PRODUCING NATURE(S): A QUALITATIVE STUDY OF WILDLIFE FILMMAKING

Addison Fay Kennedy

A Thesis

Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

August 2020

Committee:

Lara Lengel, Advisor

Cynthia Baron

Clayton Rosati

© 2020

Addison Kennedy

All Rights Reserved iii

ABSTRACT

Lara Lengel, Advisor

Focusing on the lived experiences of media producers, this study provides one of the first global and industry-level analyses of the wildlife film industry. The author draws on 13 in-depth interviews with a diverse group of freelance wildlife filmmakers, in addition to autobiographies and other accounts from professional wildlife filmmakers.

Using systematic qualitative analysis of interview texts, the author examines the production of wildlife film from a critical interdisciplinary perspective and answers the following research questions. How are media representations of Nature shaped and conditioned by media forms and conditions production? How does the production ecology of wildlife filmmaking shape the content of specific wildlife films? What are the dominant interests of the wildlife film industry? How do wildlife filmmakers represent themselves and their work in an era of environmental crisis? Finally, how do wildlife filmmakers form communities of shared practices, languages, and cultural understandings of the world?

Kennedy ultimately argues that the concept of the production of Nature dovetails with a production studies approach and provides a useful framework for evaluating the symbolic power of media institutions in shaping environmental discourse and cultural understandings of Nature.

Following a Gramscian analysis, the thesis features a plethora of thought-provoking interview passages that help shed light on the relationship between creative labor, commercial interests, and technology in media production of Nature(s). A systematic qualitative analysis of these interview passages eventually charts the relevant themes of the sub-genre of ‘blue chip’ wildlife film. The author posits that this controversial style of wildlife film epitomizes the dualisms of ‘society-Nature’ and ‘human-Nature,’ explored by theorists such as Neil Smith, iv

David Harvey, and Don Mitchell and then utilizes Jean Baudrillard’s philosophical treatise Simulacra and Simulations to theorize the relationship between wildlife filmmaking and what she calls ‘Nature’s veil.’

The thesis concludes that when the wildlife genre draws a categorical distinction between human and animal, society and nature it in effect de-politicizes nature and prevents audiences from imagining what a healthy and sustainable relationship with nature might look like. Instead, in the age of the Anthropocene, all forms of environmental media must work to destabilize the binary between nature and culture in order to see the human as part of nature and the environment rather than distinct from it.

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For Buppa, who loved the wilderness for all its ambiguity.

May he rest in peace.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First and foremost, I wish to express my deepest gratitude to my participants, who were willing to take time out of their busy professional lives to share their invaluable insights and industry experiences with a stranger. Admittedly, I was worried about finding professional wildlife filmmakers to participate in this study. I was both surprised and humbled by my participants’ patience and openness, particularly their willingness to help me push beyond the rudimentary questions in interviews. This thesis truly would not have been possible without your contributions. I would like to emphasize that I have the highest regard for the creative and artistic abilities of wildlife filmmakers. While they may appear to be the targets of my criticism, I am aware of their environmental ethics and desire to produce environmentalist content. I hope that it is clear that the purpose of this study is to increase the scholarly attention towards their work, not to diminish it.

I would also like to acknowledge my indebtedness and render my warmest thanks to my supervisor, Dr. Lara Lengel. Her friendly guidance, enthusiasm, and encouragement have been invaluable throughout all stages of this project.

I also wish to express my sincerest appreciation for the members of my committee.

Thank you, Dr. Clayton Rosati, for extended discussions and valuable suggestions that have greatly influenced my theoretical and methodological considerations. The thesis has also benefited from comments and suggestions made by Dr. Cynthia Baron, whose seminar inspired this research. Your expertise in critical approaches to film and media helped me move beyond the unproductive segregation of cultural studies and political economy.

Finally, writing this thesis would not have been possible without my extensive support system. Thank you to my loving partner, Kenneth Doherty, for your unwavering encouragement vii and support throughout this trying process – your pep talks were simply invaluable. I also want to thank my friend Tabetha Violet for peer-reviewing drafts on a weekly basis at the Learning

Commons. Last but not least, thank you to my parents, Jeff and Lynn Kennedy, who have always supported my educational endeavors and never once questioned my desire to move to Ohio to pursue this degree.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

Wildlife Film as a Case Study in the Social Production of Nature ...... 7

“Symbolic Annihilation”: The Remarkable Neglect of Wildlife Films from

Media Studies...... 12

Cultural Critical Approaches to Wildlife Film ...... 13

Theoretical Approaches to Wildlife Film ...... 14

Historical Approaches to Wildlife Film ...... 15

Production Studies Approaches to the Wildlife Film Industry ...... 16

Insider Accounts from Industry Professionals ...... 17

Science and Technology Studies of Wildlife Film ...... 17

What is The Social Production of Nature? ...... 19

From ‘The End of Nature’ to ‘The Anthropocene’ ...... 25

Nature is Complicated: Disciplinary Challenges to Studying Media at the

Intersection of Nature and Culture ...... 30

CHAPTER II: THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS ...... 41

Theoretical Frameworks ...... 41

Positionality ...... 42

Relevant Theories of Media Production ...... 43

Methodology ...... 45

Method ...... 49

Limitations and Justifications ...... 52 ix

CHAPTER III: WILDLIFE FILM AND THE PRODUCTION OF SCIENTIFIC

KNOWLEDGE ...... 57

From Showmanship to Science ...... 60

Mechanical Objectivity and Wildlife Film ...... 63

The Making of Nature ...... 69

Constructing the Telenaturalist Identity...... 75

Behaviorism ...... 85

Conclusion ...... 90

CHAPTER IV: NATURE’S VEIL ...... 92

Blue Chip Nature and Human-Nature Dualism ...... 95

A Technological History of the Hobbyist Mode...... 101

Money Shots: Funding and Wildlife Film ...... 104

Hobbyist Filmmaking and the Tourist Gaze ...... 106

We are all Bushmen: Wildlife Film and the Resurrection of Nature under the

Auspices of the Real ...... 112

‘People Stories’ and The Real Nature ...... 114

CHAPTER V: CONCLUSIONS ...... 118

REFERENCES ...... 127

FURTHER READINGS ...... 138

APPENDIX A: INTERVIEW GUIDE ...... 145

APPENDIX B: SAMPLE RECRUITMENT E-MAIL ...... 146

APPENDIX C: CONSENT FORM ...... 147

APPENDIX D: INSTITUTIONAL REVIEW BOARD APPROVAL LETTER ...... 149 x

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure Page

1 Mark Hachman. Windows XP 'Bliss' Desktop Theme ...... 2

2 Mark Hachman. Windows XP 'Bliss' Desktop Theme - What It Looks like Today .. 3

3 Caspar David Friedrich. Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1818 ...... 33

4 Jasper Cropsey. Starrucca Viaduct, Pennsylvania, 1900 ...... 35

5 George Sugihara. Chaotic Natural System, 2015 ...... 39

6 Fred Oliver with the Camera...... 73

7 Tom Clarke with the Camera ...... 74

8 Jeff Wilson with the Binoculars ...... 74

1

INTRODUCTION

What we mean when we say the word ‘Nature’ says as much about ourselves as about the things we label with that word – William Cronon, Uncommon Ground

In Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, William Cronon poses a troubling question: “What happens to environmental politics, environmental ethics, and environmentalism in general once we acknowledge the deeply troubling truth that we can never know at first hand the world ‘out there” – the ‘Nature’ that we seek to understand and protect – but instead must always encounter that world through the lens of our own ideas and imaginings?”1 This question, is the central point of departure for this thesis. While I will discuss this thought more in turn, I would like to make clear that the emphasis of this thesis is on environmental ideas in American popular media rather than on the biological and environmental principles that are central to understanding our current environmental crisis (the work of scientists has profoundly influenced this research).

We live in a highly visual culture. According to recent statistics, Americans spend an average of five hours per day watching television (not to mention other forms of screen time).2

As people spend increasingly less time outdoors, mass-market Nature imagery offers a visual and dynamic way for people to connect with the natural world. From screensavers to wildlife television, images of Nature are seemingly ubiquitous. Take the following image, for example. If you owned or used a computer in the early 2000s, you are likely to be familiar with the following

1 William Cronon. Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature. First ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1995): 25. 2 John Koblin. “How much do we love TV?” New York Times. 30 June 2016. 2 image, entitled ‘Bliss.’ This default desktop wallpaper came pre-loaded on hundreds of millions of Windows XP systems.

Figure 1. Mark Hachman. Windows XP 'Bliss' Desktop Theme.

What impact do images such as ‘Bliss’ and other examples of mass-market Nature imagery have on cultural visions of Nature, a neglected yet important consideration of environmental politics? This project sees such contemporary mass-market Nature imagery from the post-World War II period until today as tending to illustrate a pristine Nature, or a Nature untouched by the contaminating influences of man and civilization.3 This creates a false and problematic distinction between ‘Nature’ and ‘Society.’ Although mass-market Nature images such as ‘Bliss’ are often presented as a ‘window on reality,’ the reality they present is carefully curated. For example, the following image of the real-world site ‘Bliss’ site from a different view looks very different from the screensaver.

3 See also W. J. T. Mitchell. Landscape and Power. Second ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 3

Figure 2. Mark Hachman. Windows XP 'Bliss' Desktop Theme - What It Looks like Today.

Here, the emerald green hills give way to grazing pastures and fences, as well as the region’s cash-crop: vineyards. This base image is tied to a specific socio-geographical (and as such, historical and economic) context, in which the transformation of the landscape through labor is evident. More importantly, in this image, as in much of real-world Nature, the boundaries between Nature and society are blurred. Juxtaposing these two images of the same

California landscape suggests that a key characteristic of building a public, visual vocabulary of

Nature is the abstraction of images from specific geographic contexts to generic global or iconic environments for the widest possible markets, such as ‘Bliss.’ Like the word Nature, mass- market images reflect our own ideas and imagining and thus reveal more about human nature than Nature itself. I probe this problematic dichotomy more deeply in the latter half of this introductory chapter.

Images of Nature are also produced in specific contexts. For example, in

1998, photographer Charles ‘Chuck’ O’Rear was driving from Sonoma County through Napa on his way to Marin County when he took this photograph from the side of the freeway. According to California natives, January rains make the rolling Sonoma hills explode into a vibrant green before they subsequently turn brown in the spring sun. In an interview with PCWorld in the early

2000s, O’Rear explains 4

I drove down a stretch of Highway 12 that is narrow and windy, with only a slender shoulder on which to stop a car. At the bottom of a steep embankment was a barbed-wire fence. All he could see was an emerald-green hill, a ridge behind it, and a few puffy clouds … I got an email from someone at Microsoft – I suspect it was the engineering department – saying, ‘We have a contest going about that photograph. Most of us think it was Photoshopped. Some of us think it was taken out in eastern Washington in the Palouse area. Tell us about it.’ I wrote back and said, ‘Sorry, it’s the real deal. It was all there. The clouds were there, the green grass was there and the blue sky.’4

The engineering department’s expressed skepticism about the authenticity of the ‘Bliss’ photo is unsurprising when you juxtapose the two images. Reading O’Rear’s account more closely, however, I was captivated by this notion of “the real deal” and the subsequent list of signifiers that O’Rear offers, including “clouds,” “green grass,” and the “blue sky,” in an attempt to substantiate the world ‘out there’ - a real nature. This story supports Cronon’s hypothesis that

‘Nature’ is a concept, as much as a physical reality, that is always encountered through the lens of human ideas and imaginings. While the work of Cronon and other scholars cite warped cultural visions of nature as a significant barrier to effective environmental politics, there are few attempts to understand the role of media in the construction of not only audience expectations for nature, but also the construction of Nature itself. Thus, even though the nature presented in

‘Bliss’ materialized the moment O’Rear snapped the photograph, it is as real as any nature.

While it is rumored that O’Rear received a six-figure payment for this iconic image, the actual sum is unknown. O’Rear’s explanation that “it was all there. The clouds were there, the green grass was there and the blue sky” implies that there were specific aesthetic considerations, whether conscious or subconscious, that influenced the decision to photograph this seemingly

4 Mark Hachman. “The Story of the Windows XP 'Bliss' Desktop Theme-and What It Looks like Today.” PCWorld. PCWorld, April 8, 2014. https://www.pcworld.com/article/2140802/the-story-behind-the-windows-xp-bliss-photo- and-what-it-looks-like-today.html 5 random location. Interrogating the construction of Nature by creative media labor helps establish a more holistic understanding of the context in which specific images of nature are produced.

Further, I argue that studying cultural understandings of nature necessarily involves studying of consciousness and the objects of direct experience.

Whether we realize it or not, the visual images that come to mind when we see or hear the term ‘Nature’ or ‘environment’ come, to a large extent, from the media. However, little scholarly attention has been paid to the media’s construction of cultural visions of ‘Nature.’

Indeed, most environmental communications research merely addresses the environment as ‘an issue’ or ‘problem’ as the product of active ideological work.

To study mass-market images of Nature, one must not only analyze the discourses within the media texts themselves but also examine the conditions of their production.

Former wildlife filmmaker Derek Bousé writes the following:

Anyone who spends time outdoors has probably realized that most real experiences of the natural world, away from cities and development, tend to be experiences of serenity and quietude… yet stillness and silence have almost no place in wildlife film, or in film and television generally – not because they are incapable, as media technologies, of conveying these qualities, but because stillness and silence are incompatible with the social and economic functions of television…. Film and television are about movement, action, and dynamism … thriving on what is rare and unusual.5

In order to access the aforementioned disconnect between real experiences of the natural world and the social and economic functions of film and television, scholars must rely on the subjective experiences of the producers of wildlife media. In general, postmodern scholars tend to theoretically underestimate and empirically under-examine the ways in which representations,

5 Derek Bousé. “The Problem of Images” in Wildlife Film. (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2000): 4. 6 broadly conceived, are shaped and conditioned by media forms and the media industry. Even

Jean Baudrillard, whom I cite heavily in this thesis, fails to seriously consider labor and production processes in his influential treatise Simulations. For this reason, this thesis adheres to two theoretical frameworks.6 On one level, I draw on theories of media production that justify the microanalysis of particular media institutions that create our media, our information, and our culture.7 On another level, I draw on theories of the production of Nature that challenge essentialist interpretations of “Nature” and “society.” Additionally, my theoretical approach to media production is grounded in questions of power, particularly how cultural producers, in this case, wildlife filmmakers, inhabit and exercise it. This study adheres to Vicki Mayer’s notion of

“culture as production” and “production as culture.”8 In this sense, while political economy theories tend to be apathetic towards micro-level studies of media production, cultural studies theories are well-equipped for media production research, especially research that focuses on the everyday dynamics of media production.

This study demonstrates that the concept of the production of Nature dovetails with a production studies approach and provides a useful framework for evaluating the symbolic power of media institutions in shaping environmental discourse and cultural understandings of Nature.

There is, in fact, nothing natural about the processes by which audiences learn about or understand the concepts of ‘Nature’ and ‘environment.’ Smith’s analysis considers the production of Nature as directly related to the ‘production of space’ in capitalist societies. Under

6 See chapter II for further discussion of theoretical and epistemological frameworks. 7 Vicki Mayer, Miranda J. Banks, and John Thornton Caldwell. Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries. (New York: Routledge. 2014): 4. 8 Mayer et al., Production Studies, 4. 7 capitalism, “the production of space also implies the production of the meaning, concepts, and consciousness of space which are inseparably linked to its physical production.”9 Ultimately,

Smith argues that “the dynamism of geographical space is equally an expression of the image of capital.”10 However, what of virtual, mediatized spaces? How do these spaces construct meanings around ‘wild’ and ‘Nature’? I ultimately theorize that wildlife film participates in the sewing of what I call “Nature’s Veil,” in other words warping the reality of Nature and masking the absence of a mythical pristine Nature. I find the metaphor of ‘Nature’s veil’ to be useful for bridging theories of the dualistic construction of human-Nature and postmodern theories of film and media. The masking and perversion of a basic reality, as well as the masking of the absence of a basic reality, represent phases two and three of Baudrillard’s “Successive Phases of the

Image.”11 The presence of real physical animals and Nature seems to be the only thing preventing these films from being pure simulation/simulacrum. I elaborate more on this theoretical intervention in chapter IV.

Wildlife Film as a Case Study in the Social Production of Nature

We live in a highly visual culture. According to statistics, children in the United States spend an average of three hours every day watching television (which excludes time spent staring at computer screens) and increasingly less time outdoors. For more than a century, wildlife films have offered a visual, dynamic way for people to engage and connect with the natural world. Natural history and wildlife programs on the National Geographic Channel often

9 Mayer et al., Production Studies, 107. 10 Mayer et al., Production Studies, 199. 11 Baudrillard, 6. 8 draw twice as many viewers as the average audience for non-Nature programming. According to wildlife filmmaker Chris Palmer, “during prime time in September 2008, more than 30 million viewers tuned into Animal Planet, which is now seen in 94 million households in the United

States and more than 220 million internationally.”12 At the same time, Earth’s sixth mass extinction, according to scientists, is well underway. Climate change, pollution, habitat loss, and human population growth threaten most of the globe’s wildlife species with biological annihilation.13

Although wildlife films appear to be the perfect object of study for assessing the widening gap between mass-market Nature imagery and real social and environmental change, they are a remarkably under-researched area of film and media production. Indeed, wildlife films have largely been neglected by historians, cultural critics, and media scholars. Derek Bousé, professor of communications and former wildlife filmmaker, argues that the emergence of wildlife films as a force in prime-time television and beyond has not succeeded in “attracting the attention of media scholars and film historians.”14 This has resulted in the “systematic exclusion” and “symbolic annihilation” of wildlife films from “cinema and television histories, genre studies, narrative studies, ‘effects’ studies, formal analyses, and theoretical treatises.”15 However, wildlife films are visible throughout various eras of cinema and television. One wildlife documentary historian, Mark Orner, writes the following:

12 Chris Palmer. Shooting in the Wild: An Insider’s Account of Making Movies in the Animal Kingdom. (San Francisco CA: Sierra Club Books, 2010): 5-6. 13 J.R. McNeil and Peter Engelke. The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). 14 Derek Bousé. “Are Wildlife Films Really ‘Nature Documentaries’?” Critical Studies in Media Communication 15(2) 1998: 117. 15 Bousé, “Are Wildlife Films Really ‘Nature Documentaries’?,” 117. 9

There are few other genres of filmmaking, perhaps with the exception of comedy, the western and newsreel type footage, which can make this claim of longevity. From Eadweard Muybridge to National Geographic Explorer, from the first cinematic study of animal locomotion in the 1880s to the most contemporary televised examinations of tropical plant DNA, these films and later television programs have played a historically significant role in the discourse of mass media for more than a century.16

According to Gregg Mitman, wildlife films, “like naturalistic displays found in animal theme parks, museums, and zoos, have sought to capture and recreate an experience of unspoiled

Nature. They have blended scientific research and vernacular knowledge, education and entertainment, authenticity and artifice... to reproduce the aesthetic qualities of pristine wilderness and to preserve the wildlife that is fast vanishing from the face of the earth.”17 The question at this point is as follows: How are media representations of Nature shaped and conditioned by media forms and conditions production?

This study seeks to make valuable and original contributions to the contemporary scholarship of media industries in the field of cultural studies on several levels. First, this study directly responds to the “systematic exclusion” and “symbolic annihilation” of wildlife films from “cinema and television histories, genre studies, narrative studies, ‘effects’ studies, formal analyses, and theoretical treatises.”18 Although the focus of this study is on cultural production, my research utilizes textual, historical, and theoretical tools to unpack the varied meanings contained within the genre.

16 Mark Robert Orner. "Nature Documentary Explorations: A Survey History and Myth Typology of the Nature Documentary Film and Television Genre from the 1880s through the 1990s." ProQuest Dissertations Publishing. 1996): 3. 17 Gregg Mitman. Reel Nature: America's Romance with Wildlife on Films. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1999): 3. 18 Bousé, “Are Wildlife Films Really ‘Nature Documentaries’?,” 117. 10

Second, this study signifies the first production studies approach to the wildlife film industry. Vicki Mayer’s Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries argues that

“the off-screen production of media is itself a cultural production, mythologized and branded much like the onscreen textual culture that media industries produce.” In other words, production studies are interested in how media producers make culture and, in the process, transform themselves into “particular kinds of workers in modern, mediated societies.”19 My training in cultural critical studies informs my understanding of culture as both constituting and reflecting relationships of power in order to “look up and down the food chains of production hierarchies.”20 Thus, this study adheres to a broad understanding of “wildlife filmmaker.” My participants include a globally diverse group of wildlife filmmakers, including but not limited to directors, editors, technicians, researchers, writers, and producers at various stages in their careers. Part of my research focuses on how these individuals form professional networks and informal communities of shared practices, languages, and cultural understandings of the world.

Third, this work is the first hermeneutic and phenomenological study of the wildlife film industry based on interviews with wildlife filmmakers themselves. This qualitative study treats the production of wildlife film as doing significant ideological work both intentionally and unintentionally. According to Cynthia Chris’s Watching Wildlife, “the wildlife genre, as much if not more so than other cinematic genres, presents itself as an objective record of ‘natural and obvious meaning,’ when it is in fact, like any other representational medium, a carefully chosen,

19 Vicki Mayer, Miranda J. Banks, and John Thornton Caldwell. (Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries. New York: Routledge. 2014): 2. 20 Mayer et al., Production Studies, 2. 11 framed, edited and narrated set of signs.”21 A hermeneutic epistemology grounded in interviews permits the interrogation of these “carefully chosen, framed, edited and narrated set of signs,” or the media text. How does the production ecology of wildlife filmmaking shape the content of specific wildlife films? What are the dominant interests of the wildlife film industry? How do wildlife filmmakers represent themselves and their work in an era of environmental crisis? The adoption of phenomenological approach enables the interrogation of how filmmakers form professional networks and informal communities of shared practices, languages, and cultural understandings of the world.

In summary, this thesis will address the following key research questions: How are media representations of Nature shaped and conditioned by media forms and conditions production?

How does the production ecology of wildlife filmmaking shape the content of specific wildlife films? What are the dominant interests of the wildlife film industry? How do wildlife filmmakers represent themselves and their work in an era of environmental crisis? Finally, how do wildlife filmmakers form communities of shared practices, languages, and cultural understandings of the world?

The subsequent section provides a broad overview of past scholarly engagements with the subject of wildlife and/or natural history film and television from a diversity of disciplinary perspectives. I begin by establishing wildlife film as a “neglected genre” in film and media studies before briefly summarizing contemporary industry contexts that indicate wildlife films as a force in both prime-time television and on digital streaming platforms. First, I outline both past

21 Chris, xix. 12 cultural critical approaches to the genre and more recent political economy approaches.

Thereafter, I discuss Bousé’s theoretical contributions and other historical approaches to wildlife film that help code and categorize several emergent themes. I then identify the overall lack of production histories and industry-level studies. I subsequently cite several autobiographies from wildlife filmmakers that serve to supplement the data from my own in-depth interviews. Finally,

I briefly review past scholarship on the intersection of science and film that suggests the difficulty of communicating complex environmental issues, such as climate change, to mass audiences.

