Today's global media sustains a potent new environmental consciousness. Paradoxically, it also serves as a far-reaching platform that promotes the unsustainable consumption ravaging our planet. Patrick Murphy musters theory, institutional analysis, fieldwork, and empirical research to map how the media communicates today's many distinct, competing, and even antagonistic environmental discourses, demonstrating how the media pushes us to save the whales even as we are encouraged to devour all the fish. By examining this paradox through case studies of the “greening” of cable TV, online corporate ... More

Today's global media sustains a potent new environmental consciousness. Paradoxically, it also serves as a far-reaching platform that promotes the unsustainable consumption ravaging our planet. Patrick Murphy musters theory, institutional analysis, fieldwork, and empirical research to map how the media communicates today's many distinct, competing, and even antagonistic environmental discourses, demonstrating how the media pushes us to save the whales even as we are encouraged to devour all the fish. By examining this paradox through case studies of the “greening” of cable TV, online corporate branding campaigns, indigenous media, and the globalization of commercial media, he shows how today's complex, integrated media networks draws the cultural boundaries of our environmental imagination—and influences just who benefits. Analysis emphasizes social context, institutional alignments, and commercial media's ways of rendering discussion. Murphy identifies and examines key terms, phrases, and metaphors as well as the ways consumers are presented with ideas like agency and the place of nature. What emerges is the link between pervasive messaging and an "environment" conjured by our media-saturated social imagination. As the author shows, today's complex, integrated media networks shape, frame, and deliver many of our underlying ideas about the environment. Increasingly—and ominously—individuals and communities experience these ideas not only in the developed world but in the increasingly consumption-oriented Global South.