“How did it get this bad?” I hear this often in any class I teach that touches upon climate change and political responses to it. For instance, I’ve heard it during a lesson about greenwashing campaigns that push natural gas expansion as climate adaptation, when teaching the birds-eye-view in Anthropocene documentaries,[1] and again in a conversation about Containment (2015) regarding whether the toxic legacy of nuclear power squares with the politics of global heating.[2] Often, as we try to think through the question, students and I steer the discussion toward the failures of mainstream environmentalism’s liberal framework, such as its overemphasis on individual action and seeming inability to hold corporations and governments accountable. Jessica Dempsey puts this general problem succinctly: “Liberal environmentalism is an approach to ecological decline that keeps the foundations of liberal capitalism intact, aiming to improve, even perfect those foundations... It aims, as much as possible, to avoid dirty, asymmetrical, bloody politics. It seeks an orderly, technical solution.”[3] I think the frustrated critiques articulated by my students are true. But, as abstractions in the film and media studies classroom, such criticisms can conceal the historical complexity that helps explain how and why environmental problems are so persistent and pervasive. For this reason, I synthesize concerns in environmental studies and documentary studies to encourage my students to build a critical media history of the ecological present.

At the University of Chicago and Tulane University, I taught two undergraduate courses about environmental documentary that contextualized nonfiction film and media within the history of U.S. environmentalism. The University of Chicago course, titled “Compiling and Mediating Environmental History,” focused on how historical U.S. eco-documentaries index social attitudes toward the environment and contemporaneous ecological problems. The Tulane course, “Environmental Communication,” explored the rhetoric of several non-fiction media genres dealing with environmental social movements. These courses taught students how cultural views of what constitutes an environmental problem change across place and time, just as styles of nonfiction media production do as well. As interdisciplinary ventures, these courses simultaneously considered the history of documentary form alongside the genealogy, or conceptual history, of environmental ideas. Concepts as diverse as “recycling,” “ecotage,” and “conservation” each called for different styles of nonfiction communication, with lasting implications for social movements as well as documentary media practices. Keeping these goals in mind, this article focuses on strategies for teaching between documentary studies and the history of environmentalism.

Genealogy in Documentary Theory and Practise

How do historical documentary practices index environmental ideas? Recent media historiographical writing asks how mediation contributes to the conceptualization of environments.[4] This scholarship inspires my approach to environmental documentary pedagogy, as I guide students toward thinking critically about the role of media and technology in the formation of environmental ideas and their corresponding social movements. In asking students to examine their assumptions about their own environmental ideals, and where they came from, these courses adopted a history of concepts approach, or what I think about as a media history of the ecological present.

For instance, consider the documentary Circuit Earth (1970).[5] The film weaves together imagery from agricultural settings, industry, and community and activist organizations alongside footage of the 1970 Earth Week festival in Philadelphia, all shot on 16mm. As overtly stated in the film, the documentary’s formal and figurative argument attempts to realize Gregory Bateson’s influential concept of an “ecology of mind,” which theorized environmental consciousness as an expansive “coupling” of “the individual human organism, the human society, and the larger ecosystem.”[6] In concert with how this idea informed the counterculture and environmental movements, the film’s chosen subjects and editing illustrate the ecosystemic reticulation of industry, environment, inequality, and psychical/spiritual health–a time-based representation of Bateson’s concept. Teaching this documentary, and its formal experimentation, requires reading about historical contexts inclusive of both the documentary activism enabled by 16mm formats[7] and the history of the then-newly formed US environmental movement.[8] Circuit Earth shows how documentary form, ecological concepts, and environmentalism are historically tethered.[9]

One key text that initiates the course’s method is the introductory chapter to Jonathan Kahana’s Intelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary (2008). This reading does two foundational things. First, it provides a critical commentary on Al Gore and Davis Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth (2006), introducing a high water mark for both commercial documentary circulation and public awareness of climate change. My students barely recognize the world depicted in the film and grow frustrated learning about how many people went to see it, how its political push stagnated, and how liberal institutions spoke about solutions in terms of the status quos of economic growth.[10] For these reasons, I recommend showing the film today because it emphasizes the critical reassessment of longstanding assumptions about the efficacy of nonfiction humanist media advocacy. I present An Inconvenient Truth alongside a clip from the 2008 WeCanSolveIt.org campaign, which depicts Newt Gingrich and Nancy Pelosi sitting side-by-side in climate action consensus. The course therefore begins on a note of bleak hindsight: Gore’s animated lecture catalyzed political agreement across ideological divides, something unimaginable in 2024 America.

