NASA’s Nature

Updated 13 October 2009

Outer space is apparently not public space; but is it ‘masculine’ space?

by Nils Lindahl Elliot

NASA is set to crash two unmanned (and presumably also ‘unwomanned’) spacecraft into the moon today. According to NASA, the purpose of the crash is to reveal whether there is water on the moon’s surface:

‘Earth’s closest neighbor is holding a secret. In 1999, hints of that secret were revealed in the form of concentrated hydrogen signatures detected in permanently shadowed craters at the lunar poles by NASA’s Lunar Prospector. These readings may be an indication of lunar water and could have far-reaching implications as humans expand exploration past low-Earth orbit. The Lunar CRater Observing and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission is seeking a definitive answer.’

LCROSS was launched on an Atlas V rocket in June, and ‘the LCROSS shepherding spacecraft and the Atlas V’s Centaur upper stage rocket executed a fly-by of the moon on June 23, 2009 and entered into an elongated Earth orbit to position LCROSS for impact on a lunar pole. On final approach, the shepherding spacecraft and Centaur will separate. The Centaur will act as a heavy impactor to create a debris plume that will rise above the lunar surface. Following four minutes behind, the shepherding spacecraft will fly through the debris plume, collecting and relaying data back to Earth before impacting the lunar surface and creating a second debris plume.’ ‘As the ejecta rises above the target crater’s rim and is exposed to sunlight, any water-ice, hydrocarbons or organics will vaporize and break down into their basic components. These components primarily will be monitored by the visible and infrared spectrometers. The near-infrared and mid-infrared cameras will determine the total amount and distribution of water in the debris plume. The spacecraft’s visible camera will track the impact location and the behavior of the debris plume while the visible radiometer will measure the flash created by the Centaur impact.’(1)

From an environmental perspective, the news raise at least two issues. The first involves two of the fundamental boundaries that have long been disputed by environmental activists: the boundaries that separate the private from the public, in both the economic and the ‘social’ senses of the term. On the one hand, environmental campaigners have long sought to stop private corporations (as well as state entities) from abusing public spaces and their resources. On the other hand, and as I explained in Mediating Nature, a significant task for environmental activists has been to reveal the mentioned abuses when they occurred away from the public eye, in the relative privacy of remote places, or areas in which the public were not allowed access.

Greenpeace’s inaugural campaign to stop the U.S. from testing nuclear weapons on one of the Aleutian Islands (Amchitka) is a case in point. But perhaps the best example of the politics in question was the battle over the Shell Corporation’s efforts to dump its Brent Spar oil storage and tanker loading bouy in the North Atlantic, some 250 kms off the west coast of Scotland. Greenpeace’s task in that campaign was firstly to bring the event to public attention, and then to dispute Shell’s right to sink, or as Greenpeace put it, dump the Bren Spar in the Atlantic. As Campaign Director Chris Rose explained in a press release in 1996, ‘The public knows it is wrong to dump old cars in the village pond – and it’s wrong for the Government to let the oil industry treat the sea as its rubbish dump. The UK Government must rule out dumping at sea and abandon the so-called case-by-case approach.’

This context sheds an interesting light on NASA’s plans to smash a part of a rocket, and then a satellite into the moon. It seems that outer space is truly ‘outer’ in the ethical sense: the kind of issues that might be raised about the dumping, let alone the deliberate crashing of vehicles into a public space—or what might be regarded as a public space—simply don’t seem to apply. On the contrary, the experiment is being celebrated for its capacity to reveal one of nature’s ‘secrets’, a revelation which even amateur astronomers are being invited to witness if they have telescopes 10 to 12 inches or wider. NASA, and of course other countries’ space agencies in effect treat outer space in much the way that the U.S., France and other countries treated several Pacific islands during the testing of nuclear devices in the 1950s, 60s and 70s (in fact, the French had another go as recently as the 90s). No one lives on the moon (yet), and presumably radioactive contamination is not an issue; but will anyone ever look back on the ethics of these and other experiments as an example of NASA using or abusing the moon as if it were the proverbial village pond?