“Symbolic Annihilation”: The Remarkable Neglect of Wildlife Films from Media Studies

Bousé states that the emergence of wildlife films as a force in prime-time television and beyond has not succeeded in “attracting the attention of media scholars and film historians.”22

This has resulted in the “systematic exclusion” and “symbolic annihilation” of wildlife films from “cinema and television histories, genre studies, narrative studies, ‘effects’ studies, formal analyses, and theoretical treatises.”23 While excluded from such analysis, wildlife films are visible throughout the various eras of cinema and television.

Since the 1990s, however, both the popularity and production values of wildlife documentaries have increased dramatically.24 According to wildlife filmmaker Chris Palmer’s memoir, “today, wildlife film venues abound!” He notes that “on TV, half a dozen channel choices have become hundreds, creating a need for specialized programming. Wildlife films

22 Derek Bousé. Wildlife Films. (Philadelphia PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2000): 117. 23 Bousé, Wildlife Films, 117. 24 Bousé, Wildlife Films, 117. 13 have filled some of these niches, especially on The Discovery Channel, PBS, National

Geographic Channel, and Animal Planet.”25 IMAX theatres have also capitalized on the popularity of wildlife films with blockbusters such as March of the Penguins (2005), which grossed $77,437,223 over its lifetime.26 Digital streaming platforms such as Netflix are also saturated with wildlife series and have recently begun co-producing their own wildlife docuseries, such as Our Planet (2019).

Cultural Critical Approaches to Wildlife Film

Despite the critical neglect of wildlife and natural history films, there is a small and loose network of scholars interested in the genre. Cultural and media studies approaches to wildlife film, however, are relatively scant. Watching Wildlife by Cynthia Chris assesses the cultural obsession with watching wildlife on screen.27 Chris extends John Berger’s essay “Why Look at

Animals?”, which describes the relationship between animal and human through the medium of the gaze, to critically analyze the deeper social implications of wildlife films. Chris specifically takes on the racial and gendered meanings of these forms of entertainment.28

Several recent journal publications, such as Tamar Ashuri’s “Negotiating Distances: The

Cultural Economy of Television Programs,” have adopted a political economy approach to networks of natural history programs. This area of research is particularly useful for assessing

25 Chris Palmer. Shooting in the Wild: An Insider’s Account of Making Movies in the Animal Kingdom. San Francisco CA: Sierra Club Books. 2010): 4. 26 Box Office Mojo. Genres: Documentary – Nature. Box Office Mojo (IMDB). 2019. http://www. boxofficemojo.com/genres/chart/?id=Naturedoc.htm. 27 Cynthia Chris. Watching Wildlife. (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. 2006). 28 John Berger. “Why look at Animals?” in About Looking. (New York: Pantheon. 1980): 1-26. 14 the growing cultural, political, and economic irrelevancy of place in a globalized mediascape.29

Morgan Richards’s “Global Nature, Global Brand” explores the British Broadcasting

Corporation’s recent efforts to globalize their brand and appeal to international television markets.30 The BBC is a well-funded and globally renowned producer and distributor of what are known as ‘blue chip’ wildlife films. ‘Blue chip’ film is a distinctive yet highly controversial style that is closely associated with the natural history films of the BBC. Epic docuseries such as Planet Earth (2006) and Blue Planet (2017) exemplify these high-budget, high-quality, and innovative wildlife films. Planet Earth, for example, cost an estimated 2 million USD per episode and 25 million USD for the entire series.31 Elanor Louson’s “Taking Spectacle

Seriously: Wildlife Film and the Legacy of Natural History Display” also explores consumer and broadcast market contexts to explain the global commercial success of blue chip wildlife films but ultimately situates such film within the broader historical context of natural history display.32

Theoretical Approaches to Wildlife Film

Bousé’s Wildlife Films attempts to theorize British and American wildlife film by critically analyzing generic themes in wildlife films since the 1950s. Bousé is the first scholar to treat wildlife film as its own distinct genre, with its own codes and conventions. Ultimately, he concludes that “blue chip wildlife films, with their avoidance of issues and their construction of

29 Tamar Ashuri. “Negotiating Distances: The Cultural Economy of Television Programs.” Television New Media 11(2). 2010: 105–22. 30 Morgan Richards. “The Wildlife Docusoap: A New Ethical Practice for Wildlife Documentary.” Television and New Media 15(4). 2014:321–35. 31 Thomas K. Arnold. “‘Planet Earth’ looks great in HD – and to the BBC.” 22 June 2007. USA Today. http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/television/news/2007-06-21-planet-earth_N.htm 32 Elanor Louson. "Taking Spectacle Seriously: Wildlife Film and the Legacy of Natural History Display." Science in Context 31(1). 2018: 15-38. 15 period-piece fantasies set in mythic time, move wildlife films away from documentary and into the realm of art.”33 Although Bousé’s training is in media and communications, he admits in his preface that “my approach to many contemporary themes and issues in this book is almost inevitably by way of history, and this has subjected me to the historian’s temptation of looking even farther into the past in search of influences and origins.”34 Bousé’s contribution is significant, as it provides a framework for mapping relevant themes, such as dramatic storylines, across the history of wildlife filmmaking.

Historical Approaches to Wildlife Film

Historical monographs of wildlife film are indeed present, but most lack a global perspective. Gregg Mitman’s Reel Nature, for example, traces the historical development of wildlife films in North America.35 Kevin Brownlow’s The War, The West, and The Wilderness

(1979) and Pascal and Elanor Imperato’s The Married Adventure similarly focus on the early history of wildlife film in North America, with special attention to the films of Martin and Osa

Johnson.36 Additionally, there have been a few monographs that focus on the history of Disney’s

True-Life Adventures, a series of 14 short wildlife documentaries produced from 1958 to 1960.37

33 Bousé, Wildlife Films, 20. 34 Bousé, Wildlife Films, xiii. 35 Gregg Mitman. Reel Nature: America's Romance with Wildlife on Films. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1999). 36 Kevin Brownlow. The War, the West, the Wilderness. (New York: Random House, 1979); Pascal James and Elanor Imperato. The Married Adventure (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992). 37 See Ronald Tobias’s Film and the American Moral Vision of Nature (2011) for a history and analysis of Disney’s True Life Adventures. 16

Production Studies Approaches to the Wildlife Film Industry

Almost no production histories exist in the non-English-speaking world. In fact, most production and industry histories are concentrated in Great Britain. Christopher Parsons’s True to Nature focuses on the institutional history of the BBC Natural History Unit.38 Bousé also cites a plethora of anthologies of “insider” works, such as The BBC Naturalist, that explore the institutional history of BBC’s Natural History Unit.39 These histories situate the development of the wildlife film not only within cinema history but also as an integral part of the development of the television industry in the early postwar period. However, none of these histories offer a comprehensive portrait of the contemporary wildlife film industry and the significant technological advancements that it has undergone. Over the last decade, the prevalence of blue chip style programming and high budget production has transformed the industry. Planet Earth:

The Making of an Epic Series by BBC Books illustrates these technological advancements in filmmaking that are responsible for the spectacular footage captured in contemporary wildlife film. Planet Earth is comprised of “behind-the-scenes” photographs of filmmakers shooting on location as well as a series of stunning visuals that are included in Chapter III, entitled “Wildlife

Filmmaking and the Production of Scientific Knowledge.”40

38 See also, Colin Willock’s The World of Survival (1978) and P.S. Crowson’s Animals in Focus (1981), which follow the institutional history of Survival Angalia and Oxford Scientific Films (both based in Great Britain). These kinds of institutional histories, with the exception of P.S. Crowson, are written by “insiders” that helped build the industry. 39 See also The Second BBC Naturalist (1960), Focus on Nature (1981), Wildlife Through the Camera (1982), The BBC’s Natural History Unit’s Wildlife Specials (1997), The Making of “The Living Planet” (1985), The BBC Natural History Unit: Instituting Natural History Filmmaking in Great Britain (2006). 40 David Nicholson-Lord. Planet Earth: The Making of an Epic Series. (London: BBC Books. 2006). 17

Insider Accounts from Industry Professionals

Professional autobiographies by individual filmmakers include Marlin Perkin’s My Wild

Kingdom and Mary Stouffer’s Wild America.41 Both autobiographies explore the history of the television industry’s relationship with the wildlife film genre from an insider perspective. Chris

Palmer’s Shooting in the Wild and Confessions of a Wildlife Filmmaker, however, provide a more accurate contemporary portrayal of industry practices as they relate to ethics, filming, conservation, funding, freelancing, audience abuse, and education.42 There is an abundance of literature focused on the issues of honesty, ethics, and animal and audience abuse. Most of this work notes the lack of a formal and unified code of ethics in the industry. Unlike these other accounts, my brief discussion of habituation as an ethical issue in chapter III does not blame filmmakers but rather contextualizes common unethical practices as the logical result of widespread pressures among filmmakers to decrease production timelines as much as possible, in order to offset skyrocketing production costs. Jeffrey Boswall, a longtime producer for BBC’s

Natural History Unit, is particularly prolific in this area.

Science and Technology Studies of Wildlife Film

There is also an abundance of literature focused on the intersections of science and film and education and entertainment, which I draw on in my second chapter. Robert Dingwall and

Meryl Aldridge cite wildlife films as a “globally significant source of information available to

41 Marlin Perkins. My Wild Kingdom. (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1982); Wild America. Mary Stouffer. (Public Broadcasting Service, 1982). 42 Chris Palmer. Shooting in the Wild: An Insider’s Account of Making Movies in the Animal Kingdom. San Francisco CA: Sierra Club Books. 2010) ; Chris Palmer. Confessions of a Wildlife Filmmaker: The Challenges of Staying Honest in an Industry Where Ratings are King. (Philadelphia PA: Bluefield Publishing. 2015). 18 the public about issues in biological and environmental sciences.”43 They provide a case study of audience reception of scientific principles such as Darwinian evolution in wildlife film.

Ultimately, they conclude that “economic and cultural constraints limit the capacity of wildlife film to communicate the complexities of science.”44 Like other scholars, Dingwall and Aldridge suggest that blue chip programming is better understood as “spectacle.” Although “factual entertainment” is indeed a growing sector of television programming, studies like these indicate the difficulty of adequately communicating complex environmental issues, such as climate change, to mass audiences.45 Jean-Baptiste Gouyon’s “From Kearton to Attenborough:

Fashioning the Telenaturalist Identity” is also concerned with public understandings of scientific information, but he examines more closely the historical construction of wildlife filmmakers as scientific experts.46 Because this study uses the term production to refer to two different but related theoretical frameworks, the next section defines and elaborates on the origins of the important concept of ‘the social production of Nature.’ The following sections provide a broad overview of past scholarly engagements with and disciplinary challenges to the study of the complex intersections between Nature and culture, human and Nature, and environment and society.

43 Robert Dingwall and Meryl Aldridge. “Television Wildlife Programming as a Source of Popular Scientific Information: A Case Study of Evolution.” Public Understanding of Science 15(2). 2006: 132. 44 Dingwall and Aldridge, 147. 45 Dingwall and Aldridge, 147. 46 Jean-Baptiste Gouyon. “From Kearton to Attenborough: Fashioning the Telenaturalist’s Identity.” History of Science: Review of Literature and Research 49(1) 2011: 25–60. 19

What is The Social Production of Nature?

Neil Smith’s Uneven Development is credited with formulating the ‘social production of

Nature’ thesis.47 As a trained geographer, Smith uses the concept of ‘uneven development’ in the broadest possible sense. For Smith, ‘Nature’ and the ‘environment’ are spatial and geographic expressions of capitalistic economic and political arrangements and are thus inevitably entwined with an uneven and ever-changing distribution of fixed capital. The works of Smith and other

Marxist geographers suggest that to study ‘Nature’ and ‘environment’ is to study the dynamics of capitalism in its most visible form. Smith’s thesis ultimately challenges the popular notion of human society as dominant over Nature to argue that geographers must consider the "much more complex process of the production of Nature." Much of his book is an analysis of Marxist conceptions of Nature and space. For example, Smith writes the following:

Where capitalism is unique is that for the first-time human beings produce Nature at a world scale. Hence Marx's brilliant observation, over 120 years ago, that 'the Nature that preceded human history... today no longer exists anywhere (except perhaps on a few Australian coral islands of recent origin).'48

Smith uses various Marxist concepts to develop significant insights about the geography of capital, David Harvey suggests in “Spaces of Global Capitalism: A Theory of Uneven

Geographical Development” that Smith’s “the social production of Nature thesis” needs further development and refinement. Harvey asserts that a theory of global uneven development reflects the various ways in which different social groups have “embedded their modes of sociality into

47 Neil Smith. Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space. 3rd ed. (Athens: University of Georgia Press. 2008). 48 Smith, Uneven Development, 388. 20 the web of life.”49 Marx argues, Nature under capitalism “becomes for the first time simply an object for mankind, purely a matter of utility; it ceases to be recognized as a power in its own right; and the theoretical knowledge of its independent laws appears only as a stratagem designed to subdue it to human requirements.”50 For Harvey, it is the abstraction of capital from social and ecological processes that inevitably leads to “a host of potentially devastating consequences within the web of life, particularly for the environment and for labor.”51 Historical work, such as that of Donald Worster and Don Mitchell are necessary to further develop and refine the work of

Marx, Smith, and Harvey.

Donald Worster is one of the earliest critical environmental historians to radically critique capitalism’s destructive relationship with the environment.52 His pioneering works are Nature’s

Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, published in 1977 followed in 1979 by Dust Bowl: The

Southern Plains in the 1930s, winner of the Bancroft Prize in American History. In Dust Bowl,

Worster provides a rich monograph of one of the worst man-made disasters in human history.

His account of the Southern Plains in the 1930s, according to one book review, is not simply a

“tragic tale of antiquarian concern,” but rather “a revealing chapter in environmental history with ever-increasing relevance to mankind’s future.”53 Worster makes a compelling argument about

49 David Harvey. Spaces of Global Capitalism: A Theory of Uneven Geographical Development. (London; New York: Verso. 2019): 77. 50 Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. 1818-1883. (New York: Random House, 1973): 5–31; see also David Harvey, Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001); Simon Choat. Marx's 'Grundrisse': A Reader's Guide. (GB: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016). 51 Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism, 80. 52 Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1977); Hal Rothman, "A Decade in the Saddle: Confessions of a Recalcitrant Editor," Environmental History, 7-1 (2002): 9-21. 53 Samuel Redman, “New Deal Books: Dust Bowl.” Living New Deal (2004). 21 how the ecological catastrophe is closely linked to the Great Depression, revealing “two fundamental weaknesses in the traditional culture of America, the one in ecological terms, the other in economic.”54 For Worster, capitalism has been “the decisive factor in the nation’s use of nature.”55

While New Deal reform was instrumental in the relief and recovery of the Southern

Plains, it failed to address the crux of the issue. Even environmental reform initiatives like the

Soil Erosion Service only offered farmers “a technological panacea for ecological destructiveness,” when the root issue was a set of motivations and values “deeply entrenched in economic ethos.”56 Just as Wall Street ignored the “sharp practices” and a “top-heavy economy,” the plains society ignored the environmental limits and destructive effects of commercial farming.57 Thus, just as we have “analyzed our financial and industrial development in the light of the 1929 stock market crash,” we must “speak of farmers and plows on the plains and the damage they did” in light of the social and economic system which brought them there. Yet,

New Deal reformers, even with the help of highly educated agronomists, were less interested in the preservation of nature and its delicate ecological balance, and more interested in intense agricultural management which would restore America’s vast wheat factory, “a landscape tailored to the industrial age.”58

54 Donald Worster. Dust bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979): 5. 55 Donald Worster, Dust bowl, 5. 56 Worster, Dust bowl, 229. 57 Worster, Dust bowl, 7. 58 Worster, Dust bowl, 86. 22

The emergent field of environmental history, which was founded in part by Donald

Worster, has been criticized for its propensity to blame capitalism and thus oversimplify and overgeneralize environmental issues. As White points out, “writing from within a capitalist economy with its strong instrumentalist focus, historians can easily make people in noncapitalist economies – the majority of the human race – similarly instrumental in their logic.”59 Even

Cronon, whose early works are similarly reductive, later reflected that “we cannot simply label as capitalist or modern all forces for ecosystemic change, and as traditional or natural all forces for stability … rather than benign natural stasis and disruptive human change, we need to explore differential rates and types of change.”60 In other words, environmental historians need to avoid overgeneralizations and oversimplifications in favor of relativity and complexity. He asks: “Are capitalist pigs intrinsically more destructive than non-capitalist pigs?”61

In the wake of White’s influential critique, environmental historians continued their interdisciplinary research but with more attention to cultural and social contexts. By the 1990s and early 2000s, the unequal experience of environmental risk was a central concern. Alan

Taylor’s “Unnatural Inequalities” argues that environmental histories often ignore social divisions, inequalities, and conflicts.62 Taylor wants to bridge social and environmental history to add nature to the list of “others,” along with the categories of race, class, gender, and sexuality.

Since Taylor’s article, scholars are more acutely aware of the intersections between social and

59 White, 1113. 60 William Cronon. "Modes of Prophecy and Production: Placing Nature in History." The Journal of American History 76, no. 4 (1990), 1128. 61 Cronon, "Modes of Prophecy and Production: Placing Nature in History,” 1128. 62 Alan Taylor. “Unnatural Inequalities: Social and Environmental Histories,” Environmental History 1, no. 4 (Oct. 1996), 7 23 environmental inequalities. Ecofeminism, which grew out of environmental history, is a global movement which identifies critical connections between the domination of nature and the exploitation of women. The ecofeminist movement was founded by Carolyn Merchant, a prolific environmental historian who published The Death of Nature, “Shades of Darkness,” and

Ecological Revolutions. Ecological Revolutions expanded upon Changes in the Land to address issues of gender and class.63 The cultural studies and postmodernist turn in the academy catalyzed this significant shift in environmental historical thought. Contemporary environmental historians no longer essentialize “nature” and often consider urban and other “built” environments while maintaining their focus on the intersections of social and environmental inequalities. In the 1990s, environmental histories on waste and pollution in particular swelled.64

This trend has experienced a recent resurgence with the Flint water crisis in the forefront of the media. These histories highlight the realities of marginalized communities in America which suffer from the toxic byproducts of consumption. Terms like eco-racism and eco-injustice are often used.65 The field now draws on sociological research to theorize the unequal environmental risks faced by marginalized communities and communities of color. Increasing awareness about

63 Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1980); Carolyn Merchant, “Shades of Darkness: Race and Environmental History,” Environmental History 8, no. 3 (Jul. 2003): 380-394; Carolyn Merchant, Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989). 64 See, for example, M.V. Melosi, Garbage in the Cities: Refuse Reform and the Environment, 1880-1980 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1981); M. V. Melosi, The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); Joel A. Tarr, The search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective (Akron, OH: University of Akron Press, 1996). 65 See, for example, Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). See also, Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 1990); See also, Andrew Szasz, Ecopopulism: Toxic Waste and The Movement for Environmental Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). 24 the unequal effects of global climate change has also contributed to this shift and encouraged

U.S. environmental historians to adopt a global perspective.

In The Lie of the Land, Mitchell, a cultural geographer, writes a detailed account of the complex relationship between migrant labor and the scenic California landscape. Ultimately,

Mitchell demonstrates the utility of a labor studies framework in re-telling the historical development of California agricultural labor. For Mitchell, the California landscape is intimately intertwined with the social struggles of migrant workers. He refers to this idea as “the connection between both sides of the landscape” in the following passage.

Most commentators on the California landscape, however, have been little interested in showing the connection between both sides of the landscape, and these sides are dependent on each other… Only by seeing California purely as a landscape view can we see beauty without understanding the lives of the damned who are an integral part of that beauty: And that move, erasing the traces of work and struggle, is precisely what landscape imagery is all about.66

Like Mitchell’s The Lie of the Land, this project adopts both Marxist and postmodernist methodologies to blend social and cultural questions freely with nature imagery. The following sections broadly trace past scholarly developments and challenges in constructivist approaches to

Nature. A constructivist approach to Nature broadly refers to the hypothesis that, despite what mass-market nature images may depict, Nature is not a physical entity separate from human society. Instead Nature is an idea that is constantly constructed and re-constructed in interaction with human society. In Mitchell’s words “social struggle makes the landscape, and the landscape is always in the state of becoming.”67

66 Don Mitchell. The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996): 17-20. 67 Mitchell, The Lie of the Land, 30. 25

An interpretivist approach to Nature similarly argues that access to real nature is only through social constructions such as language, consciousness, shared meanings.68 The subsequent chapter provides a more detailed explanation of how these epistemological foundations inform my method and instrument in addition to influencing my theoretical approach to the concept nature itself.

From ‘The End of Nature’ to ‘The Anthropocene’

The ‘End of Nature’ debates have played a historically significant role in cultural studies scholarship for several decades now, from Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land through the postmodernist turn. Virgin Land (1950) was among the first cultural studies works to explore the binary opposition of civilization/Nature that underlies the American relationship with wilderness, particularly the frontier.69 Another early American studies thinker, Leo Marx, similarly explored the tension that underlies the distinction between civilization and Nature in Machine in the

Garden (1964). While HN Smith briefly discusses technology in his chapter entitled “Passage to

India,” which explores the relationship between the transnational railroad and American westward expansion, L Marx is more focused on the tension between technological progress and the Jeffersonian pastoral ideal.70 L Marx frames the pastoral ideal, as reflected in the works of authors such as Twain and Emerson, as an attempt to reconcile the conflict between civilization/technology and Nature. In this work, L. Marx complicates HN Smith’s

68 See my discussion of Baudrillard and ‘real’ Nature in chapter IV. 69 Henry Nash Smith. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1978).

