Critical practice and the public pedagogy of environmental and conservation media

Natural History filmmaking has a long history but the generic boundaries between it and environmental and conservation filmmaking are blurred. Nature, environment and animal imagery has been a mainstay of television, campaigning organisations and conservation bodies from Greenpeace to the Sierra Club, with vibrant images being used effectively on posters, leaflets and postcards, and in coffee table books, media releases, short films and viral emails to educate and inform the general public. However, critics suggest that wildlife film and photography frequently convey a false image of the state of the world’s flora and fauna. The environmental educator David Orr once remarked that all education is environmental education, and it is possible to see all image-based communication in the same way. The Media, Animal Conservation and Environmental Education has contributions from filmmakers, photographers, researchers and academics from across the globe. It explores the various ways in which film, television and video are, and can be, used by conservationists and educators to encourage both a greater awareness of environmental and conservation issues, and practical action designed to help endangered species. This book is based on a special issue of the journal Environmental Education Research.

Critical practice and the public pedagogy of environmental and conservation media

This article addresses the reluctance of mainstream corporate and commercial media to critically address major environmental and conservation issues. The resulting public pedagogy largely reproduces the neoliberal ideology informing much conservation practice and discourse. Nonetheless, the media retains an unrealised critical educative potential that needs to be drawn upon by critical media practitioners and educators. To do this, educators need to be cognisant of the phenomenological experience of spectatorship, the aesthetic form and relational contexts of media consumption, production and informal learning. Referring to the work of Vivian Sobchack, Henry Giroux, Pierre Bourdieu and Gilles Deleuze, the article argues that if critical practitioner-educators apply an analytic framework informed by critical realism, counter-hegemonic elements found within corporate and independent media productions and conservation initiatives may be rearticulated and re-presented in a more positive manner. For this to occur, critical media practitioners-educators need to recognise that feasible political and normative alternatives are both available and practically possible. The article ends by discussing some relatively recent non-fiction productions that express a commonality between human and non-human animals and so form the basis of a critical environmental education-media practice.

Media, ecology and conservation:using the media to protect the world's wildlife and ecosystems

The second book in The Converging World series, Media, Ecology and Conservation focuses on global connectivity and the role of new digital and traditional media in bringing people together to protect the world's endangered wildlife and conserve fragile and threatened habitats. New media offers opportunities for like-minded individuals, community groups, businesses and public organisations to learn and work cooperatively for the good of all species. One of the key themes of this book explores the important issue of how new information and communication technologies mediate the natural world, and our understanding of our place in it. By exploring the role of film, television, video, photography and the internet in animal conservation in the USA, India, Africa, Australia and the United Kingdom John Blewitt investigates the politics of media representation surrounding important controversies such as the trade in bushmeat, whaling and habitat destruction. The work and achievements of media/conservation activists are located within a cultural framework that simultaneously loves nature, reveres animals but too often ignores the uncomfortable realities of species extinction and animal cruelty.

Introduction: the media, animal conservation and environmental education

Natural History filmmaking has a long history but the generic boundaries between it and environmental and conservation filmmaking are blurred. Nature, environment and animal imagery has been a mainstay of television, campaigning organisations and conservation bodies from Greenpeace to the Sierra Club, with vibrant images being used effectively on posters, leaflets and postcards, and in coffee table books, media releases, short films and viral emails to educate and inform the general public. However, critics suggest that wildlife film and photography frequently convey a false image of the state of the world’s flora and fauna. The environmental educator David Orr once remarked that all education is environmental education, and it is possible to see all image-based communication in the same way. The Media, Animal Conservation and Environmental Education has contributions from filmmakers, photographers, researchers and academics from across the globe. It explores the various ways in which film, television and video are, and can be, used by conservationists and educators to encourage both a greater awareness of environmental and conservation issues, and practical action designed to help endangered species. This book is based on a special issue of the journal Environmental Education Research.

The media, animal conservation and environmental education

Natural History filmmaking has a long history but the generic boundaries between it and environmental and conservation filmmaking are blurred. Nature, environment and animal imagery has been a mainstay of television, campaigning organisations and conservation bodies from Greenpeace to the Sierra Club, with vibrant images being used effectively on posters, leaflets and postcards, and in coffee table books, media releases, short films and viral emails to educate and inform the general public. However, critics suggest that wildlife film and photography frequently convey a false image of the state of the world’s flora and fauna. The environmental educator David Orr once remarked that all education is environmental education, and it is possible to see all image-based communication in the same way. The Media, Animal Conservation and Environmental Education has contributions from filmmakers, photographers, researchers and academics from across the globe. It explores the various ways in which film, television and video are, and can be, used by conservationists and educators to encourage both a greater awareness of environmental and conservation issues, and practical action designed to help endangered species. This book is based on a special issue of the journal Environmental Education Research.

Concurrent multiscale modelling of atomistic and hydrodynamic processes in liquids

Fluctuations of liquids at the scales where the hydrodynamic and atomistic descriptions overlap are considered. The importance of these fluctuations for atomistic motions is discussed and examples of their accurate modelling with a multi-space-time-scale fluctuating hydrodynamics scheme are provided. To resolve microscopic details of liquid systems, including biomolecular solutions, together with macroscopic fluctuations in space-time, a novel hybrid atomistic-fluctuating hydrodynamics approach is introduced. For a smooth transition between the atomistic and continuum representations, an analogy with two-phase hydrodynamics is used that leads to a strict preservation of macroscopic mass and momentum conservation laws. Examples of numerical implementation of the new hybrid approach for the multiscale simulation of liquid argon in equilibrium conditions are provided. © 2014 The Author(s) Published by the Royal Society.

A hybrid molecular dynamics/fluctuating hydrodynamics method for modelling liquids at multiple scales in space and time

A new 3D implementation of a hybrid model based on the analogy with two-phase hydrodynamics has been developed for the simulation of liquids at microscale. The idea of the method is to smoothly combine the atomistic description in the molecular dynamics zone with the Landau-Lifshitz fluctuating hydrodynamics representation in the rest of the system in the framework of macroscopic conservation laws through the use of a single "zoom-in" user-defined function s that has the meaning of a partial concentration in the two-phase analogy model. In comparison with our previous works, the implementation has been extended to full 3D simulations for a range of atomistic models in GROMACS from argon to water in equilibrium conditions with a constant or a spatially variable function s. Preliminary results of simulating the diffusion of a small peptide in water are also reported.