The reference to the revelation of nature’s ‘secrets’, and indeed the fascinating use of the term ‘ejecta’ raises a second set of issues. I am reminded of the critiques offered by feminist environmental historians—especially, Carolyn Merchant, whose magisterial The Death of Nature (2) revealed a key discursive and ideological basis for the modern domination of nature. According to Merchant, during the scientific revolution,

‘The mechanists transformed the body of the world and its female soul, source of activity in the organic cosmos, into a mechanism of inert matter in motion, translated the world spirit into a corpuscular ether, purged individual spirits from nature, and transformed sympathies and antipathies into efficient causes. The resultant corpse was a mechanical system of dead corpuscles, set in motion by the Creator, so that each obeyed the law of inertia and moved only by external contact with another moving body’ (p.195).

The simultaneous birth and death of this nature marked the beginning of the end of the predominance of ancient circuits of anthropomorphism and cosmomorphism, my term for the circular process by means of which a set of representations of nature come to be seem natural to a group, and thereafter are employed to confirm that the own values or beliefs correspond with the character of ‘nature itself’.  In effect, nature is represented in a manner that reflects the values of a particular cultural group, but when the representations become a matter of habit, they appear to become, to that group at least, ‘nature itself’. This ‘nature itself’ (in fact the nature represented by the particular cultural group) then becomes a cultural mirror that appears to confirm the natural nature of the group’s values.

This arguably what happened with the rise of a mechanist cosmogony in the Europe of the 16th and 17th centuries. Far from simply reflecting the workings of the universe ‘itself’, mechanism was strongly indebted to emergent bourgeois values, and to new forms of patriarchy. While Sir Francis Bacon protested that the new ways of knowing were to be for the benefit of ‘mankind’, this was clearly an instance of utopian reasoning with an explicitly ideological role.

First,  it is quite clear that the new mechanistic imaginary helped to pave the way for the individualism that was to be associated with societies dominated by bourgeois classes; it is no coincidence that in Leviathan, Hobbes described not just an atomistic society, but a society whose mechanism was meant to keep in check the individuality of subjects whom Hobbes regarded as being naturally greedy: while Nature ‘hath made men so equall, in the faculties of body, and mind’, ‘she has also made them competitive, diffident, and vainglorious’.‘Hereby it is manifest, that durng the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called Warre; and such a warre, as is every man, against every man’.

Second, and as Merchant has documented, the new discourse of nature was articulated in the language of an early modern form of patriarchy. During this period women became at once the object of a kind of instituted wrath, and the unwitting protagonists of the new circuits of anthropomorphism. Where earlier so-called ‘organic’ cosmogonies had long gendered nature with images of a benevolently maternal figure, the discourse of mechanism gendered nature with images of sexual violence and exploitation. Merchant reveals, for example, how the narratives of Bacon and other philosophers of the time mixed metaphors for the study and control of nature with those for the sexual domination of women. In one of the most extraordinary passages of her book, Merchant explains that Bacon, who was James I’s Lord Chancellor, suggested to the king that nature’s ‘secrets’ might be discovered by using the same methods employed by James I to reveal the secrets of witchcraft by inquisition: ‘For you have but to follow and as it were hound nature in her wanderings, and you will be able when you like to lead and drive her afterward to the same place again. Neither am I of the opinion in this history of marvels that superstitious narratives of sorceries, witchcrafts, charms, dreams, divinations, and the like (…) should be altogether excluded’ but ‘A useful light may be gained, not only for a true judgement of offences of persons charged with such practices, but likewise for the further disclosing of the secrets of nature. Neither ought a man to make scruple of entering and penetrating into these holes and corners, when the inquisition of truth is his whole object—as your majesty has shown in your own example’(Bacon, quoted in Merchant p. 168).

Back to NASA: many centuries after Bacon, it is striking to note the continued relevance of the image of the revelation of nature’s secrets, as well as the use of terms such as ‘ejecta’, and the quest to penetrate ‘holes’, albeit, this time in the form of craters. Of course, ‘ejecta’ has a particular meaning in astronomy—it refers to the debris that is produced when an impact crater is formed. But the term also has a medical meaning, which refers to any material ejected from the human body. It might further be argued that one does not have to be a semiotician to note that the moon has traditionally been gendered as female, and that cylindrical objects are being crashed into it. Lest we forget, the centaurs are, in Greek mythology at least, the warrior progeny of Centaurus, who spent his adulthood mating with the mares of Thessaly.