70 Leo Marx. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964). 26 civilization/Nature dualism by introducing the concept of Nature as an escape from, and a remedy for, the anxieties of modernity. This intervention is highly relevant for current discussions of Nature in the American imagination, as the contemporary American relationship with Nature is dictated by escapism, consumerism, and tourism. Chapter IV provides a more detailed analysis of how the tourist gaze shapes the specific content of wildlife films.71

According to a study conducted by Shanahan and McComas in 1999 on news media framing of environmental issues, viewers of entertainment programming are encouraged to see the environment as (in no particular order)

• A beautiful alternative to city life • A ‘problem’ to be solved through citizen action • A political commitment for socially marginal types • A source of jokes • A source of trivia • A test and challenge for human resourcefulness72

I argue that, for the past several decades, blockbuster wildlife films have appealed largely to the second frame in this list. These films engage with deep public anxieties, worries and concerns about the environment. Disney nature films of the 1950s, for example, reinforce and rework the

18th and 19th century romantic view of nature purported by transcendentalists like Emerson and

Thoreau to accommodate American cultural values of the 1950s. In Reel Nature, wildlife filmmaker Gregg Mitman argues

To a wider public, Disney’s nature – benevolent and pure – captured the emotional beauty of nature’s grand design, eased the memories of death and destruction of the previous decade, and affirmed the importance of America as one nation under God…

71 See “Nature’s Veil” chapter for further discussion of these themes in wildlife film. 72 J. Shanahan and K. McComas. Nature Stories: Depictions of the Environment and their Effects. (Creskill, NJ: Hampton Press. 1999): 102-103. 27

Disney not only captured the aesthetic beauty of nature, he transformed it into a commodity with a set of values pertaining to democracy and morality that appealed to the American public.73

Contemporary wildlife blockbusters, as this thesis will demonstrate, continue to offer a compelling vision of the American way of life rooted in individualism, traditional family values, and religious morality.74 Wildlife filmmaker comments reveal these core values and worldviews as implied solutions to the environmental issues presented by other forms of media. When nature becomes a frame into which we project cultural values, however, it lends to those values the power and legitimacy of naturalness. This study demonstrates how the vision of nature presented by these films, or “Nature’s Veil,” is anything but natural, instead it is a highly selective portrait of nature with significant commercial, as well as ideological, interests.75 While advances in filmmaking technology could be interpreted as a move away from the highly constructed narratives of the Disney wildlife films of the 1950s and towards a more realist depiction of nature, scholars note the opposite trend. Both Bagust (2008) and Scott (2003), for example, remark that contemporary wildlife films have little or no concern for facts or reality. Bagust writes

For Scott, the ‘computer-generated extravaganzas’ of the Walking with documentary ‘franchise’ represent the nature film (sub?) genre’s disparate attempt to maintain a foothold in an increasingly global, fragmented and profit-driven television market. To do this, she suggests, producers are increasingly looking away from traditional ‘blue chip’ wildlife film conventions (with their pretense that they access an ‘unmediated reality’) towards a product that jumps generic boundaries and ‘ups the representational ante’ through the use of high tech visual effects to create a new level of spectacle which

73 Gregg Mitman. Reel Nature: America's Romance with Wildlife on Films. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1999): 110-124. 74 Gregg Mitman, Reel Nature, 129. 75 See Chapter IV for author’s definition of “Nature’s Veil.” 28

‘produces a visceral response in the viewer by way of the sheer audacity of the image itself’.76

The problematic distinction between Nature and culture creates a dualism that not only shapes everyday life but also structures knowledge. While the ‘production of Nature’ thesis is a significant intervention in the fields of political ecology and critical geography, there is relatively little work applying this theory to cultural critical studies of media. Cultural views of environment and Nature are undoubtedly articulated and shaped through multiple media forms of media communication. However, even the burgeoning field of environmental communications fails to critically engage with the highly constructed nature of public communication around ‘the

Environment’ and ‘Nature.’ Cultural studies’ attention to the role of language, discourse, imagery, and values, however, is well-suited for theorizing the relationship between mass-market

Nature imagery and the social production of Nature.

Connected to the social production of Nature thesis is the concept of the Anthropocene.

Paul Crutzen coined the term Anthropocene at an International Geosphere-Biosphere meeting in in Cuernavaca, Mexico. The discussion which began at this conference in February 2000 is still ongoing, as both scientific and humanistic scholars continue to grapple with this new epoch, in which human impact on the biological, chemical, and geophysical processes of the Earth system is factually unprecedented. Over the course of the twentieth century, particularly from the late

1950s onward, knowledge of the climate advanced and scientists began to predict a troubling

76 Phill Bagust. “‘Screen Natures’: Special effects and new edutainment in ‘new’ hybrid wildlife documentary.” Continuum Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 22(2), 213-226. See also Karen D. Scott. “Popularizing Science and Nature Programming: The Role of ‘Spectacle’ in Contemporary Wildlife Documentary.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 31(1) 2003: 29–35. 29 forecast for the Earth’s climate. Dramatic increases in fossil fuel usage spurred by industrial revolutions across the globe caused CO2 and other industrial gas levels to skyrocket, enhancing the greenhouse effect on the planet’s carbon cycle and warming the Earth. While scientists fear potentially catastrophic consequences for humankind if these trends are left unchecked, they discovered an enormous gap between what scientists thought needed to happen to avoid this catastrophe and the reality of global climate-change politics.77

While the advent of the Anthropocene is a relevant and legitimate threshold for not only scientific, but all humanistic and social scientific disciplines, it has particular implications for existing critical practices in the field of cultural studies of media. For instance, while millions of viewers tuned into Animal Planet in the year 2000, as many of a quarter million species had gone extinct and the great majority of these species disappeared from the face of the earth before scientists could describe them or filmmakers could film them. While the focus of this thesis is on environmental ideas in popular culture, I want to reiterate that these ideas have political and material consequences. According to McNeil and Engelke, scientists fear that, at the current rate, ten to twenty times as many species will disappear in the twenty-first century. As human beings increasingly order the world, it becomes impossible to imagine ‘Nature’ and ‘culture’ as ontologically distinct.78 With the Anthropocene, Nature is inseparable from human impact.

If we admit that humans have become a force that is changing the Earth system in its entirety, then this binary understanding of Nature and culture no longer makes sense. While some may think of these developments as novel, I argue that they resonate with earlier debates

77 J.R. McNeil and Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration, 63. 78 J.R. McNeil and Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration, 87. 30 concerning the ‘end of Nature’ in cultural studies scholarship. I intend to call for a new ‘end of

Nature’ debate in cultural studies scholarship, one that is more focused on better communicating constructivist critiques of Nature to lay audiences.

Nature is Complicated: Disciplinary Challenges to Studying Media at the Intersection of

Nature and Culture

While culture and Nature are typically thought to be ontologically distinct, the works of

Marx, Smith, Harvey, Mitchell, and Haraway and others suggest that they are, in fact, intertwined in a complex and dynamic socio-ecological system. Moreover, the human body is a part of nature rather than apart from it. Marx wrote

Nature is man’s inorganic body – nature, that is, insofar as it is not itself human body. Man lives on nature – means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous interchange if he is not to die. That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.79

Despite this, popular media abounds with content that capitalizes on presenting audiences’ images of a pristine Nature, untouched by the influences of man and civilization. This is a symptom of what Whitehead calls “the perpetual search for novelty within Nature (including human nature),” as popular reality series like Survivor (2000) and Naked and Afraid (2013) epitomize.80 Indeed, the expression of this dynamic socio-ecological system, while central to environmental science and climate politics, is almost entirely absent from popular environmental

79 John P. Clark. “Marx’s Inorganic Body.” Environmental Ethics 11:3 (Fall 1989), 243–58. See also John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett, ‘Marx and the Dialectic of Organic/Inorganic Relations’, Organisation & Environment 14:4 (December 2001), 451–462; John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett, ‘The Dialectic of Organic/Inorganic Relations: Marx and the Hegelian Philosophy of Nature’, Organisation and Environment 13 (2000), 403–425. See also more recently, Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (London: Verso, 2015). 80 Whitehead cited by Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism, 78. 31 rhetoric and mass-market nature imagery in the Anglophone world particularly. The project of protecting Nature against the encroachments of society has arguably been a staple of the modern environmentalist project since the 1970s. However, as environmental protection policies such as the Clean Water Act (1972) were implemented, it became increasingly clear that these policies did not protect Nature as Nature but were instead wrapped up in management processes in which the natural, cultural, and technological were hopelessly entangled.81

Perhaps this is the reason that cultural critic Raymond Williams, once famously referred to ‘Nature’ as “perhaps the most complex word in language.”82 Indeed, meanings associated with

Nature vary throughout history. Take Roderick Nash’s Wilderness and the American Mind, for example. Nash’s historical monograph maps the transformation in American understanding and conceptualization of “wilderness” from the pioneers through to the conservation movement.83

According to Nash, America’s historic “ambivalence” towards wilderness persists today. I find this book similar to Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land in that it treats Nature as an idea rather than a material reality. For Nash, the notion of wilderness is complex and highly subjective. He writes that “One man’s wilderness may be another’s roadside picnic ground.”84 He begins his exploration by highlighting the pioneer conception of wilderness as a “dark and sinister symbol,”

“a moral vacuum,” and “a chaotic wasteland.”85 This conception, according to Nash, placed a

“transcendent importance” on conquering and subduing wilderness in the New World. In the

81 Carolyn Merchant. A Columbia Guide to American Environmental History. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). 82 Raymond Williams. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. (Fontana, 1983): 219. 83 Roderick Nash. Wilderness and the American Mind. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967). 84 Nash, 1. 85 Nash, 24. 32

Romantic Era, in contrast, sublime wilderness, or the “strange, remote, solitary, and mysterious,” becomes strongly associated with God.86

The 1964 Wilderness Act, for example, defines wilderness as “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man is himself a visitor who does not remain.”87 However, defining American wilderness in opposition to civilization ignores indigenous cultures’ impact on the landscape, which was subsequently addressed by environmental historians William Cronon and Carolyn Merchant. Many environmental historians find Nash’s definition of wilderness unsatisfactory. They disagree with his frequent treatment of wilderness as a mythic and pre-human concept.88 This conception obscures the fact that Nature

“is quite profoundly a human creation – indeed, the creation of very particular human cultures at very particular moments in human history.”89 According to Cronon’s critique of Nash, Nature “is not a pristine sanctuary where the last remnant of an untouched, endangered, but still transcendent Nature can for at least a little while longer be encountered without the contaminating taint of civilization. Instead, it’s a product of that civilization, and could hardly be contaminated by the very stuff of which it is made. Wilderness hides its unnaturalness behind a mask that is all the more beguiling because it seems so natural.”90

Regardless of its shortcomings, Nash’s work succeeded in demonstrating the utility of analyzing ‘Nature’ or ‘the environment’ as ideas rather than essential realities. For Nash,

86 Nash, 47. 87 Nash, 5. 88 Bryan McDonald. "Considering the Nature of Wilderness: Reflections on Roderick Nash’s Wilderness and the American Mind." Organization & Environment 14, no. 2 (2001): 188-201. 89 William Cronon. Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature. First ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1995), 7. 90Cronon, Uncommon Ground, 7. 33

Thoreau epitomizes America’s “ambivalent” attitude towards the wilderness. Nature imagery of the romantic era is best exemplified by American landscape paintings, which similarly depict

“wilderness” in opposition to “civilization.” Take Caspar David Friedrich's iconic painting,

Wanderer, for example.

Figure 3. Caspar David Friedrich. Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1818.

Here, Nature is vast, powerful, obscure and unknowable. The subject, representing man/civilization, is clearly separate from the mist beyond. In this painting, the wanderer is foregrounded and perched on a rock. He simultaneously lords over nature and bows to its sublimity. The stark visual contrast between the pastel shades that color the scenery and the opaque Earth tones that color the anonymous wanderer further suggest a tension between nature and civilization.

According to Emily Brady’s The Sublime in Modern Philosophy, the sublime is central to

British and American romanticism and has long been associated with “wilder places,” like that in 34

Wanderer, in contrast to rural ones, which have been tied to pastoral beauty.”91 The romantic construction of wilderness as sublime, expansive, and almighty is shaped by pantheistic ideas of nature as created by God.

The romantic era cult of the pastoral and the picturesque is best illustrated by the early

19th century Hudson Rover School paintings. Unlike romantic era artistic depiction of nature, these paintings can be read as an attempt to replace the natural environment with a representation or illusion of the natural environment that promotes burgeoning capitalism and the economic interests of the bourgeoise. The pastoral and the picturesque are also inherently nostalgic for a mythic “pastoral economy” in which “nature supplies most of the herdsman’s needs and, even better, nature does virtually all of the work.”92 For Leo Marx, the pastoral ideal is “an embodiment of what Lovejoy calls ‘semi-primitivism,’ it is located in a middle ground somewhere ‘between,’ yet in a transcendent relation to, the opposing forces of civilization and

Nature.”93 Anders Hansen describes the ideological process of nature-referencing as the following

If nature-referencing and naturalization are key rhetorical components of the way in which ideology in communicated, then the semiotic linking of a (romanticized) view of Nature with a rural (idyllic) past with national identity has undoubtedly been one of the most potent ideological uses in the twenty-first century, used in early parts of the twentieth century for naked political propaganda and mobilization for war, and in the second half of the twentieth century for commercial purposes.94

91 Emily Brady. The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature. Cambridge University Press, New York, NY, 2013: 108. 92 Leo Marx. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. (New York: Oxford University Press, New York, 1919): 23. 93 Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden, 23. 94 Anders Hansen. Environment, Media and Communication. (New York: Routledge. 2010): 137. 35

Like contemporary advertisements, many Hudson River School painters deploy shorthand symbols in an attempt to reconcile Nature and civilization by integrating technology into the pastoral ideal. Jasper Cropsey’s Starrucca Viaduct, for example, attempts to tailor the machine to the pastoral dream by visually integrating the locomotive, an emblem of the industrial age, into the natural environment.

Figure 4. Jasper Cropsey. Starrucca Viaduct, Pennsylvania, 1900.

The atmospheric perspective of the painting makes the train tracks almost indiscernible from the treescape and the train’s pollution indistinguishable from the clouds. Both subjects’ backs are turned, inviting the spectator into the picture to behold, observe, and ponder nature. Writers like

Thoreau, on the other hand, offer an entirely different perspective on the influence of technology on the natural landscape. He bemoans; “The whistle of the locomotive penetrates my woods, summer and winter, like a hawk sailing over some farmer’s yard, informing me that many restless merchants are arriving within the circle of town.”95

95 Henry David Thoreau, 1817-1862. Walden: or, Life in the Woods. (Harper, New York, 1950): 128. 36

In the 19th century, technology becomes a prominent symbol in both literature and art.

Barbara Novak determines that “American landscape art is attuned philosophically as well as art historically to the nature attitudes of the West.”96 Not unlike automobiles in postwar America,

Leo Marx reports that by the 1830s, the locomotive was “a kind of national obsession… between

1820 and 1860 the nation was to put down more than 30,000 miles of railroad track, pivot of the transportation revolution which in turn quickened industrialization.”97 Images of the train or railroad carried new iconology in romantic painting at the turn of the century. The irreconcilable opposition between Nature and civilization embedded in the American imagination also manifests itself in contemporary wildlife film. A close textual analysis of my interview transcripts reveals that filmmaking machines and technology are still attached to the pastoral ideal as symbols of progress, power, and civilization. In fact, one of first codes to emerge in my research was that of ‘mechanical objectivity.’ It then became clear to me that technology plays a crucial role in the presentation of wildlife film as “an objective record of natural and obvious meaning.98 I discuss these ideas in more depth in chapter III.

While work in the interdisciplinary environmental humanities continues to demonstrate the utility of environmental perspectives in the humanities and social sciences, the post- structuralist turn in the 1980s challenged the meaning, history, narrative, and the very concepts of ‘man’ and ‘Nature’ themselves. Post-structuralists ultimately challenged the use of ‘Nature’ as a subject of historical analysis. As prominent environmental historian Richard White observes

96 Barbara Novak. Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825-1875. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007): 230. 97 Novak, 180. 98 Chris, xix. 37

“historians thought ecology was the rock upon which they could build environmental history … it turned out to be a swamp.”99 Environmental history’s methodology, according to White, is deterministic. In modern ecology, the idea of “natural climax – a community of plants and animals ideally adjusted to a given environment – has largely vanished,” along with “the idea of successional communities.” White cites one ecologist who argues that Nature is only “a veritable shimmer of populations in space and time.”100 This ecological principal, contrary to popular assumptions, is compatible with constructivist approaches to nature, including the social production of Nature thesis.

The poststructuralist turns in the humanities and social sciences during the 1980s, are paralleled by equally groundbreaking paradigm shifts in the natural and hard sciences spurred by chaos theory. According to Carolyn Merchant, the first approach to ecology developed in the

United States was that of ‘human ecology’ during the late 19th century by chemist Ellen Swallow

Richards. This was followed by Frederic Clements’ organismic approach. Finally, in the 19th century, an economic approach from the science of thermodynamics. The fourth, or chaotic, approach rose from the work of population ecology as influenced by chaos theory in

99 Richard White. “Environmental History, Ecology, and Meaning.” The Journal of American History 76, no. 4 (Mar. 1990). 100 See Carolyn Merchant’s textbook, A Columbia Guide to American Environmental History. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). Merchant writes a brief history of the development of ecology as a science. Chapter 9 is indispensable for both environmental historians and other researchers interested in interdisciplinary studies of culture and Nature. According to Merchant, historians must not only be familiar with ecological principals and terminology, but more importantly be aware of the “major differences in assumptions that each of these approaches makes about Nature itself, its management, and the human ethical relationship to it.” Chaos theory, for example, suggests that Nature is far more complex than previously assumed. This new ecology of chaos presents challenges for historians attempting to make sense of ecological transformations over time and for conservationists attempting to preserve systems which are inherently disordered and unstable. 38 mathematics from the 1940s through the 1960s.101 While these parallel developments overlap in fascinating ways, firm disciplinary boundaries between the social and natural sciences represent significant challenges to charting this territory.

I cite chaos theory to suggest that there are major differences in assumptions that each of these approaches makes about Nature, its management, and humans’ ethical relationship to it.

For my purposes, parallel theoretical developments of poststructuralism and chaos theory in the

1980s are useful for a plethora of reasons. First and foremost, these theories reveal that even real

Nature is far more complex than previously assumed. Second, the relatively recent advent of chaos theory challenges the uncritical mythologization of any scientific ‘truth,’ unveiling the highly constructed nature of scientific discourse. Third, despite the fact that Clements’ approach to ecology is now widely recognized as outdated and inaccurate, contemporary wildlife films continue to purport ethological principles, or the scientific study of behaviorism, which falls under the broad umbrella of an “organismic approach” to ecology. Chapter III explains why chaos theory is seemingly incompatible with blue chip narratives. Fourth, these developments suggest that success in conservation, preservation, and environmental communication in the age of the Anthropocene necessarily involves a paradox for both humanists attempting to make sense of ecological transformations over time and for conservationists attempting to preserve systems that are inherently disordered and unstable. If we can accept this reality, then I believe that we can begin to think of Nature, not as a closed system that excludes human society, but rather as an

101 Carolyn Merchant. A Columbia Guide to American Environmental History. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002): 161-173.

39 open system that is constructed in interaction with human society. Scientists’ inability to explain complex ecological phenomena that often defy mathematical calculations resulted in the following preliminary attempt to illustrate chaotic systems using method known as “empirical dynamic modeling.”

Figure 5. George Sugihara. Chaotic Natural System, 2015.

According to creator George Sugihara, empirical dynamic modeling makes no assumptions about biological and ecological principle and uses only raw data as input. In designing this graphic, for example, the researchers found that sea surface temperature can in fact help predict population fluctuations, even though the two are not correlated in a simple way. The work of Sugihara and other scientists has been praised for its ability to reveal hidden causal relationships in nature.

I find that this graphic helps theorize and accurately visualize the dynamic relationship between society and nature.

While wildlife filmmakers may possess powerful tools with which to shape public opinion in an era of environmental crisis, the realities of the media industry pose real challenges 40 to illustrating the highly complex and dynamic. The subsequent chapter describes the theoretical and methodological considerations of studying the everyday dynamics of media production.

41

CHAPTER II: THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS

We assume that directors, and editors, lighting technicians and storywriters, contract casting agents and full-time studio caterers are all cultural actors, too. They shape and refashion their identities in the process of making their careers in industries undergoing political transitions and economic reorganizations. Production studies scholars, as contributors to a field of interdisciplinary inquiry, draw on their intellectual impetus from cultural studies to look at the ways that culture both constitutes and reflects the relationships of power; or in the words of Nicholas Garnham, they examine ‘the cultural producers, the organizational sites and practices they inhabit and through they exercise their power.’” – Vicki Mayer, Miranda J. Banks and John T. Caldwell

Theoretical Frameworks

This study is informed by several theoretical frameworks. On one level, I draw on theories of media production that justify the microanalysis of particular media institutions that create our media, our information, and our culture. On another level, I draw on theories of the production of Nature that challenge essentialist interpretations of ‘Nature’ and ‘society.’

Additionally, my theoretical approach to media production is grounded in questions of power.

Particularly how cultural producers, in this case, wildlife filmmakers, inhabit and exercise it.

This study adheres to Vicki Mayer’s notion of ‘culture as production’ and ‘production as culture.’102 Thus, the phenomenological task is to understand how cultural workers, in this case, wildlife filmmakers, work through and form professional networks based on shared practices, languages, and cultural understandings of the world. The hermeneutic task, in contrast, attempts to draw connections between the conditions of production and the text itself. I elaborate on these two epistemological foundations in the methodology section. While political economy theories

102 Vicki Mayer, Miranda J. Banks, and John Thornton Caldwell. (Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries. New York: Routledge. 2014): 4. 42 tend to be apathetic towards micro-level studies of media production, cultural studies theories are well-equipped for media production research, especially research that focuses on the everyday dynamics of media production.

This study seeks to make valuable and original contributions to the current scholarship in the field of cultural studies of media industries on several levels. First, this study directly responds to the “systematic exclusion” and “symbolic annihilation” of wildlife films from

“cinema and television histories, genre studies, narrative studies, ‘effects’ studies, formal analyses, and theoretical treatises.”103 Although the focus of this study is on cultural production, my research utilizes textual, historical, and theoretical tools to unpack the varied meanings contained within the genre.

Positionality

First, I feel that it is necessary to be transparent about my own interests in this area of research, as well as my own biases and perceptions. I am drawn to this research because of my interest in the effectiveness of mass-market Nature imagery in producing real social and environmental change in an era of environmental crisis. However, I believe that film and television are ill-suited to this important task. My approach to wildlife film is inevitably by way of culture, and thus cultural understandings of Nature underlie many of the themes and issues outlined in this article. I realize that this is a partial perspective and that my lack of experience in filmmaking and media production inevitably results in bias and gaps in my knowledge. The phenomenological nature of this qualitative study attempts to fill these gaps but often results in

103 Derek Bousé. Wildlife Films. (Philadelphia PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2000): 117. 43 the establishment of both personal, as well as professional, relationships with participants. As I realize that these relationships may be cause for concern for some scholars, I would like to emphasize that I have the highest regard for the creative and artistic abilities of my participants.

Furthermore, while they may appear to be the targets of my criticism, I am aware of their environmental ethics and desire to produce environmentalist content. The purpose of this study is to increase the scholarly attention towards, not diminish, their work.

Relevant Theories of Media Production

As Mayer warns in Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries, production studies scholars face challenges not frequently confronted in the study of media consumption and audiences.104 Throughout the data collection phase of this study, which lasted approximately eight months, I became acquainted with some of these challenges. For example, in more

“traditional” textual and audience reception approaches, consumption is typically framed in terms of the politics of pleasure. In this study, however, I conceptualize media consumption practices within the political economy of labor, markets, and policy. Throughout the data collection process, I attempted to avoid getting drawn into the trade lore and ‘behind-the-scenes’ stories. The more I came to learn about the production of wildlife films, the more difficult it became to make generalized claims about the unique role of media in the world. As I will demonstrate in Chapter III through an analysis of wildlife ‘making-of’ segments and other promotional materials, so much of off-screen media production is mythologized and branded.

104 Mayer et al., Production Studies, 3. 44

Production studies and cultural studies of media industries attempt to describe the production of media texts and explore this notion of production as culture.

