Addressing “Plant Blindness” Through Reflective Reading and Creative Writing
The main focus of the learning activity is to combat “plant blindness,” a cognitive bias where people tend to overlook plants in their environment. By engaging students in reflective reading, creative writing, and hands-on plant care, the activity aims to foster empathy for plants and enhance their appreciation of the natural world.
Exploring Affect and Emotion: Doing a Care and Value-Based Ecomedia Analysis
This learning activity seeks to enhance ecomedia literacy by integrating critical thinking and emotional connections to media, emphasizing value-based literacy and care, fostering the creation of “brave spaces” for diverse perspectives, and promoting thoughtful media engagement through reflective practices and discussions on the alignment of media values with participants’ own.
Chobani Ad: Dear Alice
This short animated Choboni ad about the future of food production can be useful for exploring different environmental discourses, including pastoral, food, and sustainability. It can be used to generate a discussion about food, agriculture, eco-modernism, and mechanism.
Keep America Beautiful: The Crying Indian (1970)
This is a great media example for discussing environmental discourses and ideology. It utilizes the eco-utopian discourse (often represented by indigenous and First Nations peoples) to promote conservationist environmentalism, which aligns with anthropocentric environmental ideology.
“Earthrise” by Amanda Gorman
Amanda Gorman demonstrates the power or art and poetry to reflect on the state of the environment and what we can do about it.
Chipotle Ad: Can a Burrito Change the World?
Chipotle asks, Can a burrito change the world? What kind of environmental discourses are used to answer this? How does it describe farming practices? How does Chipotle back its claims? Can Chipotle legitimately claim they are changing the food industry? Discuss the meaning of the phrase at the very end: How we grow our food is how we grow our future.
Indigenous Cosmology: The Honorable Harvest
This short video is part of a series called “Seeding the Field: 30 Years of Transformative Solutions,” which celebrates some of the best moments of the Bioneers conference through the last 30 years. “Indigenous peoples worldwide honor plants, not only as our sustainers, but as our oldest teachers who share teachings of generosity, creativity, sustainability and joy. By their living examples, plants spur our imaginations of how we might live. By braiding indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) with modern tools of botanical science, Robin Kimmerer, professor of Environmental Science and Forestry, of Potawatomi ancestry.”
Among Giants: Short Documentary About Tree Sitting
Synopsis: “Risking injury and incarceration, an environmental activist disrupts the clear-cutting of an ancient redwood grove by sitting on a tiny platform a hundred feet up in the tree canopy. Already three years into the tree-sit when filming begins, AMONG GIANTS blends vérité cinematography with intimate personal reflection to remarkable effect.” This can be compared to how advertisers represent environmental activism. It can also be used to explore environmental ideology.
Chipotle Ad: Back to the Start
Willie Nelson, Coldplay, Chipotle and director Johnny Kelly collaborated with the Chipotle Cultivate Foundation to create this short animated film highlighting the issue of sustainable farming. This video is good for generating a discussion about different food systems–sustainable and industrial–and how these systems are represented. This is also excellent for exploring the spectrum of environmental ideologies (anthropocentric versus ecocentric). Given that this is produced by a fast food chain, could this be considered an example of greenwashing?