Doubtless these kinds of meanings were far from the minds of the NASA scientists and engineers who conceived and described the LCROSS mission. But this does not contradict, in itself, the idea that centuries after the Holy Inquisition ended, we still employ aspects of the discourse of Bacon—the discourse that has arguably been so fundamental to the modern domination of nature.

When this issue is considered in relation to the first (regarding the use of ‘public’ space), it suggests that a critical environmental consciousness is light years, or at least, many ejecta away from the minds of the people who conceive and carry out experiments such as LCROSS.

Update 13 October 2009: anyone who wants to read about another example of the anthropomorphic nature of the work of astronomers and planetary scientists should read Felicity Mellor’s excellent article about asteroid collision mitigation technologies. See ‘Colliding Worlds: Asteroid Research and the Legitimization of War in Space’ in Social Studies of Science 37/4 (August 2007) 499–531.

References

1) NASA – LCROSS: Mission Overview, http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LCROSS/overview/index.html, accessed October 9, 2009.

2) Merchant, C. (1980) The Death of Nature, New York: Harper

© Copyright 2009 Nils Lindahl Elliot All Rights Reserved

The Vienna Zoo’s ‘Trouble in Paradise’

By Nils Lindahl Elliot

The Vienna Zoo, often described as the oldest zoo in the world, has introduced a remarkable set of artefacts in some of its displays. In a project titled ‘Trouble in Paradise’, the zoo has allowed sculptor Christoph Steinbrener and photographer Reiner Dempf to put a half sunken Mercedes-Benz in the Rhino enclosure, railroad tracks in the bison pen, an oil pumpjack in the penguin display, and a barrel of ‘toxic waste’ in the zoo’s aquarium (you can see images of the different displays, here). According to the artists, the idea is to ‘unexpectedly interfere’ with visitor notions of idyllic wildlife:

The viewer is forced to reconsider traditional modes of animal presentation and simultaneously to question the authenticity of concepts which are restaging ‘natural’ environments while they are increasingly endangered. [...] Present-day conceptions of zoological gardens aim at the presentation of animals in an idyllic and apparently natural environment, untouched by civilization. But this is a contemporary conception, since courtly menageries and kennels were adapted to the exposure of animals as decorative objects.  Until the early years of the 20th century, animals were part of a preferably spectacular and exotic staging, to the entertainment and amazement of the public. The artificial and the sensational were foregrounded, without creating a realistic setting of the natural environment of the animals.(1)

On one level, the Vienna Zoo is to be commended for its remarkable willingness to engage with what is arguably a somewhat taboo subject amongst many zoos that have embraced the latest wave of naturalistic exhibits. The Steinbrener/Dempf ‘intrusions’ may well encourage many visitors to engage in more reflexive, and perhaps even self-reflexive forms of observation. Faced with a pumpjack in the penguin enclosure, visitors might well stop and ask themselves what the artists are trying to say by putting this and other symbols of an industrial modernity in the zoo’s simulations of natural habitats.

In the report that I presented to the Bristol and the Paignton Zoos in 2005, and which summarised the findings of a three-year visitor research project funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council(2), I suggested that the zoos might wish to make more of an effort to help visitors to become more reflexive and self-reflexive vis-à-vis the process of wildlife observation itself. The logic behind this suggestion was that so long as visitors remain as little more than spectators of nature (or of what passes for nature), then they will, in effect, continue to be positioned as consumers of spectacles of nature.

The Steinbrener/Dempf ‘Trouble in Paradise’ offers one somewhat extreme example of how this issue might be engaged. It is not, however, without its own problems. First, there the risk that, far from promoting a more reflexive stance, the artefacts in the displays may promote a more sophisticated form of consumption, one in which visitors are encouraged to observe the displays in much the same way that TV news audiences might ‘enjoy’ a ‘good’ Greenpeace campaign. This is a conundrum that I’ve analysed in Mediating Nature (3), and which begins to reveal some of the ways in which the rise of modern environmentalism may be linked to the mass mediation of nature.