I have attempted to strike an ideal balance between describing freelance wildlife filmmakers as “the creators of popular culture and functionaries in the service of capitalism.”105

Thus, I adhere to Mayer’s notion of media production as ‘creativity with constraints,’ which can be compared to Anderson’s ‘situated model of the individual’ in communications theory.106

While this notion of ‘production as culture’ is not an objective unique to cultural studies, it is an objective that, according to Mayer, “transformed the study of media across academic disciplines, forming its own field of study.”107 Both the cultural turn in the social sciences and the ethnographic turn in the humanities over the past decades have facilitated this shift. Mayer writes that

From their beginnings in propaganda studies in the 1930s to auteur analyses of the 1950s, media researchers have typically distinguished their objects of study as unique from all others. The reach of mass media texts, the celebrity of particular professionals, the infiltration of media commodities into daily life, and the economic resources marshaled by media industries and concentrated into a handful of global cities provide easy alibis for why studying media production is different from other production realms.108

There is a plethora of literature, namely “field theory,” that justifies my theoretical approach to the wildlife film industry. Rodney Benson’s ‘Field Theory in a Comparative Context: A New

Paradigm for Media Studies’ (1999) draws on Pierre Bordieu’s earlier works related to media studies and media production. Benson discusses field theory as a possible new paradigm for

105 Mayer et al., Production Studies, 3. 106 Refer to my discussion of my epistemological foundations in the upcoming section entitled “Methodology’ for a more detailed definition of Anderson’s ‘situated model of the individual.’ 107 Mayer et al., Production Studies, 2. 108 Mayer et al., Production Studies, 2. 45 media scholars. First, field theory offers the possibility of bridging ‘macro-societal’ and ‘micro- organizational’ analyses, which are traditionally separated in empirical studies. Second, field theory is useful for connecting media production with media reception based on the central assumption that there is ‘mutual adjustment’ between the two.

Wildlife filmmaking is well-suited for a focus on large-scale production and the multinational entertainment industry, as international pre-sales and global co-production agreements are increasingly common in the industry. Additionally, most wildlife filmmakers are freelance workers contracted with numerous production companies across the globe at any given time. For these reasons, this study adopts a global approach. For example, in one interview with an Indian wildlife filmmaker, it became clear how global markets dramatically shape the success of any given blue chip wildlife film. For example, global co-production agreements are increasingly prevalent to help offset the skyrocketing production costs of blue chip wildlife films. This filmmaker indicated that a reliance on such agreements imbues blue chip wildlife films with a distinctive ‘global style.’ According to the participants, the two main elements of this style are (1) a focus on spectacular imagery and (2) omniscient narration. A production studies explanation suggests that these conditions ensure that films may be easily translated into hundreds of different languages at minimal costs to production companies.

Methodology

Having been trained in cultural critical studies, I find myself fluctuating between an interpretivist, constructivist and a critical paradigm. While the social and historical construction of power relations, knowledge, and discourse has always been central to my research, my research on the wildlife filmmaking community relies heavily on extensive social interaction and intimate familiarity with my participants, resulting in interdependence between my research and 46 my subjects’ knowledge. Thus, my epistemology can accurately be described as critical- hermeneutic and critical-phenomenological. My research is grounded in a hermeneutic and phenomenological approach to the lived realities of wildlife filmmakers who have the authority to speak for Nature but ultimately provides a critical analysis of environmental discourse. I adhere to Berger and Luckman’s notion that “the reality of everyday life” is inherently intersubjective and circular, coming into being through social interaction and communication.109

In my mind this social constructivist perspective aligns with critical philosophies of knowledge as historically and socially specific.

My research often shifts from a hermeneutic to a phenomenological perspective depending on the kinds of questions I am asking in interviews. In many ways, I understand my participants as the producers of media and filmic texts (in this case, wildlife films.) Thus, one of my research goals is to “obtain a valid and common understanding of the meaning of a text.”110

A hermeneutic perspective is beneficial when interviewing documentary researchers and producers in particular, as I often ask them about the source of information and content featured in particular wildlife films. Other questions I often ask include the following: “Could you describe in detail, from start to finish, the typical production of wildlife film? What is your role in this process?” For researchers and producers in particular, these kinds of questions often serve to interrogate the various ways in which environmental messages are, either deliberately or unintendedly, encoded into the text. I also treat the transcriptions of my interviews as texts

109 P.L. Berger and Thomas Luckman. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in The Sociology of Knowledge. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday. 1966): 23. 110 S. Kvale. Interviews. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. 1996): 46. 47 themselves, often testing part interpretations against the “global meaning of the text.”111 As an industry outsider, I am ultimately interested in obtaining a vague consensus among practicing filmmakers about the production of these media texts. Results and emergent themes are situated in the following chapters.

The majority of my interview questions are phenomenological, focusing on the lived experiences and perspectives of filmmakers in the contemporary wildlife film industry. One question I often ask is “tell me about an experience you have had in the wildlife film industry?”

This question is intentionally vague, as it allows participants to speak freely about their experience in the industry, regardless of how they may interpret the word “experience.” The quotes I chose to include in the subsequent analysis chapters are often unencumbered descriptions that participants offer regarding industry pressures to produce certain portrayals of

Nature. This is where Berger and Luckman’s concept of the “symbolic universe” comes into play through language.

Because phenomenology is concerned with discovery and the critical analysis of this

“symbolic universe,” I understand the nature of the individual’s subjectivity, freedom, autonomy, agency, and choice according to Anderson’s “situated model.” This model considers an individual’s identity with “continuity and a semblance of independence and autonomy that materializes a culturally produced subject in, at least, partial response to personal motives and

111 Kvale, 48. 48 desires.”112 Ultimately, the “symbols, meanings, and motivations” of my participants are central to my inquiry.113

Paula Saukko’s “Methodologies for Cultural Studies: An Integrative Approach” suggests that although “the creative combining of different approaches has accounted for the productivity and popularity of cultural studies,” it has also resulted in “philosophical and political tensions.”114 While I find that my epistemological foundations embody this distinctive feature of cultural studies, I am aware of the tension between studying the lived experiences of individuals and critical discourse.115

My ontological and epistemological foundations led me to adopt a grounded theory approach.116 According to Lindlof and Taylor, “central to the logic of grounded theory is the notion that “theory is discovered only after systematic analysis of raw data from the field.” This view of the theory-building process is “different than the version handed down by positivist- influenced social science.”117 Thus, this study only tentatively employed a priori theories prior to data collection. Instead, interviews provided the basis for deriving testable hypotheses about the social phenomena of wildlife film and wildlife filmmaking. I see this as an inductive model of scientific reasoning (as opposed to the traditional deductive model) that is more aligned with my

112 John Anderson. Communication Theory: Epistemological Foundations. (New York: Guilford Press. 1996): 89-90. 113 Svend Brinkmann and Steinard Kvale. InterViews. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2009). 114 Paulaa Saukko. “Methodologies for cultural studies: An integrative approach.” In N. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (Eds.) The Sage handbook of qualitative research (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage): 343-344. 115 Saukko, 346-352. 116 Anselm Strauss and Barney Glaser. The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research. (Chicago: Aldine Pub. Co, 1967). 117 Thomas R. Lindlof and Bryan C. Taylor. Qualitative Communication Research Methods. Third ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. 2011): 101. 49 ontological and epistemological foundations and my belief in the “social reality of everyday life.”118

Method

Lincoln and Guba explain that methodology is comprised of “a set of ontological, epistemological, and axiological assumptions, as well as the voice of the researcher.”119 I have attempted to map my ontological and epistemological foundations in the previous paragraphs.

Method, in contrast, represents the tools and processes through which qualitative research is conducted.

The primary method of data collection in this study is qualitative in-depth interviews. My data set is comprised of 13 phone and Skype interviews with individual wildlife filmmakers, including but not limited to freelance cinematographers, producers, directors, editors, researchers, writers, and narrators. This sample is intentionally undelimited, as I wanted to account for both below-the-line and above-the-line perspectives. I recruited my subjects via email using the website http://www.wildlife-film.com, which features an extensive list of freelance wildlife filmmakers, their professional contact information, relevant work, and short biographies. My research employed both maximum variation and snowball sampling.120 Each interview was designed to take approximately 45 min – 1 hour and was audio-recorded with the participant’s consent. The author transcribed and coded all interviews using the software

118 P. L. Berger and Thomas Luckman. The social construction of reality: A treatise in the sociology of knowledge. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1996). 119 Egon G. Guba and Yvonna S. Lincoln. “Paradigmatic Controversies, Contradictions, and Emerging Confluences.” In N. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (Eds.) The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. 2005.) 120 Berger and Luckman, 146-148. 50

Rev.com. I have informed my participants that their identities will be anonymous and confidential with the use of pseudonyms (e.g., ‘filmmaker 1’). Thus, the risk of their participation is no greater than that of everyday life.121 Attached in the appendices to this thesis are the interview guide, consent form, recruitment materials, and Institutional Review Board approval document.

My decision to include a globally diverse range of wildlife filmmakers, including but not limited to freelance cinematographers, producers, directors, editors, researchers, writers, and narrators, was intentional. As Matt Stahl notes in his essay “Privilege and Distinction in

Production Worlds: Copyright, Collective Bargaining, and Working Conditions in Media

Making,” while, at first glance, the ‘privileges’ and ‘distinctions’ in media production may

“seem to flow naturally from differences in the kinds of tasks media workers do and the kinds of skills they bear,” they are actually the cumulative result of struggles between industry groups rather than the reflections of inherent differences between categories of workers.122

It became apparent to me early during the data collection process that the language used by industry professionals reinforces distinctions between “creative” and “technical” labor, also referred to as “above-the-line” and “below-the-line” work.123 The freelance doctrine of ‘work-to-

121 The Common Rule is frequently described as a risk-based rubric, and a central task of an institutional review board (IRB) is to determine that risks are minimized and that the risks to the subjects are reasonable in relation to the anticipated benefits (45 C.F.R. § 46.111(a)(2)). See the relevant appendices for evidence of institutional review board approval for this research project. 122 Matt Stahl, “Privilege and Distinction in Production Worlds: Copyright, Collective Bargaining, and Working Conditions in Media Making” in Vicki Mayer et al., Production Studies, 54. 123 This imaginary ‘line’ refers to project budgeting in media industries, in which creative work is accounted for ‘above-the-line’ and technical work is accounted for ‘below-the-line.’ 51 hire’ exacerbates this distinction by allocating authorship and ownership of intellectual property to employers.124 Filmmaker 13 stated the following:

Cinematographers feel very unsupported by the companies they work for. You're basically just a freelancer that gets used for your skills and then spit out the other end and you're still looking for the next job. And on top of that, you're oftentimes not allowed to discuss what you're working on. And so, if every cinematographer was allowed to send out tweets and Instagram posts that very specifically said where they were and what they were working on and who they were working for, that could really help elevate them in the industry... But usually we have to sign nondisclosure agreements that often cover a span of multiple years. We are not allowed to discuss any aspect of the project you're working on. But for a couple of years I can't tell people any of the specifics of what I worked on, which may have actually helped elevate my status in some people's eyes and given them an idea that, wow, he worked on this big show, maybe we should use him, but you can't even talk about working on that big show. And so, it's a really interesting place to be in as a freelancer focused on the camera work. So, I hope you get to explore that with other people.125

Filmmaker 13’s comments illuminate the consequences of this inequality that often enables to the dispossession of most freelancers. Freelancing thus creates authors out of employers “who may not be creative in any conventionally recognizable way.”126 According to my participants, this is a highly alienating process that often results in corporate broadcasters and producers having raw marketplace power

However, media industry inequalities even run deeper than this. For example, media industry workers who belong to guilds and unions enjoy a range of what Stahl calls “quasi- proprietary rights,” which are the result of collective bargaining and promise significant degrees

124 The doctrine of ‘work for hire’ in the US emerged after the Civil War “in conjunction with intellectual property and entertainment industries… work-for-hire decrees that when copyright-eligible products are produced by employees (and in certain cases by freelancers), the employer is the author (and hence the holder of the copyright for the duration of the copyright term)” (Stahl 56). In summary, without this work-for-hire doctrine, freelance workers would be considered “joint authors” and equal sharers in copyright protection. 125 Filmmaker 13. “Wildlife Filmmaking.” Telephone interview by author. October 24, 2019. 126 Stahl, 56. 52 of social protection and security. Specifically, when media property, such as a television rerun or stock footage, is reused, above-the-line guild members receive individual residuals, whereas below-the-line guild members gain collective residuals. These residuals sometimes take the form of company contributions to union health and pension funds.127

For the purposes of this study, cinematographers, sometimes referred to as camera people, would be considered below-the-line workers, while directors, producers, and narrators would be considered above-the-line workers. It is important to note that this term is only relevant to freelance workers who contract with large production companies such as the BBC and

National Geographic. In a small independent film, the cinematographer may well be the principal director and producer, depending on the project’s budget.

Limitations and Justifications

This research will not engage in debates over whether wildlife films may be considered

“documentaries.” Derek Bousé’s Wildlife Films provides a detailed explanation of the degree to which wildlife films represent the realities of Nature.128 He concludes that this market-driven genre constructs “period-piece fantasies” and relies on formulaic dramatic narratives, moving wildlife films away from traditional documentary realism and into “the realm of art.”129 This research does, however, consider wildlife film as its own distinct genre with its own codes and conventions.

127 Stahl, 59. 128 Derek Bousé. Wildlife Films. (Philadelphia PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2000): 5. 129 Bousé, Wildlife Films, 20. 53

This research will not provide an “effects” or audience reception study or analysis.

According to Bousé, the extent to which wildlife film and television contribute to “inflated expectations” of wildlife and Nature and “frustrated experiences” is “difficult to measure and easy to over-estimate.”130 It would be difficult to accurately gauge the effectiveness of mass- market Nature imagery with content “designed to appeal to tens of millions of diverse viewers worldwide.”131 Audience reception studies of film and television are not precision instruments that can be “wielded with predictable results.”132 Instead, this research focuses on the production of wildlife film as directly related to the social production of Nature.

The scholarly neglect of the wildlife film genre and industry has resulted in major gaps in critical scholarship. Future research should consider a labor studies approach that assesses the continued exploitation of freelance wildlife filmmakers by film and television executives. In my research, it has also become apparent that the wildlife film industry is largely white and male- dominated.133 Palmer agrees, also noting that “we are seriously deficient when it comes to diversity. At wildlife filmmaking festivals and conferences, few non-white faces can be seen.”134

Filmmaker 4 also speaks to the challenges of being a female cinematographer in a male- dominated industry.135 A production studies approach is well-suited for these kinds of explorations, as it is attuned to a broad conception of the term “working conditions” that includes

130 Bousé, Wildlife Films, 6. 131 Bousé, Wildlife Films, xiv. 132 Bousé, Wildlife Films, xiv. 133 Filmmaker 4. “Wildlife Filmmaking.” Telephone interview by author. March 22, 2019; for further discussion of gendered media labor see Miranda J. Banks “Gender Below-the-Line: Defining Feminist Production Studies” in Vicki Mayer et al., Production Studies, 87-98. 134 Chris Palmer. Shooting in the Wild: An Insider’s Account of Making Movies in the Animal Kingdom. (San Francisco CA: Sierra Club Books. 2010): 194. 135 Filmmaker 4. “Wildlife Filmmaking.” Telephone interview by author. March 22, 2019. 54 the political and economic aspects of work such as “the remuneration, control of the work process, ownership of the products of labor, etc.”136 The wildlife film industry is highly

Westernized, and there is little research on the complexities of global co-production agreements and the effects of wildlife filmmaking on the foreign communities that host these films’ production. Above-the-line industry players should emphasize local participation and ensure that their films benefit local communities and reflect their interests.

Palmer also calls for an eco-materialist approach to wildlife filmmaking practices. While

“films with a focus on conservation can certainly be considered green in content,” he asks, “what about the production of the film itself and its contribution to climate change, pollution, and environmental degradation?”137 In an era of global environmental crisis, the importance of media and film in educating audiences about environmental issues cannot be understated. If wildlife filmmakers have the authority to speak for Nature, then it is crucial that scholars continue to take their perspectives and experiences seriously while maintaining a critical and historical perspective. As Palmer concludes, “it is time to bring about a new era of wildlife filmmaking and make the world a better place for other species as well as our own.”138

In summary, the epistemological and ontological foundations of this study can be best described as critical-hermeneutic and critical-phenomenological. The primary instrument for data collection in this study was in-depth interviews with a globally diverse group of freelance

136 Matt Stahl, “Privilege and Distinction in Production Worlds: Copyright, Collective Bargaining, and Working Conditions in Media Making” in Vicki Mayer et al., Production Studies. (New York: Routledge. 2009): 54-66. 137 Palmer (2010): 192. 138 Chris Palmer. Confessions of a Wildlife Filmmaker: The Challenges of Staying Honest in an Industry Where Ratings are King. (Philadelphia PA: Bluefield Publishing. 2015): 222.

55 wildlife freelance cinematographers, producers, directors, editors, researchers, writers, and narrators. As previously noted, this sample is intentionally undelimited, as I wanted to account for both below-the-line and above-the-line perspectives. Each interview was designed to take approximately 45 min – 1 hour and was audio-recorded with the participant’s consent. The author transcribed and coded all interviews using the software Rev.com. I recruited my subjects via email using the website http://www.wildlife-film.com, which features an extensive list of freelance wildlife filmmakers, their professional contact information, relevant work, and short biographies. My research employed both maximum variation and snowball sampling.139

The major theoretical frameworks of this project are twofold. On one level, I draw on theories of media production. While Bordieu’s field theory helps justify the microanalysis of particular media institutions, i.e. BBC and National Geographic, that create our media, our information, and our culture, I draw more heavily on the work of Vicki Mayer, Miranda J. Banks and John Thornton Caldwell in Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries. Their approach to media production, is grounded in questions of power that are central to cultural studies concerns. Particularly how cultural producers, in this case, wildlife filmmakers, inhabit and exercise it. Although the authors do not reference field theory, Mayer’s notion of ‘culture as production’ and ‘production as culture’ may be seen as an extension of Bordieu and Benson’s work, as it similarly justifies justify the microanalysis of particular media institutions. 140 Unlike

139 Berger and Luckman, 146-148. 140 Vicki Mayer, Miranda J. Banks, and John Thornton Caldwell. (Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries. New York: Routledge. 2014): 4. 56 field theory, however, Mayer et al.’s approach seems to acknowledge media production as

‘creativity with constraints,’ adopting a labor studies framework in the Gramscian tradition.141

On another level, I draw on constructivist theories of Nature that challenge essentialist interpretations of ‘Nature’ and ‘society.’ A constructivist approach to Nature broadly refers to the hypothesis that, despite what mass-market nature images may depict, Nature is not a physical entity separate from human society, instead it is an idea that is constantly constructed and re- constructed in interaction with human society. Contrary to popular narratives, real nature is only accessed through social constructions such as language, consciousness, shared meanings.142

When nature becomes a frame into which we project cultural values, however, it lends to those values the power and legitimacy of naturalness. This study demonstrates how the vision of nature presented by wildlife films, or “Nature’s Veil,” is anything but natural, instead it is a highly selective portrait of Nature with significant commercial, as well as ideological, interests.

The next chapter will not only shed light on these dual interests, it will also prove the boundaries between Nature and culture and human and animal more deeply to assess the implications of natural storytelling with regard to how humans understand themselves in relation to the beyond-human world.

141 The author elaborates more on how Gramsci’s work informs this project in Chapter IV. 142 See my discussion of Baudrillard and ‘real’ Nature in chapter IV. 57

CHAPTER III: WILDLIFE FILM AND THE PRODUCTION OF SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE

“My own dominant recollection of [Tinbergen’s] undergraduate lectures on animal behaviour was of his ruthlessly mechanistic attitude to animal behaviour. and the machinery that underlay it. I was particularly taken with two phrases of his – ‘behaviour machinery’ and ‘equipment for survival’. When I came to write my own first book, I combined them into the brief phrase ‘survival machine’.” (Dawkins et al. 1991: xii).

There is a remarkable deficit in critical studies of animals, or the representation of animals, in the humanities. In the course of writing this thesis, I have become painfully aware of the general lack of humanistic scholarly engagement with scientific modes of inquiry such as behaviorism. Brett Mills, who has published several pieces on wildlife documentaries, received a considerable amount of negative media attention in the UK for his research. He explains that

Much of the response I got was highly negative and critical, including receiving hate mail. While some respondents engaged with the argument I presented – which concerned the ethics of documentary filming – what is telling is the extent to which my authority in having anything to say about animals was commonly rejected by many, and this consistently rested on the fact that I wasn’t a scientist. The argument went that a non- scientist cannot know or say anything about animals, and therefore we have no need to listen to their argument.143

However, animals account for an extremely significant proportion of what television broadcasts. For more than a century, wildlife films have offered a visual, dynamic way for people to learn about wildlife and other natural phenomena. For example, as mentioned in the previous chapter, natural history and wildlife programs on the National Geographic Channel often draw twice as many viewers as the average audience for non-Nature programming.

According to wildlife filmmaker Chris Palmer, “during prime time in September 2008, more

143 Brett Mills. Animals on Television: The Cultural Making of the Non-Human. (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2017). 58 than 30 million viewers tuned into Animal Planet, which is now seen in 94 million households in the United States and more than 220 million internationally.”144

Robert Dingwall and Meryl Aldridge refer to wildlife films as a “globally significant source of information available to the public about issues in biological and environmental sciences.”145 In 2006, they conducted a case study of audience reception of scientific principles in wildlife film such as Darwinian evolution. Ultimately, they conclude that “economic and cultural constraints limit the capacity of wildlife films to communicate the complexities of science.”146 Like other scholars, Dingwall and Aldridge suggest that blue chip programming is better understood as a form of “spectacle.”147 Although “factual entertainment” is indeed a growing sector of television programming, studies like these suggest the difficulty of adequately communicating complex environmental issues such as climate change to mass audiences.148

In the next chapter, I briefly explore wildlife filmmaking as an interface between professional and amateur science in the section entitled “A Technological History of the

Hobbyist Model.” This section will discuss how wildlife filmmaking emerged from the scientific field of bioacoustics and thus from a scientific desire to document and catalog the natural world utilizing increasingly sophisticated technology. For centuries, wildlife film has helped audiences make sense of the world they inhabit. This chapter will dig deeper into the boundaries between

144 Chris Palmer. Shooting in the Wild: An Insider’s Account of Making Movies in the Animal Kingdom. (San Francisco CA: Sierra Club Books. 2010). 145 Robert Dingwall and Meryl Aldridge. “Television Wildlife Programming as a Source of Popular Scientific Information: A Case Study of Evolution.” Public Understanding of Science 15(2). 2006: 132. 146 Dingwall and Aldridge, 147. 147 Dingwall and Aldridge, 147. 148 Dingwall and Aldridge, 147. 59

Nature and culture and human and animal to assess the implications of natural storytelling with regard to how humans understand themselves in relation to the beyond-human world.

Initially, I intended for this chapter to answer the following key research questions: (1)

How does the production ecology of wildlife filmmaking shape the content of specific wildlife films? And (2) what are the dominant interests of the wildlife film industry? However, as I began to notice an emergent theme across multiple interviews related to the construction of scientific discourse in wildlife film, I revised this first question to ask the following: In what ways are filmic representations of animals embroiled with human matters, norms, and ideologies? More specifically, what is the legacy of the scientific theory of behaviorism, or ethology, in wildlife film, and what are its implications for cultural understandings of the non-human world? I similarly revised and specified my second question to ask how has the wildlife film industry worked to establish itself as a legitimate and trustworthy source of scientific information over the past several decades?

