 2014).
Bearing these questions in mind, in this paper I explore the interplay of player agency and engagement with nature-connectivity affects in immersive nature themed digital media. Specifically, I interrogate the mediated Shelter game-play experience by conducting a context (Radde-Antewler & Zeilier, 2015) and multimodal-discourse analysis of audience reaction to the game across meta-critic online text reviews ("Metacritic Shelter Reviews," 2013), as well as numerous Shelter Let’s Play gaming playthrough videos ("Shelter playthrough," 2013) published on YouTube. In gaming discourse, agency refers to the player’s sense of meaningful influence upon unfolding game events. Here, I use the term nature connectivity affect to refer to the ways that digital media makes it possible to experience anew a sense of nature relatedness, through a combination of representation, social assemblage and also the emotive, phenomenological affects linked to that experience.
In Shelter, predators and natural disasters are a force to be reckoned with. According to a Eurogamer review, by dramatizing the role of an animal mother, “rarely has a game articulated loss in such clear and urgent terms”(Parkin, 2013). The sublime and yet also ruthless nature portrayed in the game recalls primordial fears of the wilderness, yet players more readily link the allure of this game to the chance to play as a mother in a novel and visually appealing context. In terms of nature connectivity poetics, this contrast highlights the parallel importance of personalised nature themes/agency, potentially also linked to related, real world discussion starters.
References
Åhlberg, M. (1998). Ecopedagogy and Ecodidactics: Education for Sustainable Development, Good Environment and Good Life; Contributions of the EU DGXI BEENET (Baltic Environment Education Network): University of Joensuu.
Büscher, B., 2016. Nature 2.0: Exploring and theorizing the links between new media and nature conservation. New Media & Society, 18(5), pp.726-743.
Cremin, C. (2016). Molecular Mario: The Becoming-Animal of Video Game Compositions. Games and Culture, 11(4), 441-458.
Dobrin, S.I., 2014. Frontier 2.0.
Fletcher, R., 2017. Gaming conservation: Nature 2.0 confronts nature-deficit disorder. Geoforum, 79, pp.153-162.
Freire, P., & Brasília, D. (2000). Pedagogia da terra. São Paulo: Petrópolis.
McEwan, K., Richardson, M., Sheffield, D., Ferguson, F. J., & Brindley, P. (2019). A smartphone app for improving mental health through connecting with urban nature. International journal of environmental research and public health, 16(18), 3373.
Metacritic Shelter Reviews. (2013). Retrieved from https://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/shelter
Parkin, S. (2013). Shelter review. Retrieved from https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-09-11-shelter-review
Radde-Antewler, K., & Zeilier, X. (2015). Methods for analyzing let’s plays: Context analysis for gaming videos on YouTube. En ligne. gamevironments(2).
Radde-Antweiler, K., Waltemathe, M., & Zeiler, X. (2014). Video Gaming Let’, s Plays and Religion: The Relevance of Researching gamevironments. Gamevironments, 1, 1-36.
Richardson, M. (2019). The Teenage Dip in Nature Connection and Youth Climate Strikes. Retrieved from https://findingnature.org.uk/2019/09/29/climate-strikes/
Smith, L., 2013. Taking the children: Children, childhood and heritage making. In Children, childhood and cultural heritage. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
Shelter playthrough. (2013). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=shelter+playthrough
Tyler, T. (2013). New tricks. Angelaki, 18(1), 65-82.
Thank you to my co-editors of the Digital Culture and Education journal, Victoria Carrington, Harry Dyer, Esther Priyadharshini, Jennifer Rowsell and Alexander Schmoelz who offered their enthusiastic support for this special issue throughout its germination process. Particular thanks go to Esther Priyadharshini for highlighting the legacy of youth climate action preceding the 2019 global student climate strike, and also Harry Dyer for his untiring assistance formatting and uploading the publication itself.
Thank you also to Polly Atkin for introducing me to the internet meme, Badgers