Second, if it was the artists’ intention to question the nature/culture divide that is implicit in naturalistic displays, they may have recreated this same divide on a deeper level. If it is true that many naturalistic displays try to create the illusion of an ‘undisturbed’ nature, then the simple juxtaposition of symbols of an industrial modernity in such settings may, paradoxically, underscore the opposition of nature and culture.

This poses a difficult, and rather slippery philosophical problem. I say ‘philosophical’ problem, but it is better conceived as a matter of discourse in the Foucaultian sense of the term, i.e. a way of thinking that is embedded in a certain modus operandi, and vice-versa. As Kate Soper (4) has noted, despite many critiques, the nature/culture, nature/humanity divide remains so ingrained in modern cultural practices that it is almost impossible to avoid the discursive reproduction of the fabled divide.

A good example of this tendency may be found in the statements of environmental non-government organisations (ENGO’s) such as the WWF: the WWF’s acronym once stood for the World Wildlife Fund. A few years ago it changed its name for ‘World Wide Fund for Nature’ (though it has maintained the old name in the US).  In its website, the WWF suggested that this change was meant to reflect its concern with conserving what it described as ‘the environment as a whole’. But aside from maintaining the word ‘nature’ in its name, by early 2009 the WWF’s U.S. ‘who we are’ web page still spoke of a mission ‘To stop the degradation of the planet’s natural environment and to build a future in which humans live in harmony with nature’(5)(for more on this problem, see the cmcee.org page titled ‘Nature‘). I suggest that pretty much the same tacit nature/culture divide occurs in the displays modified by Christoph Steinbrener and Reiner Dempf at the Vienna Zoo.

What might be an alternative approach? Together with a growing number of cultural geographers(6), I have become interested in what might be described as a hybrid geography, and a recombinant ecology. As I understand it, a hybrid geography is one in which the traditional distinction between natural space and (human) social space no longer holds, or at least, requires a fundamental reconceptualisation. Contrary to what some postmodern scholars seem to imply, what is required is not the elimination of any references to natural space—that would be absurd. Instead, we need to question the notion that the ancient and emphatically non-human character of natural processes necessarily transcends human interventions.

On one level, this might seem like a non-issue; of course humans can ‘modify’ nature. In fact, I suggest that many scientific accounts do take for granted the mentioned transcendence, if only implicitly. The question of human changes to the geography, the recombination of so-called ‘natural’ and ‘human’ ecologies is often either overlooked entirely, or treated as so many ‘parenthetical’ changes—changes which are known and acknowledged, but bracketed because they are regarded as not really affecting this or that form of natural behaviour, this or that form of scientific enquiry.

By way of a counter-example, in the research that I’ve conducted about ecotourism on Barro Colorado Island in Panama, I’ve been interested in considering the ways in which the trails made by scientists in the apparently undisturbed tropical forest may well have a remarkable set of knock-on consequences for this biological reserve’s ecology(7). (As I understand it, the problem of a ‘recombinant’ ecology is not one that simply applies to urban, or even exurban natures.)

Returning to zoos, one of the suggestions that I made to the Bristol and the Paignton Zoo was for displays that might explore more proximate natures, and natures that have been explicitly transformed by human intervention. As an example, I proposed recreating a small replica of the many British canals which were once used to transport coal and other materials across the country, but which have now been rehabilitated as urban and exurban ‘greenways’, veritable wildlife hotspots which illustrate what I described earlier as a ‘recombinant’ ecology.