As Jean-Baptiste Gouyon writes in his history of “BBC Wildlife Documentaries in the

Age of Attenborough,” “these stories are not simply educative; they are also edifying. To teach people how to order the world is also to teach them how to position themselves in relation to others in the social world.”149 While wildlife filmmakers possess powerful tools to shape public opinion in an era of environmental crisis, the reality of the wildlife film industry poses several challenges. The following section provides a broad historical overview of the development of the genre that not only illuminates the tensions between education and entertainment that underlie

149 Jean-Baptiste Gouyon BBC Wildlife Documentaries in the Age of Attenborough. SpringerLINK eBooks - English/International Complete Collection. (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019): 12. 60 the genre but also suggests a deliberate and distinct transition in the industry to a more

“scientifically informed” project.

From Showmanship to Science

The term “natural history film,” which is often used interchangeably with “wildlife film,” began to appear in trade papers around 1913.150 It was not until the mid-20th century that the term

“wildlife film” emerged.151 Wildlife filmmaker Chris Palmer describes early 20th-century wildlife films, like those of Martin and Osa Johnson, as “a cross between filmmaking and show business.”152 The famous couple “mounted safaris, captured dramatic footage of hunting, and, for the first time in filmmaking history, brought audiences images of exotic wild animals.”153 The

Johnsons’ primary goal was to astonish and entertain their audience. Their hunts were often staged, as they would harass big-game animals until they charged the camera. Then, they would shoot them in “self-defense.”154 Despite their unethical practices, the wildlife films of Martin and

Osa Johnson attracted a large and passionate following, revealing a cultural fascination with watching wild animals on film.155 The Johnsons inspired a new generation of filmmakers interested in wildlife films’ educational and entertainment value.

During the 1950s, Disney realized the profitability of the genre and took advantage of technicolor and other advances in film technology to capture wildlife in its natural habitat.

150 Derek Bousé. Wildlife Films. (Philadelphia PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2000): 37. 151 Bousé, Wildlife Films, 37. 152 Chris Palmer. Shooting in the Wild: An Insider’s Account of Making Movies in the Animal Kingdom. (San Francisco CA: Sierra Club Books. 2010): 34. 153 Palmer, Shooting in the Wild, 34. 154 Palmer, 35. 155 Bousé, 53. 61

According to Ronald B. Tobias, Disney films often anthropomorphized wildlife and placed it within a middle-class moral code.156 Unlike earlier wildlife films, which capitalized on a violent shock factor, Disney films used emotion-filled stories, distinguished between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ animal behavior, and emphasized traditional family values. For example, one scene from White

Wilderness (1958) celebrates a mother polar bear cuddling and nursing her cubs. In the following scene, her cubs’ playful behavior scares off a herd of walruses, and the narrator tells the audience that this intimidation is known as “trading on your father’s reputation.”157 Polar bears and other large mammals with which humans easily empathize are known within the wildlife film industry as “charismatic mega-fauna.”158 Reptiles, rodents, and insects, in contrast, are often demonized or overlooked by wildlife films altogether. The lemmings in White Wilderness, for example, are described by the narrator as “nasty little rodents” burrowing in their underground nests. Palmer and other filmmakers suggest that the disproportionate focus on charismatic mega-fauna in wildlife films has had dire consequences for conservation efforts.159

By 1957, the BBC established its natural history unit and began producing an abundance of high-budget and high-quality wildlife films. For the first time, cinematographers spent months, even years, tracking and filming animals in extraordinary locations.160 Wildlife filmmakers refer to this distinctive yet controversial style as “blue chip” film. The accessibility of high-definition cameras and drones on the part of film producers and the increased access to

156 Ronald B. Tobias. Film and the American Moral Vision of Nature: Theodore Roosevelt to Walt Disney. (2011); Cynthia Chris. Watching Wildlife. (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. 2006). 157 White Wilderness. Directed by James Algar. Disney. 1958. 158 Palmer, Shooting in the Wild, 2010; Filmmaker 2. Telephone interview by author. March 22, 2019. 159 Palmer, Shooting in the Wild. 160 Palmer, Shooting in the Wild. 62 widescreen televisions in the homes of consumers are responsible for the spectacular content featured in, and the widespread success of, blue chip wildlife films.161

Gouyon’s writes the following in his history of the BBC:

In the 1930s, visual culture was dominated by cinema, and early television was perceived at first as necessarily standing in competition with it. To create a space for television in the media landscape where it could co-exist peacefully with cinema, proponents of the new medium presented it as fact-based, as opposed to cinema, defined as fiction based, the realm of illusion. Thus, Cecil Lewis, one of the co-founders of the BBC noted in 1937: ‘I do not believe [television] will conflict with the cinema or the theatre; as broadcasting did, it will develop its own technique. … I believe that its unique feature, in which it differs from any other form of entertainment or news service, is in its ability to bring the actuality before the public at the very moment it is happening.162

In July 1960, the British government appointed the Pilkington Committee to consider the future of British public broadcasting.163 One of the primary concerns of this committee was whether or not the BBC should launch a new channel to provide more. educational, particularly scientific, content to viewers. Ultimately, the committee launched BBC2 and appointed David

Attenborough as its head. From then on, Gouyon argues that “wildlife television in Britain took a decisive turn toward scientifically informed coverage of natural history topics, reconfiguring the relationship between nature and humans, film-making and science.”164 This marks a sharp divergence from the wildlife films of the previous decades, like those of Martin and Osa

Johnson. While Gouyon, along with many industry professionals, tends to celebrate this transition, this more “scientifically informed project” considered wildlife from an

161 John Merli. “Making a Highly Defined ‘Planet Earth.’” 21 February 2007. TVTechnology.com. http: //www.tvtechnology.com/news/0002/making-a-highly-defined-planet-earth/184330 162 Gouyon, “BBC Wildlife Documentaries in the age of Attenborough.” 163 Gouyon, “BBC Wildlife Documentaries in the age of Attenborough.” 164 Gouyon, “BBC Wildlife Documentaries in the age of Attenborough.” 63 anthropocentric standpoint. In all of my interviews with filmmakers, the issue of anthropomorphism emerged as perhaps the most controversial issue facing the industry today.

However, many critiques of contemporary wildlife films’ anthropomorphic tendencies fail to recognize that anthropomorphism is merely a symptom of a larger flaw in contemporary scientific discourse that rests on firm divisions between Nature and culture and another between human and animal. It is not coincidental that the development of ethology, the scientific study of animal behavior that embodies this mechanistic view of Nature, parallels the development of wildlife film and television in the postwar period. This study not only seeks to problematize framing wildlife in terms of its usefulness for humanity, or as a resource for the production of knowledge, but also to critique the legacy of ethology. Animals and Nature do not exist to provide a mirror held to society or a source of social-political order. In the age of the

Anthropocene, we must destabilize the binary relationship between Nature and culture and human and animal in order to see the human as part of Nature and the environment rather than apart from it.

Mechanical Objectivity and Wildlife Film

According to Cynthia Chris’s Watching Wildlife, “the wildlife genre, as much if not more so than other cinematic genres, presents itself as an objective record of ‘natural and obvious meaning,’ when it is in fact, like any other representational medium, a carefully chosen, framed, edited and narrated set of signs.”165 One of the first codes to emerge in my research was that of

‘mechanical objectivity.’ It became clear to me that technology plays a crucial role in the

165 Chris, xix. 64 presentation of wildlife film as “an objective record of natural and obvious meaning.166 In a 1984 interview, David Attenborough explains that

In fact, there is precious little that is natural … in any film. You distort speed if you want to show things like plants growing or look in detail at the way an animal moves. You distort light levels. You distort distribution, in the sense that you see dozens of different species in a jungle within a few minutes, so that the places seem to be teeming with life. You distort size by using close up lenses. And you can equally well distort sound. What the filmmaker is trying to do is to convey a particular experience in as vivid a way as he can.167

Blue chip productions, in particular, are known to showcase innovative technologies through highly defined imagery of Nature and wildlife. Filmmaker 13 cites the renowned UK tech company Ammonite, which develops highly specialized equipment for blue chip natural history films. He describes the following:

[Ammonite] is known as the real tech company. They're always developing new things and new ways to film wildlife. And so they've done the shows where they've put a camera inside a fake penguin egg, and then you get the view from a penguin egg, or they've put a camera inside of fake sea turtle and the sea turtle swings around the ocean and sees the other species. And it's not a camera man with the big scuba gear. And so the animals behave more naturally. They say, ‘oh my gosh, we're changing the way we're going to see wildlife.’168

The philosophy of mechanical objectivity emerged in the 17th century as the fundamental social and intellectual problem of the scientific revolution.169 It served as a unifying model for

166 Chris, xix. 167 J. Burgess, and D. Unwin. ‘Exploring the living planet with David Attenborough.’ (Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 8(2), 1984, 93–113): 103. 168 Gouyon, “BBC Wildlife Documentaries in the age of Attenborough,” 7. 169 Carolyn Merchant. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. New York: HarperOne. 1989): 192-252. 65 science and society through the new metaphor of the machine. It also served as a conceptual framework for values that were fully compatible with burgeoning commercial capitalism in the

West.170 Ammonite, according to filmmaker 13’s comments, has capitalized on and branded itself per this notion of mechanical objectivity. In wildlife film, mechanical objectivity helps perpetuate the relatively heterodox idea that insights about the world are derived from the objective interactions between a filmmaking apparatus and Nature. In turn, it also helps to establish media as a principal form of information about Nature and wildlife. It suggests that television producers armed with cinematographic equipment, rather than professional naturalists or field scientists armed with scientific instruments, should be responsible for both documenting and presenting scientific information. However, as Attenborough’s above explanation of the complexities of these films’ post-production suggests, a filmmaker’s intervention ultimately results in the creation of Nature, rather than a purported objective representation of it.

When Attenborough eventually took up a management position at BBC2 in the early

1960s, he immediately emphasized the importance of filming animals in their own natural habitats and the critical role of post-production in enhancing the viewing experience.171 He often stressed the importance of visual close-ups of animals and the tools of visualization. In one interview with Gouyon, Attenborough explains that

The first programme will deal with the various fascinating methods used to render animals inconspicuous. Their concealment value is not always obvious at first sight, and often their true significance can only be appreciated by seeing the animals in their natural surroundings. For that reason, we hope to reconstruct in the studio a piece of a tropical

170 Merchant, The Death of Nature, 192-252. 171 Merchant, The Death of Nature, 192-252. 66

swamp and a scene from a Pacific island. Viewers will then be able to judge for themselves the success of the camouflage devices we shall show.

In many of my own interviews with wildlife filmmakers, there is a similarly strong emphasis on post-production. For example, filmmaker 6 stated the following:

The best advice I could give anybody who wants to produce direct or working in wildlife filmmaking is to spend six months in an editing room to understand what is actually required. Yeah. So many people do this the other way around. They think, ‘Oh, I'm going to go out and I'm going to be a cameraman.’ It's like, no, don't be a camera person first, be an editing assistant first. That it's the best way to learn how things go together.172

The notion of ‘how things go together’ refers to the grammar of visual storytelling in wildlife film. In interviews, most filmmakers suggest the need to ‘capture everything’ or to collect as much raw footage in the field as possible. This footage is subsequently taken apart and put back together in post-production.

Technological distortion of footage emerged as a recurring theme early on in my interviews with filmmakers. Specifically, time is distorted to create an image of a planet that is, according to Attenborough’s comment, “teeming with life.” While environmental protection often necessitates the intervention of technology, I find the distortion of time and space in wildlife film to be particularly problematic for environmental politics. The concept of the

Anthropocene, coined by Nobel-prize winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen, describes a new geochronological epoch of unprecedented human impact on the biological, chemical, and geophysical processes of the Earth’s system, including but not limited to global climate change, pollution, soil degradation, and a dramatic and rapid loss of biodiversity. According to the World

172 Filmmaker 6. “Wildlife Filmmaking.” Telephone interview by author. October 2, 2019. 67

Wildlife Fund, “populations of wild fish, birds, reptiles, and mammals have shrunk by an average of 58% over the last 40 years… wildlife today accounts for only 3% of the biomass of terrestrial vertebrates, the rest being humans (30%) and livestock (67%).”173 Thus, while more than 30 million viewers and 94 million households tune into Animal Planet during prime-time,

Earth’s sixth mass extinction is well underway. Many of the most daunting challenges of the

Anthropocene result from what Horn and Bergthaller call “a clash of scales.”174 This includes an accurate representation of naturally occurring events. While the concept of sustainability was energized by a focus on conserving local environments for the benefit of coming generations, understanding the Anthropocene involves fostering not only a sense of place in the local sense but also, more importantly, ‘a sense of planet.’ The technological distortion of time in wildlife films might suggest that the medium of film and television are ill-suited for pushing the boundaries of human timescales. A range of prominent scholars in the environmental humanities assert that issues of scale and scale variance are of paramount importance in coming to terms with the Anthropocene. Geological and planetary timescales are often referred to as ‘deep time.’

While it is difficult to conceive of an ‘aesthetic of the Anthropocene,’ many scholars see great potential in visual art’s ability to offer an alternative discourse concerning he Anthropocene than that that offered by science and politics. According to Davis and Turpin, “art provides […] a non-moral form of address that offers a range of discursive, visual, and sensual strategies that are not confined to the regimes of scientific objectivity, political moralism, or psychological

173 Eva Horn and Hannes Bergthaller. The Anthropocene: Key Issues for the Humanities. (New York, NY: Routledge, an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, 2020): 2. 174 Horn and Bergthaller, 141. 68 depression.”175 Wildlife film is uniquely positioned for making the abstract concept of the

Anthropocene thinkable and perceptible.

Interestingly, when filmmakers are asked about their experience with issues of ethics and honesty in the industry, most cite any direct interference with Nature and/or wildlife on-site as a prime example of a violation of an unspoken wildlife filmmaking code of ethics and honesty.

However, the technological distortion in the production stages required to produce high-quality wildlife film, as echoed in Attenborough’s interview, is often mentioned by filmmakers as part of the storytelling and filmmaking process. Indeed, no filmmaker cited technological distortion in post-production as a form of interference with ‘accurate’ or ‘objective’ representations of Nature.

In his history of the BBC, Gouyon argues that “once the production of wildlife television has become the work of professionals, claims to objectivity for the films they present rest on the idea of ‘mechanical objectivity.’ Filmmaker comments seem to suggest that the images appearing on- screen “stand as the outcome of a process which does not involve a direct encounter between a human subject and Nature but one between mechanical devices and Nature.”176 When filmmakers claim to objectively represent Nature using technology, they draw a categorical distinction between Nature and culture, which in effect, depoliticizes Nature by preventing audiences from imagining what a healthy, sustainable, and responsible relationship between human and Nature might look like.

175 H. Davis and E. Turpin. Art in the Anthropocene, Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies. (London, Open Humanities Press. 2015). 176 Gouyon, BBC Wildlife Documentaries in the Age of Attenborough, 7. 69

The Making of Nature

In order to answer two of my primary research questions, which are (1) How do wildlife filmmakers represent themselves and their work in an era of environmental crisis? and (2) how do wildlife filmmakers form communities of shared practices, languages, and cultural understandings of the world?, I began by interrogating how wildlife filmmakers brand themselves as trustworthy figures of scientific expertise. A close examination of these making-of segments and other similarly promotional materials reveals that these are not representations of the reality of media production but rather well-crafted storytelling devices that are highly selective in their depiction of the filmmaking process. Mayer explains the following:

We frequently come to know about media producers and their work, ironically, through the representations they make. From the “making-of” videos that cull DVD customers to entertainment television tabloids that ‘report’ on the excitement on the sets, the non- fiction portrayals of production that often reflect the drama of some of their producers’ best known fictional works. To wit: conflict and chaos frequently precede teamwork and collaboration, leading ultimately to creativity and the commercial success in recitations of how the production occurs.177

Over the past two decades, the wildlife film industry has seen the rise of these ‘making- of-documentaries,’ or a short segment dedicated to revealing the shooting of iconic sequences from the episode. While these segments may appear inconsequential, I argue that they are yet another example of how the wildlife film industry solicits trust from their audiences. Like technology, they help redefine the relationship of wildlife film with objectivity and with Nature.

They also have significant epistemological implications, as they make the case for filmmakers to

177 Mayer et al., Production Studies, 2. 70 be seen as participants in a highly scientific endeavor. These segments have recently become a staple of every high-profile wildlife film. One director tells me,

I started my directing career making filmmakers look good… Apparently, the BBC says these segments test very highly because people are interested how things are made/obtained. Perhaps they are, but at what cost to engagement? Most movies are lost to awe now because whatever is put on screen, we all go ‘it’s amazing what computers can do…’ and leave it at that. This is why my respect for pre-digital filmmaking, physical filmmaking, is at an all-time high.178

‘Making-of’ sequences are well-crafted storytelling devices that are highly selective in their depiction of the filmmaking process. For example, these shorts are usually composed solely of cinematographers in exotic locations and rarely depict the film in the editing and post- production process. They typically depict cinematographers as hybrid hobbyist-field scientists. In

2006, immediately after the release of Planet Earth, BBC Books published a promotional print version of these shorts entitled, “Planet Earth: The Making of an Epic Series” by David

Nicholson-Lord. Its promotion blurb reads:

The best stories are the true ones, and there can be few BBC series that have generated as many gripping tales as ‘Planet Earth’. With producers and camera people travelling to every continent and almost every corner of the world, from the highest mountains to the lowest depths, their adventures have been many and unforgettable. Using every kind of craft and technological wizardry imaginable, from helicopters and submersibles, to satellites and remote cameras, they have also witnessed remarkable things. And what makes so much of the series special are the unique aerial perspectives from which they have filmed so many of the animals. This book tells the dramatic tales of their encounters, discoveries and many trials and tribulations. Also revealed are the ingenious means by which some of the unique sequences in the series have been made. Memorable sequences filmed in the wild include wild camels in the snow in the Gobi desert, a giant (truly giant) salamander hunting at night, desert lions capturing an oryx, golden snub- nosed monkeys playing high in the mountains of China, a giant panda in a cave tending her tiny newborn and a snow leopard chasing its prey down a sheer rock face. Used for

178 Filmmaker 7. “Wildlife Filmmaking.” Email exchange with author. January 6, 2020. 71

the first time in any book are special photographs taken from high-definition film footage, which will bring the tales to life.179

A close analysis of this book reveals that it is equally selective in its depiction of the filmmaking process. In fact, no space is dedicated to the post-production process, a focus on post-production would disrupt the illusion and reveal the highly constructed and artificial Nature of wildlife behavior sequences. In the ‘making-of’ format, filmmakers are framed as commentators who stand outside of the action and acting as a vehicle for the story. The following excerpt from a ‘making-of’ sequence entitled Making the Waves on BBC1 was coded by Dingwall and Aldridge:

Caption “Svalbard – Day 1”

DA: On the Arctic islands of Svalbard Doug Allen and polar expert Jason Roberts are in search of polar bears. They’re carrying everything they need to live up here for four weeks but almost straight away they run into a problem.

Doug: We’ve got what we call whiteout when the clouds have come over we’ve got no contrast. The next route lies out over the seas and we need good conditions for that because the series might not be too good so we’ve decided just to stop here at this snow covered in the hope that the weather gets better.

(...)

Caption “Svalbard Day 7”

DA: Near the shoreline in Svalbard the ice is constantly moving and polar bears come here to try and catch seals but to find a white bear in this white wilderness requires a great deal of persistence.

Doug: Eleven hours I feel as though these things have been glued to my eyeballs. One bear who was much too wary of us to allow us to get anywhere close. A long day for not very much.

(...)

179 David Nicholson-Lord. Planet Earth: The Making of an Epic Series. (London: BBC Books. 2006). 72

Caption “Svalbard Day 12”

DA: Back in the Arctic the weather is still holding things up. Doug: This is definitely not a day to go looking for bears. It’s about minus 15 lots of wind it’s so ferocious so I’m now going back in....

(...)

DA: One of the advantages of working in the polar regions is that in the summer the sun never sets and you can work out on the ice right round the clock. Just as well for Doug and Jason who still haven’t found their polar bear.

Jason: Freeze dried curry and chicken absolutely lovely at minus 20, mix it with a bit of water. Tastes like crap but you can live on it. DA: Despite the food things did seem to be looking up. At long last after days of searching they had found a polar bear cub... and its mother. The light was ideal for filming but the bears were not being cooperative.

Doug: That was so frustrating. We had this female and a cub and we’d been kinda watching her for the last three four hours doing a bit hunting not very close and anyway she came into a nice position and then I took a few steps towards her and she was a long way away but she just completely reacted the wrong way and I lost all her confidence and just pissed off somewhere and it’s such a nice day for filming and I thought we had.

Caption “Svalbard Day 18”

DA: Despite the set backs two days later Doug’s persistence finally paid off and he was able to win back the confidence of the bears.

Doug:... it’s five o’clock in the morning and the 18th day of the shoot and I think we just cracked it. We had a female there with the cub and she did quite a lot of pouncing about at about 18 meters away just a nice sort of distance and you know what she did when she was finished she was so relaxed she sat down and gathered the cub into her and suckled her head on to the camera. The weight off your mind when you get something like that it’s incredible... 180

180 Coded by Dingwall and Aldridge, 144-146. 73

The point here is less that these films take an extraordinary amount of time and labor to produce and more that the bear behavior presented in Frozen Seas was filmed so that it could be edited to fit a prior narrative structure. As Dingwall and Aldridge point out, “Where the Grand Narrative is the presenter’s quest, the everyday reality of science as full of contingency, untidiness and unsolved problems can be much more easily accommodated.”181

While a full-fledged critique of these sorts of self-promotional materials could comprise its own chapter, very few women and non-white faces are featured in ‘making-of’ materials. I think that the following images usefully illustrate the idea that ‘making-of’ materials help create a grand narrative of mechanical objectivity and adventure.

Figure 6. Fred Oliver with the Camera.

181 Dingwall and Aldridge, 145. 74

Figure 7. Tom Clarke with the Camera.

Figure 8. Jeff Wilson with the Binoculars.

In a way, these photos are vaguely reminiscent of early wildlife filmmakers like Martin and Osa Johnson, who were essentially hunting with the camera. Figure 7 illustrates the colonial dimensions of mechanical objectivity and the tourist gaze, as well as a brand of masculinity that is closely associated with hobbyist and/or adventurist filmmaking. Figures 6 and 8 are obviously reminiscent of Wanderer and other the romantic nature paintings of the 18th and 19th centuries. In these images, Nature is sublime rather than pastoral. It is framed as vast, powerful, obscure and unknowable. The subject in figure 6, for example, representing man/civilization, is visually separate from the flurry beyond. 75

A close analysis of the history of wildlife filmmaking from the Johnsons to the BBC suggests that filmmakers were not always framed as field scientists. In any production studies or industry-level analysis of media institutions, it is crucial that we understand the social construction of filmmakers as public figures, in this case, public figures of scientific and mechanical expertise.

Constructing the Telenaturalist Identity

While wildlife films represent a globally significant source of scientific information, there has been little attention paid to the genre as an important source of social pre-cognition.