As we know, this brief consensus led nowhere. We don’t live in the sustainable, technologically enabled, and climate-mitigated reality hoped for in 2008. Clues as to why can be found in even older media, like the global warming segment from Frank Capra’s The Unchained Goddess (1958), a science education program made for The Bell System Science Series television special that presented U.S. climate change research while endorsing Cold War nuclear modernism and masculine desires to control nature.[11] Such a history of environmental representation encourages students to question historical relationships between the social character of environmental ideas and nonfiction media as informative advocacy. U.S. environmental documentaries have been talking about global warming for 65 years; the political inertia signalled by this fact helps teaching start from the assumption that distributing the right information will not equal political action.[12]

Like most social advocacy films, An Inconvenient Truth did not solve the political problem it named. This prompts critical questions for students: How can we think about the history of environmental documentary from the urgency of our heating present? And how can understanding documentary history help identify the past environmentalist practices and ideas that continue to shape present issues? A second major methodological contribution made by Kahana’s text is his idea that a documentary film constitutes a historical “problematic”: “a reflection on thought, or a context for thinking” that engenders the “temporary suspension of received wisdom” (27).[13] As a theoretical framework and learning objective for the course, this position sets up each film we view, and the historical context within which it was produced, exhibited, and received, as a popular platform and forum through which assumed ideas about environments were challenged. This leads students away from dismissing work that, by today’s standards, appears apolitical or somehow irrelevant to our present crisis. It also helps with the broader narration of American environmental history, as today’s problems—and our institutions’ apparent inability to treat them—have been conditioned by pivotal moments of environmental documentary.

In what follows, I provide information about class meetings and units that I’ve found worked particularly well for my “Compiling and Mediating Environmental History” and “Environmental Communication” courses. In each section, I identify key texts and films that I have drawn upon in hopes that my syllabi can inform ongoing teaching in our field. Before I survey these units, however, I want to emphasize several texts that have most helped me understand how to build a syllabus with the goal of braiding documentary history and the history of environmental concepts. Finis Dunaway’s Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images (2015), Gregg Mitman’s Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film (2009), and Helen Hughes’ Green Documentary: Environmental Documentary in the 21st Century (2014) are inspiring studies and rewarding pedagogical engagements. These monographs provide close readings and extensive historical context for environmental social movements. From environmental studies, Julie Sze’s Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger (2020) provides an excellent introduction to questions of environmental inequality and social movements. And, while not about documentary film proper, two collections of primary texts from across US environmental history, Christopher W. Wells’ Environmental Justice in Postwar America: A Documentary Reader (2018) and Libby Robin, Sverker Sörlin and Paul Warde’s The Future of Nature: Documents of Global Change (2013), present students with a wide variety of written criticism on ecological issues from the 18th century through 2016. These books can serve as anchors for students looking to understand the historical relationships between non-fiction media practices and how Americans have thought about, and acted upon, environments in the past and present.

Introduction and Revision

Early classes begin by complicating assumptions that students may have about both the US environmental movement and documentary’s historical role in that campaign. William Cronon’s “Trouble with Wilderness” sets the tone for how the course will question US environmentalism through consistent references to inequality, racism, and the violence of settler-colonialism.[14] I pair this with media-focused texts examining the iconographies of “wilderness” generated by paleontologists and the US Geological Survey,[15] Sierra Club photographers and coffee table books,[16] early visual ethnography and landscape photography,[17] Indigenous photographers working in the 19th and 20th centuries,[18] as well as more recent critical photographic practices.[19] Together, this unit introduces students to how environmentalism, as a social movement, developed in tandem with constructed and contested aesthetic categories, such as “wilderness.”