This might sound like a rather peculiar display to put in a zoo, but my research suggests that many adults and children would enjoy climbing into a canal boat in a ‘mock lock’ at least as much as they would seeing the ‘Serengeti’ in North Bristol. The former display might describe the history of the canal system’s transformations, even as a series of modifications—perhaps views from within the ‘lock’, or even a glass bottom canal boat with a view of fish, diving waterfowl and a discarded supermarket trolley or two—would generate a context for discussions about just what it is that we regard as being, or not being, nature. Admittedly, there might need to be a sociologist or two on hand to explain such issues; I’d nonetheless argue that the matter goes to the heart of the modern environmental crisis. If we have travelled as far as we have down the path of environmental destruction, it is partly because we continue to think of nature as something that is only really found in ‘remote’ and ‘undisturbed’ places.

The example of the canal boat exhibit was only that—an example. To be sure, the Bristol Zoo has already produced innovative displays that explore the mentioned issues in its Twilight World, which includes a ‘Victorian’ house where rats are allowed to patrol through the house’s kitchen. It would be excellent if this and other zoos could design more displays that challenge visitors to question their own environments, their own assumptions about the nature of nature. Depending on how such exhibits are designed, they might also provide contemporary zoos with a way out of what is increasingly looking, to this observer at least, like a design dead end, i.e. an unsustainably ‘naturalistic’ approach to the semiotics of zoo displays, one which tends not only to be extraordinarily expensive and CO2 rich, but which frequently sacrifices local landscapes in favour of simulations of ‘remote’ habitats.

The point, I might add, is not to oppose the local and the global, the ‘banal’ and the ‘exotic’, but rather to revisit the tacit dualism, the geography of difference which remains most zoos’ representational staple.

References

1) http://www.steinbrener-dempf.com/, accessed July 21, 2009
2) An abridged version of this report is available here. I am currently completing a book on the subject titled The Nature of Zoos.
3) N. Lindahl Elliot (2006) Mediating Nature. London: Routledge.
4) K. Soper (1995) What is Nature?, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
5) http://www.panda.org/about_wwf/who_we_are/index.cfm, accessed February 4, 2009.
6) See for example, S. Whatmore (2002) Hybrid Geographies: Natures Cultures Spaces, London: Sage Publications.
7) Observing Wildlife on Barro Colorado Island: Ecotourism, Environmental Education and Transmediation (forthcoming)

Copyright © 2009 Nils Lindahl Elliot All Rights Reserved

WildFilmHistory.org – A Review

The WildFilmHistory.org site offers a remarkable set of resources for anyone who wants to learn about the history of wildlife filmmaking. However, the nature media have developed a very particular way of representing nature which tends to be promoted as being the way of representing nature, ie., ‘nature itself’. With two partial exceptions, the archive takes almost no critical distance from this dynamic.

By Nils Lindahl Elliot

The WildFilmHistory.org website offers an archive of natural history filmmaking: in the website’s own words, the site offers an ‘online guide to the pioneering people and landmark productions behind one hundred years of wildlife filmmaking’ with ‘ground-breaking films, “behind the scenes” photographs, essential production information, and specially crafted learning resources, as well as a unique collection of personal memoirs from key industry players’(1).

The following review introduces the institutional context within which WildFilmHistory has been generated. It then describes the structuring of the site from a practical, user-oriented perspective. It concludes by offering a discursive analysis of WildFilmHistory.

1. About Wildscreen

Let us begin with a brief institutional contextualisation of the website. Wildfilmhistory.org is the result of an initiative of a British non-profit organisation called Wildscreen. Wildscreen’s official remit is to ‘promote an appreciation of biodiversity and nature through the power of wildlife imagery’(2). The organisation is at once an expression of, and a key agent for, the formalisation of a field of interaction (3) constituted by the practices of wildlife TV producers, and of the organisations that commission their work and/or support their filmmaking.

Wildscreen began as the organiser of Bristol’s Wildscreen Festival, a biennial trade show in which natural history filmmakers talk shop, award prizes for the best natural history documentaries, and engage in a variety of activities that promote the public image of the field. In time, Wildscreen has acquired additional functions; one of these involves the establishment of public archives of the nature media’s TV programmes, and WildFilmHistory.org is one such archive.

As noted earlier, the website makes available a variety of historic materials relating to the production of natural history documentaries. Like all archives, WildFilmHistory not only makes available certain resources, but organises and presents them in a particular way. The present review offers an analysis of the latter aspects.