While there is now a considerable literature on potential sources of scientific information, much of this work is narrowly focused on content that is explicitly labeled factual at the point of consumption.182 The intention of this section is not to accuse popular science, whether in natural history film or elsewhere, of misrepresenting scientific work as doing so would rely on an ideology that perpetuates separation between science and society and politics. Instead, I simply intend to draw attention to the highly social nature of the production of scientific knowledge and discourse. In fact, this study urges us to recognize that people who are not scientific practitioners, including but not limited to wildlife filmmakers, can stand as legitimate spokespersons for

Nature and the environment. Arguably, each form of communication inevitability results in the production of knowledge. The question at this point is how do non-scientific experts such as Sir

David Attenborough become publicly legitimate spokespersons for Nature? More importantly,

182 See D.A. Kirby. “Science Consultants, Fictional Films and Scientific Practice,” Social Studies of Science 33. 2003: 231–68; S. Locke. “The Use of Scientific Discourse by Creation Scientists: Some Preliminary Findings,” Public Understanding of Science 3. 1994: 403–24; J. Turney. Frankenstein’s Footsteps: Science, Genetics and Popular Culture. (New Haven: Yale University Press. 1998). 76 what are the mechanisms and beliefs involved in this process of legitimization? These questions permit further interrogation into the ideology of Nature presented on-screen.

During the era of Martin and Osa Johnson, wildlife filmmaking was rooted in the late

Victorian culture of rationalized bourgeois leisure.183 This era of wildlife filmmaking was dictated by a socially stratified access to Nature via imperial hunting grounds. It is not until the postwar years that wildlife film took a sharp sociobiological turn.184 By sociobiological, I mean there was a greater emphasis on the social dimensions of the interactions between individual organisms and their environment in the films themselves.185 By studying animals and plants, ecologists of the postwar years hoped to develop a biological understanding of problems confronting human society. This sociobiological turn is accompanied by an overt focus on animal behavior in wildlife films (informed by the scientific field of behaviorism) as a perceived window into human behaviors. However, as historian of science Gregg Mitman urges, “We must stop looking to Nature for reassurances about humanity, for we will inevitably see – as in the proverbial mirror in the story of Snow White and the seven dwarfs – a reflection of what we

183 See Sheila Jasanoff, “Breaking the Waves: Comment on H.M. Collins and Robert Evans, 'the Third Wave of Science Studies'." Social Studies of Science 33, no. 3. (2003): 393. 184 As I demonstrated last chapter’s section entitled, “Hobbyist Filmmaking and the Tourist Gaze,” contemporary wildlife filmmaking is about access to technology. 185 The concept of ‘sociobiology’ is often conflated with social Darwinism. According to historian of science, Gregg Mitman, “part of the problem with the received historical view of sociobiology id the preeminent status that evolutionary theory and Mendelian genetics held in the disciplinary hierarchy of twentieth-century biological sciences and the subsequent attention placed on these subjects by historians of biology. These fields represent the scientific bridge that spans the interstices of social Darwinism, eugenics, the modern synthesis, and sociobiology.” See Gregg Mitman. The State of Nature: Ecology, Community, and American Social Thought, 1900-1950. (The University of Chicago Press. 1992). 77 want to see.”186 The telenaturalist plays a critical role in the dissemination of sociobiological ideology.

In the wildlife film industry, Attenborough is among the most renowned figures. Over the past several decades, he has accumulated a remarkable amount of symbolic capital.187 Of course, there are other well-known examples of presenter-led wildlife programs such as Steve Irwin’s

The Crocodile Hunter. Early in his career, Irwin established a self-brand based on providing viewers with brief glimpses of dangerous exotic beasts up-close or to observe animals behaving unsuspicious of the presence of a human observer.188 Irwin’s “reality-style” wildlife film differs greatly from blue chip conventions. One filmmaker made the following observation:

The difference being is that the natural world [in Steve Irwin films] is reduced to sidekick. And that's why I had a problem with it because it was all about, look at me and look what I'm doing with this animal. And the fact that he died because of a stingray injury - it's absolutely tragic, but that's what happens when you do what you do. You run those risks. But when you reduce the so-called subject of your film based on the character of the person who's doing … I'm not talking about Attenborough wandering around the Galapagos, obviously that's a bulletproof genre in and of itself, the guy's 92 or something. It just blows your mind.189

Attenborough’s position of dominance in the blue chip industry is unparalleled, as echoed in Filmmaker 7’s explanation. Cultural authority enhances the commercial value of entertainment. Thus, Attenborough is the prime example of the historical construction of the

186 Gregg Mitman. The State of Nature: Ecology, Community, and American Social Thought, 1900-1950. (The University of Chicago Press. 1992): 9. 187 For further discussion of “symbolic capital” see Pierre Bordieu. Raisons Pratiques. Sur la Théorie de l’Action. (Paris: Editions du Seuil. 1994); See also J. Burgess, and D. Unwin, 1984, ‘Exploring the living planet with David Attenborough’, Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 8(2), 93–113, 103. 188 See Louson (2018) on the genealogy of wildlife documentaries’ spectacular dimension. See also Mitman (1993). 189 Filmmaker 7. “Wildlife Filmmaking.” Telephone interview by author. October 3, 2019. 78 telenaturalist as a figure of expertise. I frequently refer to Attenborough as a ‘telenaturalist’ because, for most of his career, he was neither a cameraman nor quite a producer-director.190

Instead, he is a narrator, presenter, or storyteller who frequently interprets natural history and scientific phenomena for audiences.

While Attenborough presents as a figure of scientific expertise, studies illustrate the various ways that wildlife program narration is deeply imbricated in Judeo-Christian ideology and teleology. For example, while Attenborough often narrates from an omniscient perspective, he is rarely featured in the shot. Moreover, according to Dingwall and Aldridge’s case study on television wildlife programming as an endorsement of creationist accounts of evolution,

Attenborough takes on a ‘god-like’ presence in these films. They argue that blue chip wildlife films’ pressure to establish a strong narrative “discourage[s] explorations of the contingency and amorality of evolution. The outcome is, typically, a text that does not challenge creationist accounts and may even implicitly endorse them.”191 Since the early 1990s, cultural studies of media have acknowledged the negotiated nature of audience-text interactions. Because there has been little research on audience reception of the wildlife film genre, Dingwall and Aldridge rely on textual analysis to theorize audience responses to the genre. However, their findings suggest that audience responses may play a significant role in viewers’ ability to effectively engage with scientific developments.

190 Gouyon, “BBC Wildlife Documentaries in the age of Attenborough.” 191 Robert Dingwall and Meryl Aldridge. “Television Wildlife Programming as a source of Popular Scientific Information: A Case Study of Evolution.” Public Understanding of Science 15. 2006: 131-152. 79

Their initial analyses show an unexpectedly large number of teleological (purposive or goal-directed) elements in contexts relating to the evolution, or evolutionary behavior, of the animals being described or depicted in wildlife films.192 The authors collected their sample from

UK terrestrial, satellite, and cable broadcasting during October and November 2001. In their coding and analysis of program soundtracks, they performed a conventional inductive reading of the transcripts as well as a systematic word-search for terms potentially implicative of intelligent design creationism (IDC), including “design,” “plan,” “goal,” and “strategy.”193 They find that there are “a few occurrences of ‘design’ as a noun in a relatively unelaborated way but

192 According to Dingwall and Aldridge, “Evolution is a particular area of contest between scientists and lay people, especially in the United States, so that the approach adopted by a widely consumed popular medium might have considerable implications for the outcome. Over the past 30 years, a substantial body of scholarship has examined the debates between creationists and evolutionists (Park, 2001). This work is mostly American, reflecting the historical and contemporary prominence of this contest, particularly through a succession of struggles for control of school curricula, mainly in the Southern States. Although the evolutionists were thought to have won a moral victory in the 1925 trial of schoolteacher John Scopes (Tennessee v. Scopes), the defendant was convicted and the Tennessee statute prohibiting the teaching of evolution was not repealed until 1967. Similar laws were passed in Arkansas and Mississippi and the topic of evolution was omitted from most 1930s high school biology textbooks (Nelkin, 1976, quoted in Barker, 1985). Each state and community reached its own accommodation between biblical literalism and evolutionary thought until the perceived challenge of Soviet technology in the late 1950s provoked national elites to press for the modernization of science education. This revived old conflicts, leading eventually to a Supreme Court ruling (Epperson v. Arkansas, 393 U.S. 97 (1968)) that state bans on the teaching of evolution violated the First Amendment, requiring neutrality in matters of religion (Nelkin, 1982)… The continuing influence of creationism can be seen in US surveys, which show that Americans are more skeptical about evolutionary thinking than almost any other nation. Reviewing Gallup poll data from 1982 until 1997, Bishop (1998) notes the consistent finding that about 45 percent of respondents stated that they believed in the literal truth of Genesis, about 40 percent believed in a theistic account,7 where God guided the evolutionary process, and only about 10 percent accepted the Darwinian orthodoxy. Comparable questions asked in the International Social Survey Program (ISSP), covering 21 developed nations, demonstrate that American adults were the least likely to accept evolution. ISSP data from 1993 show 45 percent of American respondents agreeing that human beings were descended from earlier species of animals compared with 74 percent of UK respondents (Gendall et al., 1995). US Science and Technology Indicators 2002 noted that its 2000 public understanding survey was the first occasion when more than half of all respondents had agreed with this statement (http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind02/). More recently, however, a Harris poll of June 2005, cited in Time magazine (15 August 2005), found an increase since 1994 in the proportion of respondents who did not believe that humans had developed from an earlier species, from 45 percent to 54 percent. The main political strategy of creationists now focuses on undercutting the authority of the Darwinian account of evolution. Two main techniques are used. One involves promoting evolutionary and creationist accounts as rival hypotheses of equal standing deserving equal curriculum time (Park, 2001).” 193 Dingwall and Aldridge, 137. 80 teleological usages in verb form are more common.”194 They cite the following examples, highlighting indications of design metaphor in bold:

You will actually notice that they have a mouthful of very, very sharp dagger-like teeth. And they’re actually designed for catching their prey and holding it while it struggles and swallowing it whole. (Shark Gordon, Animal Planet, 17 November 2001)

He’s a viper and as with most species of viper the venom is designed to both kill prey and to destroy the tissue of the prey to make the digestive process that much easier. (Jeff Corwin, Animal Planet, 1 November 2001)

Now when we let him go he could very well go right up a tree because he’s got this long tail and beautiful long claws. He’s really designed for climbing. (The Crocodile Hunter, Discovery, 8 October 2001)195

While none of these examples endorse IDC or theistic evolutionary accounts outright, it is reasonable to assume that audiences would need a relatively sophisticated understanding of evolutionary theory to avoid this interpretation. Design usage in blue chip programs does not differ greatly from other subgenres, though often assumed to be a more scientifically informed form of wildlife programming. For example, in Wild Africa on BBC1, the narrator states that

“Now the killifish shows its true colors, superbly designed to flit from stream to stream in this temporary water world.”196 For audience members, the design metaphor implies the influence of a designer, which imbues the omniscient narration with a God-like quality.

The treatment of evolution is a proxy for a wide range of concerns regarding the understanding of genetics and environmental change. If the goal of blue chip programming is purely educational, then why does the genre not challenge the creationist viewer to confront the

194 Dingwall and Aldridge, 138. 195 Dingwall and Aldridge, 138. 196 Wild Africa, BBC1, 21 November 2001 cited by Dingwall and Aldridge. 81 scientific worldview that lies behind them? At crucial points, “there is an ellipsis allowing viewers to hear the narration without disrupting whatever prior framing they have brought to their viewing.”197 I argue that the material conditions of these films’ production are restrictive.

My participants explain that the blue chip industry in particular, with its emphasis on dramatic storylines and spectacle, is essentially in competition with CGI films such as Jurassic

Park and animated wildlife films. As global co-production agreements attempt to offset the skyrocketing production costs of blue chip wildlife film, there is widespread industry pressure to focus on powerful visual images of wildlife that can be re-dubbed with soundtracks in different languages, re-edited for different markets, or re-sold as stock footage.198 As one 2002 Guardian article celebrates, “We recently sold a lot to Discovery Channel’s Animal Planet and they have really stood the test of time... As long as there aren’t too many people in flares or old Ford

Cortinas the films are fine – the wildlife behaved the same way 30 years ago as it does today and did 30,000 years ago.’”199 To be potentially acceptable worldwide, these films must not only appeal to universal frames but must also appear apolitical and have as few cultural references as possible. In fact, the market-leading BBC have the ‘elimination of controversy’ inscribed in their working practices by statute.200 It is not that textual approaches to wildlife film are commercially deterministic; it is that they simply fail to illuminate the material conditions that dictate the production of these films.

197 Dingwall and Aldridge, 140. 198 Refer to section entitled, “A Technological History of the Hobbyist Model” for further discussion of these industry constraints. 199 “Jungle Death Throes.” The Guardian. February 12, 2001. 200 For the BBC see Editorial Guidelines http://www.bbc.co.uk/ guidelines/editorialguidelines/edguide/; for other broadcasters http://www.ofcom.org.uk/tv/ ifi/codes/bcode/undue/#content. 82

Thus, the presenter “stands outside the film... the naturalist film-maker looks but, unlike the hunter or the zookeeper, does not touch, and the images produced are thus able to transcend the moment of recording, universalized as natural behaviour.201 This is similar to the way in which scientific reports on Nature transcend “the circumstances of their production to produce purportedly universal accounts of the real.”202 A production studies framework is not only useful for cultural studies of media industries but also potentially insightful for interrogating the specific conditions of the production of scientific discourse. Narration in wildlife film deserves closer scrutiny, as it serves an important function in helping audiences make sense of scientific principles through presenter monologue. Dingwall and Aldridge coded the following presenter monologue from a sequence about polar bears in the blue chip film The Blue Planet: Frozen

Seas.203

1 In late March and into April female bears emerge from winter dens with their new cubs

Long shot of bears (Rear L)

2 The mother has not eaten for at least five months and she’s hungry, very hungry (0.3)

Close-up of M (L)

3 (0.6) If she doesn’t succeed in catching a regular supply of seals her milk will fail

Mid-shot of M and cub – blurry (L)

4 and her cub will die

Close-up of cub (R)

201 G. Davies. “Science, Observation and Entertainment: Competing Visions of Postwar British Natural History Television 1946–1967”, Ecumene 7. 2000: 451. 202 Dingwall and Aldridge, 141. 203 Dingwall and Aldridge, 142-143; 83

5 (0.5)

Close-up of M and cub

6 (0.2) Bears have an extraordinary sense of smell and can detect seal pups hidden in the snow from 2 kilometres away

Close-up of M sniffing snow (R)

7 (1.2)

Close-up of cub (L) Close shot of M pounding on ice (L)

8 But a female ringed seal uses several lairs

Long shot of M (L)

9 and the bear will certainly have to break into a number before it finds one that is occupied

(0.2)

Close-up of M (C)

10 (0.8) This is a crucial time for the cub

Cub digging (L)

11 by watching its mother hunt and by copying her actions

Cub (R)

12 it’s beginning to acquire the rudiments of its own hunting skills (0.6)

Cub and M in mid-shot

13 Play is also important for developing muscles and improving

Cub and M in long shot (L)

14 coordination (2.1)

Cub and M in close-up (R)

15 As the days go by the sun rises higher and remains above the horizon even at night (0.2) 84

Shot of sun directly ahead over mountains

16 (0.8)

Bears in long shot – silhouetted [light much pinker]

17 (0.2) The female bear continues to hunt until her cub is too tired and can’t keep up

Close-up of M in silhouette [same pinkish light]

18 (0.4)

Cub in close shot (R) [much whiter light]

19 She smells something (2.4)

M in close shot, pounding at snow (L) / brief close-up of seal / same shot of M / seal / M / cub

/ seal [louder music]

20 The pup escapes

Seal diving in hole

21 through a hole in its lair which leads to the sea below

Seal swimming under ice

22 (1.7)

M shaking off water (S)

23 (0.8) Only one in twenty hunts are successful but

Cub in close-up (S)

24 this mother must find a seal pup soon if her cub is not to starve to death

M in mid-shot (S)

25 (0.7)

M moves away in long shot (S)

26 (1.1) 85

Cub scampers after in same long shot (S)

This transcript reveals the highly constructed Nature of sequences in wildlife film and the extent of their artifice. Upon closer inspection, it is evident that the direction of the lighting, quality of the image, shadows, and highlights change rapidly throughout the same sequence, which suggests that these are not contemporaneously filmed images. While one might expect cutting to condense real-time footage to the space available, these variations strongly suggest that shots taken on different occasions were selected to produce a visual storyline to accompany the narration. The dramatic storyline that is so common in blue chip wildlife films is, therefore, an artificially constructed logical storyline rather than a contingent order of events.

Behaviorism

The scientific study of animal behavior, or ethology, during the 1950s and early 1960s was key to redefining wildlife film’s relationship to Nature. At the same time as wildlife television broadcasters were breaking away from amateur naturalists and big game hunters and seeking to fashion themselves as professionals, ethologists began to engage in redefining wildlife conservation as a scientifically informed project, similarly distancing themselves from earlier approaches inherited from practices of game management and the natural historical aesthetic valuing of Nature. Until this point, two cultures of wildlife television had prevailed and had competed to shape the spectacle of Nature on the British television screen. One originated in the culture of imperial big-game hunting. Gouyon cites the examples of Gerald Thompson, an entomologist, and Niko Tinbergen, a zoologist, both of whom independently developed an 86 interest in filmmaking in the 1960s.204 They argued that film was “as much a research tool as a means of communicating scientific research and its results to wider audiences: students and the interested public.” Gouyon writes:

Their motives were diverse, ranging from the idealist view that it was scientists’ social duty to communicate with non-scientists to more commercial projects. In the latter case, as Tinbergen put it, producing films for the BBC was a means of raising the funds necessary to make as many free copies of educational films as possible available to schools… At the same time as Tinbergen was developing his use of film as a research tool, he had also become adept at using these research films as teaching aids, showing specially edited versions to his students at the end of lectures, ‘after I have told the basic story at leisure’. At first, Tinbergen’s use of film as a teaching resource was limited to filming patterns of behaviour. However, in 1962–1963, he began using film not only to document his findings but also his research methods, producing what he called research- in-action films.205

Celebrating a scientific approach, however, this new style of wildlife film considered wildlife from an anthropocentric standpoint, defining it in terms of economic value and its usefulness for humanity, as a resource for the production of knowledge, and as a mirror held to society and a source of social-political order. Since then, ethology has been widely discredited as a legitimate form of research. Scientists argue that this discipline is better understood as “human ethology,” as it seeks to ultimately create a non-existent link between animal life and social-political order.

Anthropomorphism, which can be defined as the attribution of human characteristics or behavior to an animal, remains one of the main critiques of blue chip wildlife film. This issue emerged as a topic of discussion in every interview I conducted. Filmmaker 7 explains that

When human beings are in the frame, there are certain things that we know about human beings. They do certain things and you can cut in certain ways so that you can cut a

204 Niko Tinbergen, personal letter to Christopher Parsons and John Sparks, 7 September 1968, p. 1. BBCWAC WE8/600/1. 205 Gouyon, 153. 87

whole bunch of action out in the middle and you'd still understand that the person got their passport and got on a plane… If you just have a shot of somebody sitting there thinking, “I'd like to go somewhere,” And then you do a shot of a plane, and then these are the deck chair wherever he was dreaming about being, that's perfectly fine. But you can't do that with wildlife. Wildlife narrative have to be more…you have to be more precise about where the animals are and how the animals interact with each other… So all I'm saying is that with animals and animal sequences, you can't take anything for granted because people don't live with mere cats, people don't live with lions.206

By looking at wildlife behavior through the perspective of Darwinian evolution, filmmakers could construct dramatic narratives that were more compelling than the more descriptive, natural historical approach. This new generation of wildlife filmmakers developed an “interventionist” approach that authorized valued intervention, which allowed them to control the conditions of production and distill the essence of the specific behavior they wanted to depict in film. This new interventionist approach enabled filmmakers to produce films at an accelerated rate. This, however, had unforeseen consequences in terms of issues of ethics and honesty in the industry. One veteran filmmaker tells me:

When the budgets and the time to film were commensurate to the job at hand, ethics was not a problem because people behave themselves. All right. But when you shrink down a two-year schedule, National Geographic are expecting you to get the same thing in six weeks. So you have to bend your own rules to a degree. You have to have, because they look exactly like ping pong balls. You can drop those into a hole and pretend the turtle’s laying it or the crocodile's laying it. A lot of stuff like that goes on. I don't have a problem with that kind of thing. And I certainly don't have a problem of people filming things in an environment that's controlled, which is then cut in.207

Other participants tell me similar stories about the consequences of financial pressures to decrease production costs as much as possible. One of the most shocking examples is the

206 Filmmaker 7. “Wildlife Filmmaking.” Telephone interview by author. October 3, 2019. 207 Filmmaker 7. “Wildlife Filmmaking.” Telephone interview by author. October 3, 2019. 88 common industry practice known as wildlife habituation. When I asked filmmaker 6 to define this term to me, he provided the following explanation

[My colleague] used to do some teaching. And he showed students like 10 shots of animals. And he asked: ‘what should you do in these situations?’ Because there was a theme to each of the 10 shots and each of the 10 shots showed the animals walking away because they were unhappy with the filming vehicle. And the only way that you can get really, really truthfully spirited is how I call it truthfully spirited stories is the animals I've got to accept you as part of the landscape.

He went on to tell me that in order for animals to “accept you as part of the landscape,” filmmakers will gradually expose the animal to their presence, sometimes intervening with food or live prey, to habituate certain species to their presence. In one filming technique article, the

BBC justifies “Directors of natural history films are at a major disadvantage compared with their counterparts in other genres because wildlife does not take direction, so how to film wildlife and remain true to nature is one of their biggest challenges.”208 Habituation is common and typically takes place in wildlife parks or preserves dedicated as filmmaking locations. This article also deems the practice of “imprinting” as inevitable because “birds move fast and in unpredictable ways… some birds will identify the first thing that they see after hatching as their parent.”209

Beyond issues of ethics and honesty, the consequences of financial pressures to decrease production costs as much as possible can be particularly challenging for below-the-line workers.

One cinematographer expresses his frustration:

208 “Earth - Working with Animals in Wildlife Filmmaking.” BBC. April 29, 2016. http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160314-working-with-animals-in-wildlife-filmmaking. 209 “Earth - Working with Animals in Wildlife Filmmaking.” BBC. April 29, 2016. http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160314-working-with-animals-in-wildlife-filmmaking. 89

In the industry, you have to go where you're told and do it under their conditions and you have to deliver. And so, it's not just like the hobbyist who can go when they want. You're tired, you go home. If your feet are wet, you go home. It's like no, you have to be able to operate under really, really difficult conditions that are really stressful with a huge amount of pressure from the office back in the UK, constantly contacting you to see if you've got the shots yet. So, it can be really tough, and so if you don't have that reputation and people vouching for you and bringing your name to the table when they're deciding who's going to be on the crew, then you're never going to get a job… I think especially with these types of higher-tier films, the environmental issues that we're dealing with are extremely complex and can't really be explored in a two-minute sequence about a specific behavior. It requires more time and depth, and those types of documentaries are out there, but it’s just difficult to explain these systems that are highly complex given the conditions of production… it’s so much simpler to look at wildlife from a behaviorist standpoint.210

Filmmaker 7’s comments also highlight the idea that is economically beneficial from a production standpoint to establish a behaviorist frame. However, what wildlife filmmakers fail to acknowledge is the fact the field of ethology has been widely discredited for its overreliance on the false assumption that patterns of wildlife behavior necessarily have evolutionary significance.

