This collection asks and answers a basic question: what is the relationship between humanitarian and environmental issues, and how are these portrayed in the media? The essays examine this question from a variety of academic viewpoints and argue that although the interests of planet and people are often seen in opposition, they are, in reality, symbiotic.

This is a collection of essays about the media, the environment, and the whole of humanity at the brink of extinction. As the demands of overpopulation and of an unsustainable consumer economy dry up existing natural resources and destroy vital ecosystems that we need to survive, the corporate-controlled media saturate worldwide audiences with a barrage of hypnotic images and narratives to stimulate over-consumption and to distract us from the consequences of rampant consumerism, while remaining silent about the systematic destruction of the environment and our future.

Academicians from the across the sciences, the social sciences, the arts, and the humanities engage in an interdisciplinary discussion informed by a vision of an interconnected humanity and focused on the role of the media in forging public discourse.

Contributors to the collection argue that today’s media are failing humanity. Rather than providing pictures of reality on which the world’s citizens can act, the corporate-controlled media are widely used as instruments of commercial and political propaganda, creating an immense web of images and narratives that their creators know to be not true–-fabrications designed to sell, to manipulate, in a sense to enslave worldwide audiences.

At the core of the discussion in this book is a utopian vision of one unified humanity—billions of people whose destinies and dreams are imbricated and interdependent, and who share the same world, the same habitats. It is a vision of a world that cherishes diversity but is also united—a world where our differences are no longer a cause for conflict and where separate countries or separate ethnic or religious communities no longer have to compete or wage war to exploit available resources. As extensions of humans, the media can be instruments of salvation instead of destruction, liberation instead of oppression. But first, we must recognize the challenges we face.

List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction: One Humanity, One Planet, and the Media
Luigi Manca and Jean-Marie Kauth
Section One: Imagining a Better Future for Humanity
Envisioning a Simple One Planet—One Humanity Utopia: Exploring John Lennon’s Imagine
Kit O’Toole
A Generic Cosmopolitanism Is Not an Alternative to the Damages of Globalization
Federico Francioni
The United Nations Alliance of Civilizations: Reality or Utopia?
Joaquín Montero
Utopian Hackers and the Drive to Change the World
Chris Birks
Section Two: Media, Humanity, and the Common Good
An Hypothesis about the Role of Gateopener in the Westley-MacLean Model
Luigi Manca
Occupy the Media: Towards a Communication System for the 99 Percent
Steve Macek
Public Radio and Public Access: Applying HD Radio Technology to a New Form of Broadcast Localism
Craig Stark
The Press and the Politics of Genocide
Marian Mesrobian MacCurdy
Solidarity Know-How in Local Development: Translating Civil Virtues into Practice
Maria Lucia Piga
The Communicative Dimension in a Globalized World and the Globalization of Social Rights
Francesco Villa
Section Three: Environmental Science and the Media
Lost in Translation?: Public Perceptions and Mass Media Coverage of Climate Change Risks
Pierpaolo Duce
Viable Scientific Communication and the Mass Media
Timothy W. Marin
The 50th Anniversary ofSilent Spring: An Opportunity Lost
Elizabeth Dobbins
Pope Francis on the Ecological Crisis: Its Nature, Causes, and Urgency
Martin Tracey
Section Four: Ecocriticism and the Popular Imagination Windmills and Dandelions and Polar Bears, Oh My!: Contested Icons of Environmental and Anti-Environmental Rhetoric
Jean-Marie Kauth
Environmental Perceptions of College Students
Anne Marie Smith
Good Company? The Non-Ephemeral Catalog as Intervention
Elizabeth Kubek
Post-Apocalyptic Storytelling as Global Society's Environmental Unconscious
Jean-Marie Kauth
Nature and Art: Seeing Beauty amidst the Ruins
William Scarlato
Index
About the Contributors