2. A Tour of WildFilmHistory

The structuring of the archive is simple, but effective: WildFilmHistory allows its users to obtain textual, or multi-mediated materials in one of four basic categories:

• the historic film clips themselves, which can be accessed by name, or by date;
• brief biographies of filmmakers, whose names are archived in alphabetical order;
• ‘oral histories’, which are videotaped interviews with about 30 figures in the above mentioned films, and which can either be played onscreen, or read via a PDF-based transcription;
• and finally, a list of ‘key events’, which is essentially a timeline of selected events in the history of wildlife filmmaking.

The various entries are illustrated with a collection of still images. This collection is itself a valuable resource. The various aspects of the archive can be accessed in one of three ways: via a browsing list on the homepage; via the banner; or via a useful search function. The fact that the collection is web-based means that the omnipresent Google can also be used to search for entries.

Unfortunately, the four categories listed above do not offer the possibility of searching via subcategories; for example, one cannot ask for a listing of photographers or camerapersons, and one cannot request a listing of all films about, say, the Serengeti. The search function can of course be used for either request, but it will simply list every item in the website that includes the search term, however incidentally.

That said, the four categories listed above do include clickable cross-referencing, which means for example that if the entry on David Attenborough mentions, amongst other series, The Private Life of Plants, then users can click on the title to go that series. There is also a column on the right-hand side of each biographical entry which lists any available film clips, and oral histories produced by or with that person.

The quantity and quality of the entries varies considerably. This is arguably to be expected in so far as there may be more or less information available about one or another producer; and in so far as the archive may have procured varying numbers of clips for viewing. As the user goes through the various biographical entries, it is nevertheless apparent that WildFilmHistory is still very much a project in the making. Many of the biographical entries have no more than a photograph of the person in question—presumably such entries are still under construction. There are also some names which don’t appear on the list, but which have made their mark in the field: to name just two examples, the contemporary producer, Mike Linley; and Étienne-Jules Marey, who was arguably as important to early early filmmaking as was Edweard Muybridge.

Of course, anyone determined enough can always find one or another entry that ‘ought’ to have been included in an archive such as this. What is more interesting from the point of view of this review is the fact that the archive gives no account of its own logic of selection. It would be absurd to suppose that any archive is an entirely rational endeavour with an exact logic that can be traced via each and every document. But the opposite argument can and must be made: no archive is ever a purely arbitrary selection of materials, and so it would be good to have some kind of page that explains in some detail what the curating team was trying to achieve, what constraints they faced, some of the known limitations, and so forth.

3. On the discourse of WildFilmHistory

Let us give credit where credit is due: the WildFilmHistory.org site offers a remarkable set of resources for anyone who wants to learn about the history of wildlife filmmaking. It is clear that an enormous amount of work has gone into the project, and the result is a website that makes readily available a number of fascinating cinematographic/ televisual clips, as well as quite a lot of useful information about the filmmakers. The oral history project is innovative, and as noted earlier, the collection of stills is also significant. Given these strengths, it is to be hoped that the limitations mentioned in the previous section of this review reflect the newness of the project, and perhaps also the finite nature of the resources that can be devoted to what is potentially a very expensive venture. In time, and given further funding, WildFilmHistory will perhaps develop into an even more interesting and complete archive.

What will be more difficult to address unless there is a sea change at Wildscreen will be the conceptual or discursive limitations of the archive. As noted at the beginning of this review, any archive is, as archive, at once a matter of a collection of certain ‘contents’, but also, a matter of a certain logic of selection and combination, or what might be described as a social dynamic of classification and framing (4). Put differently, any archive reflects not just the personal perspectives of its curator(s), but also, the codes and discourses of the institutional contexts that they work in. In the case of WildFilmHistory, the context in question is the one associated with Wildscreen, but more generally, with the organisations and the field of interaction that I described earlier as the ‘nature media’.