Documentary Frameworks in Environmental Media History

I teach foundational research in documentary studies alongside readings about pre-Silent Spring (1962) American ecological consciousness, which helps students build documentary media literacy and understand both the industrialized historical conditions and institutional responses that gave rise to the US environmental movement. To think through relationships between social institutions and environmental nonfiction media, I screen Pare Lorentz’s The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1938). Paired with established texts, like Paula Rabinowitz’s analysis of U.S. nationalism and government film in public culture alongside Dunaway’s writing on wide-angle panoramic landscape aesthetics,[20] these films help students think about both the politics and form of documentary circulating in popular contexts. George Stoney’s production for the Environmental Defense Fund, Planning for Floods (1974), adds a critical civil society perspective on debates about water management.[21] Adam Diller’s recent article on the film history of the Bonneville Power Administration,[22] and Richard White’s short study The Organic Machine (1995),[23] are both media/environmental historiographies that demonstrate alternative approaches to declensionist narratives that assume the U.S. has fallen from an idealized garden of “wilderness” or terra nullius. By considering environmental documentary as a social institution, the films are seen to manifest political positions responding to the public comprehension of ecological impacts wrought by settlement and industry. This shifts student thinking from seeing historical documentaries as artifacts of their time and toward an appreciation for how non-fiction functions discursively in its own historical context for better and worse. This lends urgency to critically rethinking our own eco-documentary institutions.

Sponsorship and Media Historiographical Assignments

How to account for contradictory films like Royal Dutch Shell’s unreleased global warming documentary, Climate of Concern (1991)? A unit on sponsored film and media helps students see that nonfiction stakeholders include industry perspectives. Notable texts include Erik Barnouw’s, Janet Walker’s, and Emily Roehl's discussions of Standard Oil financing Robert Flaherty’s Louisiana Story (1948)[24] and, outside the U.S., Brian Jacobson’s analysis of the ambivalences of British Petroleum’s The Shadow of Progress (1970), Belinda Smaill on the Shell Film Unit Australia, the Middle East/Southwest Asian focus of Mona Damluji's research, and Marina Dahlquist and Patrick Vonderau's Petrocinema volume.[25] Students recognize their present in these topics as they learn that motivations for nonfiction media campaigns are more complicated than what can be reduced to greenwashing. For instance, BP’s “carbon footprint” campaign[26] is a great pedagogical tool because it shows how oil-industry sponsored nonfiction responds tactically and precisely to contemporaneous environmentalist ideation, which helps make their anti-politics all the more effective. In Climate of Concern’s assurance of a low-emission gasoline and carbon-taxed future, or BP’s “carbon footprint” emphasis on individual action, students see Big Oil’s historical preference for liberal status quos.

For assignments, one of these courses asked students to evaluate archival film and media for the purpose of reconstructing a short environmental media history through a compilation essay film. Each student chose to assemble footage from institutional archives. Students made films about socio-hydrology pieced together from documentaries created by the Tennessee River Valley Authority; audiovisual ties between automotive advertisements and the promotion of the US National Park system; as well as discursive relationships between xenophobic racism and the collapse of the Midwest steel industry, evidenced by compiled news clips. An excellent primer by Shane O’Sullivan and Ciara Chambers for Make Film History[27] prepares students for this assignment, which I make a semester-long project that involves teaching on archival access as well as reporting on research progress.

Neoliberal Environments

The petroleum industry has a historical attachment to neoliberal environmentalism, and my students learn this by reading about nonfiction mediation following crises like oil spills. I have assigned Dunaway’s chapters on the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill and the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989 in a comparative case study approach, which stresses how much changes across both media culture and environmentalism in a twenty-year interval. Where the earlier event is memorialized as catalyzing the legislation that backed the environmental movement, the latter is better remembered for how Exxon lawyers gradually beat back government fines while using financial instruments and propaganda to weather the public fallout. This provides an opportunity to read critical magazine journalism and watch TV advertisements produced by Exxon for their public relations. As I show in the book that I’m currently finishing, these campaigns depict the “recovered” Prince William Sound as an environment valuable primarily for its tourism economy, which Exxon helped build after the spill immiserated coastal fishing communities. Students recognize these advertorial works of “non-fiction” as it’s clear that BP took a page from Exxon’s PR playbook during the media campaign following Deepwater Horizon in 2010.[28] Broadly, Dunaway’s Seeing Green clarifies neoliberalism within American environmentalism and these case studies show students how the social movement came to emphasize individual action, green consumption, and boycotts as political strategies while corporations learned to evade government sanction and embrace public relations.