The contemporary wildlife film industry seems unconcerned probably because these cuts of patterns of behavior become stock footage with an extended shelf life. Yet, as Dingwall and

Aldridge conclude “The costs of achieving these production values lead to a way of editing and narrating programs that maximizes their market potential but lowers the profile of content that may challenge sections of the audience.” These films should offer greater opportunity for engagement with scientific understandings of the world.

The economic constraints, to which this cinematographer alludes, ultimately suggest that the industry has a limited capacity to adequately communicate important environmental issues such as climate change. Wildlife film’s treatment of evolution is only a proxy for a wide range of

210 Filmmaker 13. “Wildlife Filmmaking.” Telephone interview by author. October 24, 2019. 90 concerns about the understandings of genetics and environmental change. For example, creationists and/or audience members with little understanding of Darwinian evolution would have an even more difficult time understanding concepts such as the genetic modification of food crops and animal species.

Conclusion

This chapter problematized utilizing wildlife as a resource for the production of scientific knowledge. Animals and Nature do not exist to hold a mirror to society or a source of social- political order. In the age of the Anthropocene, we must destabilize the binary between Nature and culture and human and animal in order to see the human as part of Nature and the environment rather than apart from it. I argue that, when filmmakers claim to objectively represent Nature with technology, they draw a categorical distinction between Nature and culture. The wildlife genre, as much if not more than other cinematic genres, presents itself as an objective record of natural and obvious meaning when it is in fact like any other representational medium: a carefully chosen, framed, and edited set of signs. In effect, this de-politicizes Nature and prevents audiences from imagining what a healthy and sustainable relationship with Nature might look like. I cite the genre’s transition from showmanship to science, ‘making-of’ promotional materials, and the figure of ‘the telenaturalist’ to highlight the process of historically constructing the genre’s identity as a trustworthy and reliable source of scientific information.

Dingwall and Aldridge conclude that

The most surprising and counter-intuitive finding, however, is the extent to which high- prestige, blue chip programs may actually be less effective than conventionally less highly regarded alternatives at conveying both the practice and the outcomes of science to mass audiences. For large media organizations, blue chip programming is a token of 91

status and authority, emblematic of the claim to a social mission that transcends mere commercialism.211

As ‘factual’ entertainment continues to grow as a notable sector of television programming, the tensions between the “factual” and the “entertainment” present an important challenge to those interested in the relationship between science, scholarship and civil society. At present, and despite the honorable intentions of many filmmakers, it is highly questionable whether wildlife and Nature programming is making an appropriate contribution to the preparedness of civil society to deal with basic principles in the biological and environmental sciences, let alone face the impending catastrophes, both environmental and economic, that will accompany global climate change.

211 Dingwall and Aldridge, 147-148. 92

CHAPTER IV: NATURE’S VEIL

Since Neil Smith published his provocative Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space, an increasing body of political ecology research has focused on the deepening commodification of ecological life in late-stage capitalism. As Marx argues, ‘the

Nature that preceded human history... today no longer exists anywhere.’212 Despite the contemporary impossibility of distinguishing ‘Nature’ from ‘society,’ popular environmentalist rhetoric is preoccupied with a pristine Nature. Thus, cultural struggles over visions of Nature should be central to contemporary scholarly discourse in the environmental humanities. Although Smith’s work is already considered a classic in human geography, there is little exploration of the role of labor, practice, and productive activity in his thesis and more generally in the field of media studies. It is imperative that scholars shed light on the practice and process of making Nature(s). According to recent scholarship in human geography, further engagement with Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis is necessary. In an article entitled “Revitalizing the Production of Nature Thesis: A Gramscian turn?”, the authors argue:

[Gramsci] helps us to consider the broad organization of practical activity and of those subjects engaged in the making of Nature… Gramsci forces us to highlight the different types of concrete labour (artistic, intellectual, scientific, manufacturing) that are formative in the production of Nature, before closing by reflecting on how Gramsci’s absolute historicism requires embedding concepts within the ebbs and flows of particular histories and geographies: these historical geographies, in turn, provoke theoretical refinement and extension.213

212 Neil Smith. Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space. 3rd ed. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008; 2010). 213 Michael Ekers and Alex Loftus. “Revitalizing the Production of Nature Thesis: A Gramscian Turn?” (Progress in Human Geography 37 (2) 2013): 234-252. 93

Marx’s understanding of Nature has been analyzed and interrogated by a small group of political ecologists, cultural ecologists, and human geographers. Many suggest that the locus of

Marx’s understanding of Nature “lies in the metabolism of humans and Nature.”214 Nature, according to Marx, co-evolved with society, as both are transformed through labor. This is, however, a hierarchal relationship where capital is dominant over labor and where human is dominant over Nature. Yet, Marx’s analysis of Nature primarily sees Nature as an object of labor in the production process without exploring the texture and complexity of this relationship.

Hence, Gramsci’s attention towards those subjects engaged in this productive process is more useful for cultural studies of media industries.

If the Oxford English Dictionary definition of environment is broadly ‘that which surrounds,’ then the popular notion of a universal Nature is impossible.215 Contemporary cultural visions of Nature are not simple, nor are they entirely conceptual. Some layers are often highly contradictory. For example, Nature is simultaneously both external and internal. Smith, for example, argues that the concept of internal ‘human Nature’ is “every bit as natural as the so- called external aspects of Nature.”216 Smith describes the symbolic power of Nature but admits that images of Nature are “indescribably complex.”217 He cites the concept of wilderness, particularly in relation to the dualism of ‘civilization’ and ‘Nature’ and ‘human’ and ‘Nature,’ as major themes in literary, historical, and artistic depictions of Nature. However, in his

214 James Swindal. “Marx on Nature.” Frontiers of Philosophy in China 9, no. 3 (2014): 358-369. 215 For this reason, the author refers to Nature(s), in the parenthetical plural. 216 Smith, Uneven Development, 11-12. 217 Smith, Uneven Development, 19. 94 brief exploration of these themes in social scientific and humanistic disciplines, he fails to acknowledge the way that these dualisms inform visual media.

An analysis of wildlife filmmaking as a case study helps us conceptualize the role of creative labor in the contemporary production of Nature(s) and permits further interrogation of the deepening commodification of ecological life via film and media. This qualitative study is based on in-depth interviews with 13 freelance wildlife filmmakers and answers the following research questions: How are images of Nature constructed by the media? How are media representations of Nature shaped and conditioned by media forms and production? Finally, how do wildlife filmmakers understand their role in the process of constructing images and expectations of Nature on-screen?

In this chapter, I define the genre of ‘blue chip’ wildlife film, positing that this controversial style of wildlife film epitomizes the dualisms of ‘society-Nature’ and ‘human-

Nature.’ I utilize Jean Baudrillard’s philosophical treatise Simulacra and Simulations (1981) to theorize the relationship between wildlife filmmaking and what I call ‘Nature’s veil.’ I find the metaphor of ‘Nature’s veil’ to be useful for bridging theories of the dualistic construction of human-Nature and postmodern theories of film and media. In the Gramscian tradition, however,

I turn my attention towards creative media labor to provide a technological history of wildlife photography that contextualizes what I call ‘the adventurist’ or ‘hobbyist’ model of the freelance filmmaker. Phenomenological analysis of interview-based narratives and secondary source material illuminates industry practices that account for the lack of environmentalist content in blue chip wildlife films. In the final sections, I return to the concept of Nature’s to demonstrate the various ways that it is contested and interrupted by what I refer to as ‘people stories,’ or geographically, socially, and culturally specific documentaries that focus on the intersections of 95 humans and wildlife. While one filmmaker’s story of the Bushmen highlights the occasionally problematic reality of ‘people stories,’ I ultimately argue that ‘people stories’ inherently challenge the human-Nature dualism at the heart of mythic representations of Nature, helping us imagine new possibilities for environmental storytelling in an age of crisis.

Blue Chip Nature and Human-Nature Dualism

There is widespread awareness among wildlife filmmakers of the role of what is known in the industry as ‘blue chip’ film in falsely depicting a pristine Nature where humans are absent.

Mitman defines “pristine nature” as a romantic view of Nature that can be traced back to 18th and

19th century romantic conceptions of Nature as God’s “grand design.”218 A pure and benevolent safe haven from the sullying influences of man and civilization. ‘Blue chip’ film is a distinctive yet highly controversial style that is closely associated with the natural history films of the BBC.

Epic docuseries such as Planet Earth (2006) and Blue Planet (2017) exemplify these high- budget, high-quality, and innovative wildlife films. Planet Earth, for example, cost an estimated

2 million USD per episode and 25 million USD for the entire series.219 The production process involved “sending 70 filmmaker teams to 200 locations in 62 countries around the world over a five-year span, with all the required crew, equipment, and logistical support for extended periods of remote work.”220 This landmark series is the most expensive project ever commissioned by the BBC and has been praised for its immersive qualities, as each episode features intimate

218 Mitman, Reel Nature, 124. 219 Thomas K. Arnold. “‘Planet Earth’ looks great in HD – and to the BBC.” 22 June 2007. USA Today. http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/television/news/2007-06-21-planet-earth_N.htm 220 John Merli. “Making a Highly Defined ‘Planet Earth.’” 21 February 2007. TVTechnology.com. http: //www.tvtechnology.com/news/0002/making-a-highly-defined-planet-earth/184330 96 encounters with creatures from across the globe. It was the first wildlife series to be filmed entirely in high-definition and promised to “transport nature lovers from the Himalayan

Mountains to the depths of the ocean and everywhere in between.”221

The accessibility of high-definition cameras and drones on the part of film producers and the increased access to widescreen televisions in the homes of consumers are often deemed responsible for the spectacular content featured in, and the astounding commercial success of, these blue chip wildlife films.222 According to wildlife filmmaker Chris Palmer,

“during prime time in September 2008, more than 30 million viewers tuned into Animal Planet, which is now seen in 94 million households in the United States and more than 220 million internationally.”223

Despite their spectacular content, a National Geographic cinematographer and independent wildlife film producer hereinafter referred to as filmmaker 1 explains that there are

“ideological differences” between blue chip wildlife films and documentaries about conservation and other environmental issues.224 Filmmaker 1 notes that

After Planet Earth came out, which was a groundbreaking film because it did so well online and on television, a lot of industry professionals, more legitimate than I, talked about it negatively. It portrayed animals in this perfect world where their environments are unaffected by humans.225

221 Planet Earth. Directed by Alastair Fothergill. Narrated by David Attenborough and Sigourney Weaver. BBC. 2006. 222 Elanor Louson. "Taking Spectacle Seriously: Wildlife Film and the Legacy of Natural History Display." (Science in Context 31, no. 1. 2018): 15-38. 223 Chris Palmer. Shooting in the Wild: An Insider’s Account of Making Movies in the Animal Kingdom. San Francisco CA: Sierra Club Books. 2010): 5-6. 224 Filmmaker identities will remain anonymous and confidential. Pseudonyms such as ‘filmmaker 1,’ will be used instead of names. 225 Filmmaker 1. “Wildlife Filmmaking.” Telephone interview by author. March 20, 2019. 97

According to filmmaker 1, contemporary wildlife film is “of two worlds,” of which blue chip is one, “and then there are actual documentaries about animals and conservation, like Blackfish”

(2013).226 He explains that blue chip films often steer clear of politics and policy and that wildlife documentaries should have an ethical and professional responsibility to alert audiences to a problem, examine it, and then present a call to action in traditional documentary-realism fashion. In short, according to many wildlife filmmakers, blue chip films portray a fantasy.

Although specific definitions of blue chip wildlife film vary among filmmakers, there are emergent themes and patterns that distinguish it from other styles of wildlife film. Derek Bousé, author of Wildlife Film and former wildlife filmmaker, outlines several of the subgenre’s chief tendencies. Both Bousé’s thematic categories suggest that human-Nature dualism is an integral component of the blue chip formula. These are the following: (1) the depiction of charismatic mega-fauna – those animals with which humans easily identify and empathize (e.g., sharks, bears, big cats, elephants, whales, etc.); (2) visual splendor, or magnificent scenery that evokes a still-unspoiled, primeval wilderness; (3) dramatic storyline, or a compelling narrative with some sort of narrative arc; (4) absence of science, which Bousé admits that as the “weakest and most often broken of these ‘rules,’ the discourse of science can entail its own narrative of research, with all its attendant technical jargon and seemingly arcane methodologies, which can shift the focus onto scientists and spoil the period-piece fantasy of pristine Nature”; (5) absence of politics, meaning little or no reference to controversial issues; (6) absence of historical reference points, or the construction of a “timeless” world; and (7) absence of people, or as Bousé

226 Filmmaker 1. “Wildlife Filmmaking.” Telephone interview by author. March 20, 2019. 98 suggests, the absence of white people that may spoil the image of a timeless realm and an unspoiled Nature.227

Bousé suggests that, when questioning wildlife films’ relationship to reality, the wildlife genre lies somewhere in the space between Baudrillard’s representation and simulation. While advances in filmmaking technology could be interpreted as a move away from the highly constructed narratives of the Disney wildlife films of the 1950s and towards a more realist depiction of nature, scholars note the opposite trend. My findings similarly suggest that increased formal and technological sophistication has allowed for greater artfulness and illusion in the wildlife film genre.228 This project sees wildlife film as producing what I call ‘Nature’s veil,’ in other words warping the reality of Nature and masking the absence of a mythical pristine Nature.

The masking and perversion of a basic reality, as well as the masking of the absence of a basic reality, represent phases two and three of Baudrillard’s “Successive Phases of the Image.”229 The presence of real physical animals and Nature seems to be the only thing preventing these films from being pure simulation/simulacrum. The advent of virtual reality at this year’s Wildscreen film festival, however, suggests that full-fledged simulacrum may be on the horizon.230

In an interview with filmmaker 3, who has produced and edited wildlife films for over 20 years, the filmmaker uses the term “simulacrum” to describe blue chip wildlife

227 Derek Bousé. Wildlife Films, 15. 228 See for example Josh Arbon. “How Virtual Reality Will Change Wildlife Film.” Nature TTL, February 25, 2017. https://www.naturettl.com/how-virtual-reality-will-change-wildlife-film/. 229 Baudrillard, 6. 230 See Josh Arbon. “How Virtual Reality Will Change Wildlife Film.” Nature TTL, February 25, 2017. https://www.naturettl.com/how-virtual-reality-will-change-wildlife-film/. 99 film.231 Filmmaker 3 elaborates that “This is not the wild; this is a simulacrum of the wild. This has as much reality as a Disney theme park ride.”232 In Simulations, Baudrillard famously utilizes

Disneyland as a perfect model of “all the entangled orders of simulation.”233 He writes:

Whence the possibility of an ideological analysis of Disneyland … digest of the American way of life, panegyric to American values, idealized transposition of a contradictory reality. To be sure. But this conceals something else, and that ‘ideological’ blanket exactly serves to cover over a third-order simulation: Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the ‘real’ country, all of ‘real’ America, which is Disneyland (just as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.234

I wish to adapt Baudrillard’s concept of ‘the ideological blanket’ to an ‘ideological veil.’

The veil of Nature in wildlife film presents an illusory transparency between media images of

Nature and reality. Simultaneously, the veil works to actively conceal a nonexistent pristine

Nature. In an interview, a director (also known as filmmaker 7) explains that “selecting is what directing is about... the idea that we want to make people believe that there is a natural world or almost like a baseball stadium of naturalness … and say [to audiences] ‘there's the natural world.’” Filmmaker 7 then admits, “Well, [humans are] part of [the natural world]. Whether we acknowledge that or not, we're just very, very interestingly evolved primates.”235 Indeed,

231 Both Filmmaker 1 and Filmmaker 3’s criticisms seem to echo those of critical cultural scholars, who suggest that the Guy Debord’s concept of spectacle and Jean Baudrillard’s notion of simulacrum are useful for contemplating the contemporary wildlife film format (Debord 1967; Baudrillard 1981; Bousé 2000; Louson 2018). I argue that blue chip films frequently subvert real depictions of the natural world in the service of spectacle and entertainment, in turn creating a simulation of the natural world. 232 Filmmaker 3. “Wildlife Filmmaking.” Telephone interview by author. March 28, 2019. 233 Baudrillard, 12. 234 Baudrillard, 12. 235 Filmmaker 7. “Wildlife Filmmaking.” Telephone interview by author. October 3, 2019. 100 filmmakers are often aware that they are not representing the reality of Nature but often dismiss this as an inevitable and harmless aspect of the storytelling and filmmaking process. As filmmaker 7 repeats throughout his interview, “filmmaking is filmmaking.”236 While

Baudrillard’s theory is useful for connecting media images to Smith’s social production of

Nature, the essence of a production studies approach directs one’s critical attention towards labor in the Gramscian tradition – in other words, towards those freelance filmmakers actively involved in the process of the production of Nature.

Despite filmmakers’ apparent awareness of the blue chip fantasy and their criticisms of the genre’s lack of environmentalist content, I noticed a cognitive dissonance in interviews, as most of my participants simultaneously speak of their aspirations to work on blue chip style film.

The goals of the next section are twofold: On the one hand, I attempt to contextualize the lack of conservationist content in blue chip film within media economics and production practices of collecting stock footage. On the other hand, I attempt to assess the aforementioned cognitive dissonance among filmmakers by exploring the technological history of what I call ‘the adventurist’ or ‘hobbyist’ model of the freelance filmmaker and the touristic impulses that underlie this distinct style of creative work.

236 Filmmaker 7. “Wildlife Filmmaking.” Telephone interview by author. October 3, 2019. 101

A Technological History of the Hobbyist Mode

According to one independent filmmaker, Nature is made both sacred and profitable by the absence of human activity. They explain the lack of conservation-minded content in blue chip films, as a ‘standard problem.’ He says that

Conservation is this sort of, you know, ugly C word that nobody wants to include in their film for the reasons like I said, that it can be depressing. And also, that it really dates a film. If you capture wildlife behavior that can serve as stock footage, these companies can resell it, they can use it 10 years down the line with the resolution that we're shooting in. But the second you start talking about dates and numbers and declines and this year and that year, then it becomes very dated and that stuff doesn't translate to somebody watching it way down the line. And so [blue chip production companies] want these films to be really evergreen, just focus on the wildlife, because people are ephemeral, but this idea of wildlife unimpeded by humans just has this sort of timeless feel.237

The libraries of stock footage to which filmmaker 13 refers are part of the legacy of bioacoustics, a scientific field that emerged out of behaviorism in the postwar period. According to “For

Science, Broadcasting, and Conservation: Wildlife Recording, the BBC, and the

Consolidation of a British Library of Wildlife Sounds,” the availability and affordability of “portable magnetic tape recorders, combined with the commercialization of wartime acoustic analysis technologies, had offered researchers new opportunities to record and analyze wildlife sounds on an unprecedented scale.”238 Although the International Committee for Bioacoustics

(ICBA) explained in 1956 that one of their prime concerns was creating a centralized library of wildlife sound data, by the mid-1970s, more than a dozen libraries and archives for wildlife sound had been established.239

237 Filmmaker 13. “Wildlife Filmmaking.” Telephone interview by author. October 24, 2019. 238 Joeri Bruyninckx. “For Science, Broadcasting, and Conservation: Wildlife Recording, the BBC, and the Consolidation of a British Library of Wildlife Sounds.” Technology and Culture 60 (2) (2019): 89. 239 Bruyninckx, 89. 102

While the primary purpose of these collections was the scientific investigation of the acoustic behavior of wildlife species, public broadcasting and entertainment industries quickly expressed interest in their entertainment value.240 The immense success of wartime radio broadcasts of songbirds in Great Britain led the BBC to purchase a sizeable personal collection of several thousand cuts of wildlife sounds. The BBC, as a publicly funded organization, took charge of preserving a collection that had been deemed of importance for scientific research and cultural heritage. By 1946, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization

(UNESCO) was established to “advance international peace and common welfare” through

“educational, scientific and cultural relations between people” and the preservation of cultural, material, and immaterial heritage.241 In the wake of the formation of UNESCO, the BBC formed an advisory panel to oversee the continued collection of not only sound recordings but also films, illustrations, and books depicting wildlife, working to legitimate their use of this material for broadcasting needs. These collections have been credited with creating a standardized discourse among British naturalists. By 1957, however, in the context of increased competition in the television industry, the BBC began to stress popular entertainment over educational programming. Over time, the BBC came to rely less on costly collection expeditions by professional naturalists and more on freelance “wildlife recordists, naturalist societies, and broadcasting organizations on an ad-hoc basis.”242 They often used their own sizeable sound library as a bargaining chip to acquire recordings.

240 Bruyninckx, 89. 241 Bruyninckx, 89. 242 Bruyninckx, 89. 103

The library itself was no longer driven by academic and scientific impulses but rather by entertainment needs in an increasingly commercialized public broadcasting landscape. This shift gradually diminished the preservationist intentions of the archives and, according to Bruyninckx, created a new network of wildlife recordists. Bruyninckx cites historians of sound media such as

Karin Bijsterveld and Paul Massinon to argue that the commercialization of portable magnetic tape recorders attracted a new group of private individuals, outdoorsmen, and amateur naturalists interested in the new hobby of ‘sound hunting.’ Bruyninckx explains that “the BBC paid them a fee for licensing their recordings. Although few of these recordists managed to make a living out of wildlife recording at the time, these fees helped to sustain their hobby, enabling further investment in better equipment or the organization of expeditions to more exotic locations.”243

While a few programs in wildlife, or ‘scientific,’ filmmaking exist, the majority of this study’s participants adhere to what I call the hobbyist model. When asked how they became involved in wildlife filmmaking, 10 out of a total of 13 participants allude to their lifelong interest in outdoor hobbies. Not unlike the advent of the portable magnetic tape recorder, the accessibility and affordability of high-definition cameras in the 1990s on the part of hobbyists was a way into the film industry. Filmmaker 8 describes this process:

I've always been an outdoors type of person, and even when I was a little kid, I grew up in Texas, and we had a family farm, and I preferred spending more time there than anywhere else. And being a real filmmaker 50 years ago was very expensive. And so, I did photography, and I majored in composition. And as things progress, Apple came out with an affordable computer that could edit video, and Sony had a camera. I think the model was a TS... it was an 8 mm camera that shot decent video, and you didn't have to go to the World Bank to buy it. And so, my first job was doing a PSA for PBS in

243 Bruyninckx, 89. 104

Tennessee. And I had a graphics background as well as music, so I was able to do the design and artwork, and it felt like I'd come home.244

As I argued in the previous section, the notion of “coming home” to Nature, expressed by filmmaker 8, is a common trope associated with the nostalgic view of Nature as an asylum from the civilized world. Mitman suggests that the Nature presented in wildlife film has a “sheltering” effect, just like that of the suburban home of the 1950s, which sheltered the nuclear family from

“nuclear annihilation,” threats of communism” and “the more insidious side of commercial culture.”245 Indeed, prominent themes in wildlife film tend to revolve around animal courtship, nest-building and parenting. However, while wildlife film actively works to conceal the “more insidious side” of commercial film, funding can be a source of tension between wildlife films’ commercial and ethical interests.