This review is not the place for a detailed account of the nature media, their strengths and limitations (5). It suffices to note that the nature media have developed a very particular way of representing nature, one which is nonetheless promoted as being the way of representing nature, ie., ‘nature itself’ (6). With two partial exceptions, the archive takes almost no critical distance from this dynamic. The two exceptions are some of the comments made by some of the filmmakers interviewed in the oral histories; and a learning resource which is titled ‘Ethics in wildlife filmmaking’. In the former case, some of the filmmakers refer to the commercial pressures they face (see for example, the comments made during the oral history with Andrew Buchanan). In the latter case, a Powerpoint presentation lists a number of the technical ways in which the documentaries take what might be described as ‘poetic license’ in order to achieve certain audio-visual effects. These range from the somewhat dubious use of editing continuity effects, to the unacknowledged substitution of captive animals for wild animals.

While welcome, these exceptions are somewhat marginal thanks to their location in the archive. Anyone wanting to obtain a critical perspective would have to troll through reams of transcripts, and/or download the sizable Powerpoint file. But more importantly, anyone who does so would still not find a truly reflective, and ideologically critical take on the misleading notion that the documentaries merely ‘show what there is to save’; or on the direct and indirect ways in which commercial imperatives structure the filmmaking of a field which is nonetheless regarded as being a form of science communication, or an instance of public service broadcasting.

What the user will find instead is a celebration of the field, and its many notable achievements. Certainly there is much to celebrate; a significant part of the success of the nature media undoubtedly lies in the extraordinary skills of the filmmakers, and the resources which their organisations have managed to both attract, and deploy in the representation of wildlife. Given this selfsame success, it is a shame that WildFilmHistory has not been structured in a manner that is more critical of the above mentioned issues.

This could have been achieved in at least two ways: first, by using some of the existing research about the representation of nature in modern culture to develop narratives that offer deeper historical perspectives on the social, cultural and of course economic motivations of the existing forms of filmmaking. Such narratives might be developed in short clips, in standalone webpages, in Powerpoint presentations, or indeed, by asking more probing questions with the producers themselves. Another alternative might have been more interviews with scholars who can offer truly critical perspectives. While the references to Derek Bousé are welcome, several other scholars might also have been referenced; some of the names that come to mind are Jane Arthurs, Barbara Crowther, Gail Davies, Meryl Aldridge, or Simon Cottle. A much longer list might be suggested if one goes beyond natural history filmmaking sensu stricto to consider a variety of cultural issues pertaining to the social representation of animals.

Of course, some of the critical perspectives might raise hackles amongst some producers, and might also require additional funding in order to be obtained. If the latter problem is the more important one, then a second alternative would be to at least direct users to alternative perspectives via annotated bibliographies, via bibliographical comments in the biographical entries, or next to some of the cinematic entries. These (or other similar steps) would alert users about some of the deeper ethical issues raised by the filmmaking practice. They might also help to develop the site into an arena where the producers themselves might find a genuinely critical space in which to reflect on the past, and so innovate in the future.

Notes

1) http://www.wildfilmhistory.org/index.php, accessed 13 March 2009.
2) see the Wildscreen website’s home page at http://www.wildscreen.org.uk/, accessed 13 March 2009.
3) Bourdieu, P. (1990) The Logic of Practice, translated by R. Nice. Cambridge: Polity Press.
4) Bernstein, B. (1990) The Structuring of Pedagogic Discourse. London: Routledge.
5) See for example Lindahl Elliot, N. (2006) Mediating Nature. London: Routledge International Library of Sociology. See also, Lindahl Elliot, N. (2009) Observing Wildlife on Barro Colorado Island: Environmental Education and the Challenges of Transmediation, forthcoming
6) For an account of this dynamic in the natural history documentaries themselves, see the cmcee.org blog entry titled ‘Showing to Save? A Critique of Natural History Documentaries on Television’ at http://cmcee.wordpress.com/2008/02/01/showing-to-save-a-critique-of-natural-history-documentaries-part-1/

Copyright © 2009 Nils Lindahl Elliot All Rights Reserved. The following is the bibliographical information for anyone wishing to cite this text:

Lindahl Elliot, N. (2009) ‘WildFilmHistory.org – A Review’. Bristol: Centre for Media, Culture & Environmental Education.

This review is part of a new section of the cmcee.org website.