Environmental Justice and Resistance

Thus, US media/environmental history helps students understand the inertia of recent domestic climate politics, but it also shows them key strategies for resistance. Laura Dunn’s Green (2000) gives a clear and compelling account of the struggles facing Louisiana “sacrifice zones” along Cancer Alley.[29] One sequence offers a particularly effective historical geographical argument regarding the environmental racism of land leasing along the Mississippi, which turned over from indigo, sugarcane, and cotton plantations to petrochemical refineries and company towns. This point is also documented in Dorceta E. Taylor’s writing[30] as well as Kate Orff and Richard Misrach’s excellent Petrochemical America (2014).

My students often find it surprising to learn about what happened in the Pacific Northwest in the late ‘90s and early 2000s regarding organized environmental resistance movements. Marshall Curry’s documentary account of the Earth Liberation Front, If a Tree Falls (2011), captures this movement and its media strategies in their complexity, but may require a discussion of images of police violence before screening. In class, this film has moved conversation toward “eco-terrorism”: What happens to environmental activism in the post-9/11 security state? Where did this term come from and what does it mean today? Critical, here, are two chapters from David Pellow’s Total Liberation (2014).[31] Pellow documents a history of direct-action tactics alongside racial dynamics within the environmental movement, asking readers to think about how the concept of private property is itself environmentally destructive and iterative of both whiteness and settler-colonialism.

To conclude with more recent events, Sze’s Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger highlights the history and transnational stakes of struggles in Flint MI, Standing Rock, and California’s Central Valley. Alongside this short book, Myron Dewey, Josh Fox, and James Spione’s AWAKE: A Dream from Standing Rock (2017) shows the importance of documentary media to contemporary Indigenous resistance. This is especially true considering how the mediation of #NoDAPL shaped public opinion as well as the tactics of both repressive state violence and its opposition. With Sze, further assigned context from Nick Estes,[32] Lisa Parks,[33] and Janet Walker[34] enable students to discuss the ambivalences and particularities of networked digital documentary committed to environmental justice.

Changing Nature: An Environmental Media History

In summary, the historical trajectories braiding non-fiction media production with ecological concepts can give students a critical foundation for evaluating how those histories surface in their present. These classes have conducted discussions with a dual purpose: on the one hand, we analyze concrete case studies in the past, and on the other hand, we discuss how those past events help explain the pervasive environmental political dilemmas of the present. Environmental documentaries can be seen as historically situated opportunities to problematize how people have thought about what constitutes an “environment” and how those conceptions license certain actions. Acknowledging the role of documentary film and media in such changing nature helps students identify past ideas that may limit, or potentially enable, action in the present. How did it get this bad? It didn’t happen all at once. This history shows that, in environmentalism’s documented ambivalence, there is a critical structure for justice.


Thomas Patrick Pringle is an Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California. With Gertrud Koch and Bernard Stiegler, he is the co-author of Machine (Meson and University of Minnesota Press, 2019). Pringle’s articles addressing media and the environment appear in NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, Journal of Film and Video, Spectator, Heliotrope, and New Media & Society.

    1. Zoë Druick’s recent work on the birds-eye-view as “capitalist aesthetics” has been important for teaching this material. See: “On (Not) Falling from the Sky: Fly-Over Global Documentary as Capitalist Body Genre,” in Reclaiming Popular Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2021). ↑

    2. For a recent examination of how documentary aesthetics respond to the scalar difficulties of representing nuclear energy and waste, where nonfiction narration and visual form respond to the “determinate durations” of plutonium, see: Derek Woods, “Geomedia and Michael Madsen’s Into Eternity,” in Narratives of Scale in the Anthropocene. (New York: Routledge, 2021), 23-38. ↑

    3. Jessica Dempsey, “The tragedy of liberal environmentalism,” Canadian Dimension, 3 May 2017. See also: Jessica Dempsey, Enterprising Nature: Economics, Markets, and Finance in Global Biodiversity Politics (Hoboken, N.K.: John Wiley & Sons, 2016). ↑

    4. See: Yuriko Furuhata, “Of Dragons and Geoengineering: Rethinking Elemental Media,” Media+Environment 1, no. 1 (2019); Yuriko Furuhata, “Architecture as Atmospheric Media: Tange Lab and Cybernetics,” Media Theory in Japan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017); and Florian Sprenger, “Surrounding and Surrounded: Toward a Conceptual History of Environment,” Critical Inquiry 49, no. 3 (2023): 406–427. ↑