Money Shots: Funding and Wildlife Film

Funding influences what kinds of wildlife films are made. While producers technically do not need all the money in hand before greenlighting a film, Palmer asserts that “I never give a project the go-ahead without all the funding in hand.”246 The typical sources of money for wildlife films are broadcast networks, corporations, and foundations but may also include individuals, non-profit organizations, and government agencies.247 While broadcasters are primarily concerned with ratings, corporations, foundations, and individuals often seek public esteem and recognition. For corporately funded wildlife films, conflicts of interest are especially

244 Filmmaker 8. “Wildlife Filmmaking.” Telephone interview by author. October 4, 2019. 245 Mitman, Reel Nature, 135. 246 Palmer, Shooting in the Wild, 80. 247 Palmer, Shooting in the Wild, 80. 105 common. Palmer tells a story about his work at The National Audubon Society, an organization dedicated to producing documentaries about conservation and persuading viewers to join campaigns. Conservationist concerns, according to Palmer, put him “at odds with some powerful interests.”248 He writes:

In 1989, filmmaker Jim Lipscomb and I made Ancient Forests: Rage over Trees, hosted by actor Paul Newman, which highlighted a protracted battle over logging on publicly owned forests in the United States… When advance word got out about the film’s content, it led to a logging-industry boycott of our main corporate sponsor (Stroh Brewing Company), as well as eight corporations (including Ford, Citicorp, and Exxon) that had purchased commercial time slots during the program on TBS.249

All of Palmer’s sponsors eventually retracted their funding. Nonetheless, the documentary was aired and succeeded in convincing the U.S. Forest Service to stop logging three-million acres of old-growth forest.250 Sadly, The National Audubon Society lost a significant amount of money that was dedicated to producing other documentaries to advance the cause of conservation.

The logging industry is only one example of commercial influence on the wildlife film industry. For instance, Mitman mentions how wildlife filmmakers took advantage of the rise of pet keeping and the growth of tourism in the 1960s. This is the era when charismatic mega-fauna such as Pandas become national and global emblems in the political campaigns of animal rights activists. When the code ‘tourist gaze’ emerged in my own interviews, I found that it had both industry-level and theoretical implications for the production of Nature(s).

248 Palmer, Shooting in the Wild, 85. 249 Palmer, Shooting in the Wild, 85-86. 250 Palmer, Shooting in the Wild, 85-86. 106

Hobbyist Filmmaking and the Tourist Gaze

Many filmmakers frequently express their gratitude for the ability to freelance ‘in exchange’ for free flights to ‘exotic’ locations. One participant, who captures stock footage for various YouTube channels, explains that his interest in wildlife filmmaking developed on

“family vacations.”251 In one instance, this participant’s interest in capturing Madagascar’s wildlife directly conflicted with the goals of the travel agency. Filmmaker 6 describes the conflict as follows:

I'm always very happy to work with somebody like [a big travel company] in exchange for flights to Madagascar and shoot stuff for them. I don't think I did very well because I did a lot of pictures and videos of animals and things. After I got back, I started posting all these animals and things that I liked and then they're like, ‘Well don't you have pictures of your accommodation?’ And they wanted foods and natural accommodation to try and get people to go to Madagascar, not pictures of frogs, which is what I thought they wanted. So sometimes it doesn't work out. They have this vision of pearly beaches and my drinking Pina Colada on the beach and that's what they want to put out there and they got, you know, chameleons and snakes.252

The touristic impulses of wildlife filmmakers and production companies are often reflected in the specific content of the films themselves. One German cameraman reminisces, “well one of the things that got me intrigued by wildlife filmmaking was, we were not allowed to watch much television as kids, but whenever there was a wildlife show on, we could go and watch it, and I really enjoyed it. It was like traveling from your living room around the world.”253

According to John Urry, the tourist gaze is concerned with the visual consumption of a

‘physical’ environment that is not intended primarily for production but embellished for aesthetic

251 Filmmaker 6. “Wildlife Filmmaking.” Telephone interview by author. October 2, 2019. 252 Filmmaker 6. “Wildlife Filmmaking.” Telephone interview by author. October 2, 2019. 253 Filmmaker 9. “Wildlife Filmmaking.” Telephone interview by author. October 10, 2019. 107 appropriation. Urry emphasizes that such visual consumption is “not a straightforward process.

Views are not literally seen because tourism paradigmatically involves the collection of signs.”254 When applying the tourist gaze to wildlife film, these signs include primeval environments, visual splendor, charismatic megafauna, and the absence of people and historical reference points. These signs are then embellished and strung together in the form of a dramatic storyline. Filmmaker 7 explains:

Every time I sit down and work with a director, I'm trying to serve his or her needs for the film... it's a very, very difficult thing to enforce a point of view on naturally occurring events with animals because you either get the material and then you interpret it and obviously the way that it's put together, you're still trying to tell a story. You're still trying to move people. And in the end you're just trying to say to people, isn't this extraordinary? That's it... That's it.”255

The concept of the tourist gaze is similar to that of Nature’s veil in that it constructs Nature for the purpose of entertainment and visual consumption. Despite filmmakers’ apparent awareness of the relationship between tourism and wildlife film, many wildlife filmmakers often succumb to the gaze’s seductive powers. For example, in one interview, filmmaker 7 describes witnessing a rare lion fight as leaving him “drunk on experience.”256 On other occasions, the romance of the tourist gaze is momentarily interrupted by the evident signs of environmental crisis, as several participants explain that climate change, mass extinction, and widespread habitat loss are making animal behavior and migratory patterns increasingly unpredictable.

According to Urry, the relationship between the tourist gaze and environmental activism, like that between wildlife films and conservation, is contradictory. Urry suggests that while

254 John Urry. “The Tourist Gaze Revisited.” The American Behavioral Scientist (1986-1994) 36, no. 2 (1992): 172. 255 Filmmaker 7. “Wildlife Filmmaking.” Telephone interview by author. October 3, 2019. 256 Filmmaker 7. “Wildlife Filmmaking.” Telephone interview by author. October 3, 2019. 108 photography increases “the attractions of particular kinds of unpolluted landscapes and hence the demand to protect or conserve such environments … it has in turn done much to worsen such an environment through increasing the numbers of and concentrations of visitors all seeking to capture particularly memorable views.”257 Filmmakers sometimes argue that wildlife films, like tourism, “help establish a love of Nature, make people care about it, and make people curious” in turn promoting conservation.258 However, as Urry notes, the visual consumption of an environment does not necessarily lead to the protection and conservation of that environment.

Urry argues that photography tends to “obscure the fact that Nature is a historically specific social and cultural construction.”259

The notion of ‘people stories,’ which emerges in several interviews, illuminates the social and cultural construction of Nature. One celebrity director explains the influence that investigative journalism has had on the wildlife film industry. The idea of human stories intersecting with wildlife stories is highly controversial in the industry. ‘People stories,’ as filmmaker 13 explained, threaten the “evergreeness” of blue chip films and thus the shelf-life of their stock footage. There also seems to be widespread agreement among filmmakers that people stories are simply too complicated. One celebrity director tells me the story of his work filming reptiles in Malawi, one of the poorest nations in the world. He describes the following:

We were filming an episode on the Shiri River, which is the Mississippi of the country of Malawi. At that point, three people a week were being taken by crocodiles because the river is the main thoroughfare. [The villagers] need the Shiri for drinking, cleaning, and transportation. And therefore, [villagers] are constantly coming into close contact with crocodiles. And the crocs are picking people off and it's tragic and it's terrible. I was

257 John Urry. “The Tourist Gaze and the Environment’” Theory, Culture, and Society 9, no. 3 (1992): 1-26. 258 Filmmaker 2. Telephone interview by author. March 22, 2019. 259 Urry, “The Tourist Gaze and the Environment,” 172. 109

doing another interview with the host, just talking about things. This was early in the shoot, and [the host] started crying. And I'd never seen him cry before. And somehow it impacted me. I started crying too. I realized our obligation, and I realized the sensitivity, and I hoped that this was a moment that was going to get across to frankly a Western audience of... the humanity of what's going on here. Of what's happening in these places where there is conflict between the wildlife and humans … we're encroaching in their habitat, abject poverty, et cetera.260

He goes on to describe the juxtaposition of the “cavalier” and “cowboy” tone of the show with the horrific reality of people being maimed and killed by wild animals. He laments, “you couldn't hide behind the veil of adventure … period.” And went on to reflects, “What am I doing to help?

What am I doing to hurt? What's my responsibility as a storyteller?”261 Here, the highly political reality of abject poverty, overpopulation and violence clearly contradict the romantic view of

Nature the show’s producers are attempting to paint. The director’s moment of reflection, however, reveals the situated nature of filmmakers who are clearly constrained by the economic and organizational pressures of the wildlife film industry. These demands ultimately compromise the filmmaker’s “ethical responsibility as a storyteller.”262

The sanitized and harmonious version of nature presented by audiences is not only pristine – untouched and unspoiled by humans – it is also devoid of graphic portrayals of animal violence and sex. For example, Mitman write the following about the Disney nature films of the

1950s:

Like Pristine nature, childhood, conceived as a time of innocence, offered a place of grace from the horrific acts of destruction and degenerative influences wrought by modern civilization. Both were hallowed spaces in American society that needed to be preserved. Much of natural history films were the respectable alternative to less wholesome films in the early motion picture industry, animal shows on 1950s television

260 Filmmaker 9. Telephone interview by author. October 3, 2019. 261 Filmmaker 9. Telephone interview by author. October 3, 2019. 262 Filmmaker 9. Telephone interview by author. October 3, 2019. 110

offered entertaining and educational subject matter that the whole family could enjoy. In television shows like Zoo Parade, the construction of sentimental nature and childhood in postwar American society were closely intertwined.263

Mitman’s historical analysis of wildlife film provides a carefully constructed view of nature.

Thus, while his analysis of popular nature programming in the 1950s in thorough and accurate, graphic portrayals of animal sex and violence have become commonplace in particular sub- genres of wildlife film, namely the reality-style television format.

Wildlife filmmaker, Chris Palmer argues that contemporary wildlife films, like other film genres, are not exempt from the temptation to exploit sex and violence for profit.264 They call this phenomenon “nature porn.”265 Palmer cites Animals Gone Wild (2014) as an extreme example. Although Animals Gone Wild is not a blue chip film, the filmmakers note that blue chip films also tend to exploit animal violence and mating in the service of spectacle.266 Palmer, who admits that he has been accused of showcasing violence himself, warns: “These shows perform a great disservice to conservation by demonizing wild animals and encouraging viewers to hate and fear them.”267 According to Palmer, “the celebrations of sex and violence comes in high- brow as well as low-brow forms.”268 For example, Animal Planet’s Bear Feeding Frenzy (2008),

Lion Feeding Frenzy (2008), and Crocodile Feeding Frenzy (2008), are the opposite of blue chip style film, as they adhere to a low-budget reality television format. Not unlike the films of the

263 Mitman, Reel Nature, 135. 264 Filmmaker 3. “Wildlife Filmmaking.” Telephone interview by author. March 28, 2019; Palmer, Shooting in the Wild (2010); Palmer, Confessions of a Wildlife Filmmaker (2015). 265 Palmer, Shooting in the Wild, 145-153. 266 Filmmaker 3. “Wildlife Filmmaking.” Telephone interview by author. March 28, 2019; Palmer, Shooting in the Wild (2010); Palmer, Confessions of a Wildlife Filmmaker (2015). 267 Palmer, Shooting in the Wild, 146. 268 Palmer, Shooting in the Wild, 147. 111

Johnsons, the Feeding Frenzy series and others like it frequently harass and abuse animals while encouraging dangerous audience behavior. Palmer writes:

This three-part series described “experiments” with bears, lions, and crocodiles conducted by the ruggedly handsome Chris Douglas. A soap opera star and fashion model, Douglas appears to possess no formal training as a naturalist. The film crew built a five-foot cube, which they called “the predator shield,” made of see-though Plexiglas with six-inch-wide air hole. For dramatic scenes, Douglas climbed inside while the powerful predators came right up to the shield… In the process of these “experiments,” Douglas goaded Grizzly Bears into feeding frenzies and violent attacks on lifelike dummies, as well as breaking into cars and tearing into tents.269

Filmmaker 3 asks “What does it say about us as a society that there continues to be a market for such carnage? We haven’t come far from the days of the Roman amphitheater.”270

Unfortunately, sensationalized sex and violence in wildlife film reliably produces high ratings.

This combined with the low-production value of reality style television and the demand to fill airtime on The Discovery Channel and Animal Planet proves highly profitable for television network executives.

Mitman notes that, by the late 1970s, the proliferation of television slots increased the demand for less expensive but equally popular wildlife shows while blue chip filmmakers continued to manufacture even more sophisticated nature documentaries that “kept pace with viewers increasingly exacting taste for more dramatic, hyperreal scenes of wildlife.”271 The emphasis of blue chip productions is still hyperreality. Mas-market nature imagery often deploys a retrospective yearning for an idyllic past. While Baudrillard and other theorists debate whether this yearning is for a mythic or merely a romanticized past, they almost always refer to this view

269 Palmer, Shooting in the Wild, 147 270 Filmmaker 3. “Wildlife Filmmaking.” Telephone interview by author. March 28, 2019. 271 Mitman, Reel Nature, 205. 112 as ‘nostalgia.’ According to Williams nostalgia is tied to national identity, is intensified by social and economic changes such as rapid urbanization and industrialization and is a cultural response to a sense of alienation, loss of control and deep class stratification that accompany such largescale structural changes.272 The next section discusses the unexpectedly significant role that nostalgia plays in constructing a hyperreal nature.

We are all Bushmen: Wildlife Film and the Resurrection of Nature under the Auspices of the Real

When one filmmaker tells me the story of his work filming “iconic animals” in the

Kalahari Desert, he similarly reflects on his own responsibility as a storyteller. He expresses his desire to draft a proposal to tell the story of the Bushmen, who were relocated outside of their protected lands in Botswana for the purpose of creating a space for wildlife tourism and filming.

He explains his thoughts as follows:

I think it's a very interesting, it's a very difficult story to tell … I mean in the end the wildlife is being protected, but there's still something that feels so real about removing people from somewhere that has lived for so many years, even if it does protect the wildlife. These fancy lodges in the Central Kalahari, you know, $2,000 a day to stay there, and each little fancy lodge has its little Bushman village, and the Bushman listed as show pieces for the tourists who visit the lodge. When you go to the lodge you that you go on an outing to see the animals, then you'll go on an outing to see the traditional Bushmen villages … even though most Bushmen aren't allowed to even live in the Central Kalahari, there is now lodging for you. … A random traditional look in the Central Kalahari are these kind of fun Disneyland things for tourists.273

Nostalgia plays an important role in the contemporary wildlife film. According to

Baudrillard’s philosophy, “when the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its

272 Raymond Williams. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. (Fontana, 1983). 273 Filmmaker 6. “Wildlife Filmmaking.” Telephone interview by author. October 2, 2019. 113 full meaning.”274 In Simulations, he cites the Tasaday, a group of 26 hunter-gatherers living in caves in a remote corner of a Philippine forest, as an example of the selective portrayal of indigenous people as primitive anachronisms in an increasingly globalized culture. Subsequent revelations 15 years later revealed that the tribe’s discovery had been staged and scripted by the government of President Ferdinand Marcos. The Tasaday were misrepresented and sensationalized with the aid of the mass media, particularly the natural history film industry.

According to Allen W. Palmer’s article “Primitives among Us: The Paradox of the Tasaday and

Other Lost Tribes,” the discovery of the Tasaday ultimately served as a public symbol by drawing on “powerful metaphors that seemed to be an antidote to the social malaise of postwar protests and the environmental revolution of the 1970s.”275 Baudrillard writes that

Of course, these particular Savages are posthumous: frozen, cryogenised, sterilized, protected to death, they have become referential simulacra, and the science itself a pure simulation. Same thing at Creusot where, in the form of an ‘open’ museum exhibition, they have ‘museumised’ on the spot, as historical witnesses to their period, entire working class quartiers, living metallurgical zones, a complete culture including men, women and children and their gestures, languages and habits - living beings fossilized as in a snap shot. The museum, instead of being circumscribed in a geometrical location, is now everywhere, like a dimension of life itself.276

For Baudrillard, the Tasaday epitomize a postmodern paradigm. However, in Simulations, he fails to account for the role that the mass media played in the museumization of the Tasaday. National Geographic, for example, published two photographic essays on the

Tasaday. One essay was entitled “First glimpse of a stone-age tribe 1971.”277 Indeed,

274 Baudrillard, 6-7. 275 Allen W. Palmer. “Primitives among Us: The Paradox of the Tasaday and Other ‘Lost Tribes.’” Science Communication 21, no. 3 (March 2000): 223–43. 276 Baudrillard, 8. 277 Palmer, “Primitives among Us: The Paradox of the Tasaday and Other ‘Lost Tribes,’” 227. 114 the Kahlahari Bushmen, like the Tasaday, have been resurrected by the media and tourist industry. They are framed as noble savages; anachronistic symbols of a utopian mythic past projected into the future. Yet, as Baudrillard asserts, “we are all Tasadays.”278 Indeed, we are all

Bushmen, living in a world that is completely “cataloged and analyzed,” a world where Nature is artificially resurrected by wildlife film “under the auspices of the real.”279 The final section explores the potential of ‘people stories’ to provide an alternative vision for Nature, including one cinematographer's reflection on portraying a real Nature.

‘People Stories’ and The Real Nature

According to Smith, Nature has a two-fold character in capitalist societies: Nature is both a material and an abstract entity. The latter derives from the abstraction of its use-value, which is

“inherent in exchange-value.” According to Ekers and Loftus, “if human labour produces the first Nature and human relations produce the second, the labour of first Nature must be seen as embodied – requiring us to look at the lived life of the labourer – and the human relations of second Nature must be seen to be structured by various other axes of what are often mutually determining productions of social difference.”280 In Don Mitchell’s The Lie of the Land, for example, he provides a socially and culturally textured analysis of the relationship between agricultural labor and the California landscape. While Baudrillard asserts that “it is now impossible to isolate the process of the real, or to prove the real,” socially, historically, and

278 Baudrillard, 8. 279 Baudrillard, 8. 280 Ekers and Loftus, 238. 115 geographically specific people stories might provide a more socially and culturally textured account of the relationship between people and Nature(s) in wildlife films.281

Surprisingly, the notion of people stories as imbued with the quality of ‘realness,’ appears several different interviews. In one instance, filmmaker 13 reflects:

I think everybody I work with wants to have more [people stories] in these blue chip films but is just so aware of how difficult that is. And so I get to work on these films every now and then, like I said, but these guys who I worked with who are in as top tier cinematographers who are doing this over 300 days a year, some of them feel really bad about what they're doing about painting this false picture of Nature and they know they're doing it, but it's fun to do… But at the end of the day, a lot of these guys and a lot of these people question themselves like ‘God, am I really having an impact?’ ‘Am I really doing the right thing?’ And so, some of them wish they were working on grittier environmental-type films because for so long they've been painting this picture of Nature in just this perfect, beautiful state unimpacted by humans. And it weighs on them, you know? And, and it does me too, when I get to work on these things that it feels a little bit cheap sometimes when you just point your camera at the beautiful things and you just cut out everything that's ugly. And so it's a very weird feeling to have, especially when I'm working on these big shoots and I'm like, I've made it. I'm here, I'm working for National Geographic, this is it, but there's this part of you that just goes, it feels weird that you're presenting this image that may not be real to everybody around the world and saying ‘this is real.’282

If the crux of the blue chip fantasy is a human-Nature, society-Nature dualism, then the contours and character of human-Nature relations, then it is essential that wildlife films seek to imagine possibilities for alternative conceptions of the world, of Nature(s), and of environmental politics.

In the words of Neil Smith, the historical roots of this dualism can be traced back to Kant. Kant believed that the human mind “was ultimately a means through which this dualism was overcome: the individual knowing mind experienced Nature as a unity in the mind; and at the

281 Baudrillard, 21. 282 Filmmaker 13. “Wildlife Filmmaking.” Telephone interview by author. October 24, 2019. 116 level of the species it was the function of culture to overcome this dualism of inner beast and outer Nature.”283 I suggest that the process of watching wildlife onscreen is a deeply social and cultural phenomenon that has yet to be fully explored. According to Cynthia Chris’s Watching

Wildlife, “the wildlife genre, as much if not more so than other cinematic genres, presents itself as an objective record of ‘natural and obvious meaning,’ when it is in fact, like any other representational medium, a carefully chosen, framed, edited and narrated set of signs.”284

Interviews with wildlife filmmakers permit the interrogation of these “carefully chosen, framed, edited and narrated set of signs.” As filmmaker 13 explains,

If the sequence does work out, you're going to see some crazy wildlife behavior. But what you don't see is that most of our shots were contaminated by people and fishermen coming in and out of our shots. And you know, there's people everywhere, but we don't shoot that, because Nat Geo doesn't want people in their films. And so we're creating sort of a false image of what this location was actually like just because of where we choose to point the camera and what we choose to include or exclude from the footage we provide.285

To develop an account of the social production of Nature(s) for theoretical purposes, historicization is key. According to Ekers and Loftus, “to historicize, suggests, involves detailing the specific forms of political, economic and cultural relations in place and time.”286 My technological history of the hobbyist or adventurist model of the freelance filmmaker is based on a Gramscian analysis and attempts to historicize the relationship between creative labor, commercial interests, and technology in the media production of Nature(s). An exploration of the role of the tourist gaze in wildlife filmmaking illuminates the contradictory relationship between

283 Smith, Uneven Development, 12. 284 Cynthia Chris. Watching Wildlife. (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. 2006): xix. 285 Filmmaker 13. “Wildlife Filmmaking.” Telephone interview by author. October 24, 2019. 286 Ekers and Loftus, 248. 117 not only blue chip wildlife film and conservation but more broadly the visual consumption of mass-market Nature imagery and real social and environmental change. While Baudrillard’s story of the Tasaday and filmmaker 6’s story of the Bushmen suggest the dark side of ‘people stories,’ socially, historically, and geographically specific ‘people stories’ allow us to envision new possibilities for environmental storytelling in an age of crisis.

118

CHAPTER V: CONCLUSIONS

“There is no single concept of nature; it embraces everything that is fluid, changing, and mysterious. Ultimately, however, to ‘know nature’ on earth is to live within it and to revere it in every way.” – Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature

In this thesis, I examined the production of wildlife film from a critical interdisciplinary perspective, with theories and methods combing several disciplines, including, but not limited to cultural critical theory, phenomenology, hermeneutics, cultural geography, political economy, political ecology, production ecology, field theory, qualitative content analysis, science and technology studies, film, and media studies. The introductory chapter asked readers to consider the idea that the nature they seek ