This essay argues about the urgency for determining why (despite the
saturation of popular media with messages about environmental issues) global
temperatures continue to rise, unsustainable practices grow rather than shrink, and
viable solutions sprint further and further out of reach. To date, no work in ecomedia
studies has seriously addressed the matter of ecophobia—one of the ethical positions
unwittingly conveyed in a great deal of ecomedia. There are several reasons
why so much of ecomedia has had limited effects on pushing people to change their
behaviors and thereby halt or slow the warming of our atmosphere: (1) it reproduces
what it critiques: media reiterates and perpetuates the ecophobic ethics that are so
central to the problem in the first place; (2) it is embedded in a period in which our
continuous partial attention runs hand-in-hand with our compassion fatigue; (3) it
dilutes the material to such a degree that important abstract concepts are blurred,
thus preventing thinking people from seeing key connections, and (4) it is entertainment,
and the blurring of virtual and actual worlds makes a lot of the actual
news simply another form of entertainment. It is the first of these—the marketing of
counter-productive values embedded (wittingly or not) within green narratives—
that raises the alarm bells. This essay argues that some of the ideas of liberty
America has enjoyed and promulgated are both unsustainable, in an environmental
context, and ironically reliant for their continuation on notions—such as sexism,
racism, homophobia, and, not least of all, ecophobia—that are in stark conflict with
the very bases of liberty. Liberty stops at hate speech and hate crimes (at least it
should), yet mainstream ecomedia participates in marketing these crimes.

EB00000002873K

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• Ecomedia and ecophobia