    5. Directed by John Abrahall, Christopher Bamford, Robert Feldman, Michael Katz, and Peter Krotozynski, Circuit Earth was recently distributed by Bullfrog Films (2020). ↑

    6. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays to Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology (Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson, 1987), 313. ↑

    7. Brian Winston’s “The Case of 16mm film: From Home Movies to Cinéma Vérité” in Technologies of Seeing: Photography, Cinema, and Television (New York: Bloomsbury, 1996), gives a helpful account of the social drives that led to 16mm documentary practices. The recent argument from “format theory” expands on the importance of a 16mm production focus for documentary studies, as most recently and notably collected in the recent JCMS In Focus: “A Century in 16mm” (2023), edited by Haidee Wasson. ↑

    8. Etienne S. Benson’s “The Evolution of Risk: Toxicology, Consumption, and the US Environmental Movement” in Surroundings: A History of Environments and Environmentalisms (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), is an excellent overview of the post-1945 social and epistemic changes that coincided with the start of the US environmentalism. As a complementary reading suggestion, “Earth Day and the Visual Politics of Environmental Crisis” in Finis Dunaway’s Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), details the relationship between visual iconographic media practices and this moment. ↑

    9. Charles Musser makes a similar point regarding Lincoln P. Brower’s The Flooding River (1972), which reflected burgeoning environmentalist attitudes after Earth Day 1970. The film’s content challenged prevailing “command and control” attitudes toward nature, something also seen in the film’s style and form as the “environmental documentary” gained a discernible, generic identity: “Such an emergence must be understood in relationship to developments in the environmental movement as well as to documentary and moving-image practices.” See: Charles Musser, “Trauma, Truth and the Environmental Documentary,” Eco-Trauma Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2014). ↑

    10. Kahana’s perspective pairs well with the conclusion to Dunaway’s Seeing Green, which points out that, beyond how the film neglects the historical inequality that structures environmental risk, “Gore’s brand of environmentalism has closely followed the neoliberal paradigm” (271). ↑

    11. For historical context and an analysis of this film, see: Thomas Patrick Pringle, “Documentary Ascertainment: Climate, Risk, and Realism” in The Documentary Moment (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, forthcoming 2024). ↑

    12. On the failure of Enlightenment-model assumptions regarding climate pedagogy, see: Wendy H.K. Chun, “On Hypo-Real Models or Global Climate Change: A Challenge for the Humanities,” Critical Inquiry 41, no. 3 (2015): 675–703. See also Pooja Rangan’s critique of “faith in the power of images to compensate for the failures of democracy” in her discussion of Trouble the Water (2008), a Hurricane Katrina documentary, in Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 96. See also: Lucas Hilderbrand, “Nature Programming, the Anthropocene, and the Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary,” Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 7, no. 2 (2020): 210-5. Regarding climate communication specifically, see Anne Pasek’s commentary on the “failure of the deficit model of communication” in “Mediating Climate, Mediating Scale,” humanities 8, no. 159 (2019): 4-5. ↑

    13. Jonathan Kahana, Intelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 27-8. ↑

    14. William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” Environmental History 1, no. 1 (1996): 7-28. ↑

    15. Kyla Schuller, “The Fossil and the Photograph: Red Cloud, Prehistoric Media, and Dispossession in Perpetuity,” Configurations 24, no. 2 (2016): 229–261. ↑

    16. Robin Kelsey, “Sierra Club Photography and the Exclusive Property of Vision,” Rcc Perspectives 1, no. 1 (2013): 11–26; and Finis Dunaway, “Picturing the American Earth,” Natural Visions: The Power of Images in American Environmental Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005): 117-93. ↑

    17. Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (New York: Viking, 2003); James Nisbet, “Atmospheric Cameras and Ecological Light in the Landscape Photographs of Eadweard Muybridge,” Photography and Culture 6, no. 2 (2013): 131–155. See also: Kevin DeLuca and Anne Demo, “Imagining Nature and Erasing Class and Race: Carleton Watkins, John Muir, and the Construction of Wilderness,” Environmental History 6, no. 4 (2001): 541-60. ↑

    18. Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie and Veronica Passalacqua, Our People, Our Land, Our Images: International Indigenous Photographers (Davis: C.N. Gorman Museum, University of California, Davis, 2006). ↑

    19. Mike Davis, “Dead West: Ecocide in Marlboro Country,” New Left Review (1993): 49-73. ↑

    20. Paula Rabinowitz, “People’s Culture, Popular Culture, Public Culture: Hollywood, Newsreels, and FSA Films and Photographs,” The Must Be Represented: The Politics of Documentary (New York: Verso, 1994): 75-106; Dunaway, “The Decline to Dust” and “The River of Time,” Natural Visions, 33-86. ↑

    21. This piece questions water infrastructure development, echoing growing public concern about hydrological control within the environmental movement. It also presages discourses about anthropogenic flood risks that climate change has since made evident. ↑

    22. Adam Diller, “The Bonneville Power Administration Film Archives: Ecologies of Infrastructural Media from 1939 to the Present,” JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 60, no. 5 (2021): 174–196. ↑

    23. White’s historiographical approach to the Columbia River builds from Lewis Mumford’s theoretical framework, which may be familiar to students with backgrounds in media history. ↑

    24. Erik Barnouw, Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film. 2nd rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993): 216-9; Janet Walker, “Media Mapping and Oil Extraction: A Louisiana Story,” NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies 7, no. 2 (2018): 229-51; Emily Roehl, “Petrodocumentary in the 1940s: The Standard Oil Photography Project, Louisiana Story (1948), and the Domestication of the US Oil Industry,” in American Energy Cinema (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2023), 122-31. ↑

    25. Brian Jacobson, “The Shadow of Progress and the Cultural Markers of the Anthropocene,” Environmental History 24, no. 1 (2019): 158-172; Belinda Smaill, “Petromodernity, the environment and historical film culture,” Screen 62, no. 1 (2021): 59-77; Mona Damluji, “The Image World of Middle Eastern Oil,” in Subterranean Estates: Life Worlds of Oil and Gas (New York: Cornell University Press, 2015): 147-64; Petrocinema: Sponsored Film and the Oil Industry (New York: Bloomsbury, 2021). ↑

    26. Julie Doyle, “Where has all the oil gone? BP branding and the discursive elimination of climate change risk,” Culture, Environment and Ecopolitics (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2011). ↑

    27. “A guide to the creative reuse of archive film for young filmmakers and educators in the UK and Ireland” available here: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5bff256029711473bf8dcfe0/t/6266a7c5bbfd7749a8d6e878/1650894798525/A+guide+to+the+creative+reuse+of+archive+film.pdf ↑

    28. For excellent critical commentary on this event, see: Anne McClintock, “Monster: A Fugue in Fire and Ice,” e-flux Architecture (2020): https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/oceans/331865/monster-a-fugue-in-fire-and-ice/ ; “Slow Violence and the BP Oil Crisis in the Gulf of Mexico: Militarizing Environmental Catastrophe,” Hemispheric Institute 9, nos. 1-2 (2012): https://hemi.nyu.edu/hemi/es/e-misferica-91/mcclintock ↑

    29. For a historical-conceptual approach to the “sacrifice zone,” see: Ryan Juskus, “Sacrifice Zones: A Genealogy and Analysis of an Environmental Justice Concept,” Environmental Humanities 15, no. 1 (2023): 3-24. ↑

    30. Dorceta E. Taylor, Toxic Communities: Environmental Racism, Industrial Pollution, and Residential Mobility (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 20-32. ↑

    31. David N. Pellow, Total Liberation: The Power and Promise of Animal Rights and the Radical Earth Movement, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014): 127-209. Pellow’s point on private property comes from a reading of Cheryl I. Harris’s “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (1993): 1709-1791. ↑

    32. Nick Estes, “Film Forum: Awake: A Dream from Standing Rock,” Environmental History 23, no. 2 (2018): 385-6. ↑

    33. Lisa Parks, “Vertical Mediation at Standing Rock,” LA+: Interdisciplinary Journal of Landscape Architecture, no. 12 (2020): 33-41. ↑

    34. Janet Walker, “Standing with Standing Rock: Media, Mapping, Survivance,” Media Fields Journal, no. 13 (2018): 1-21. ↑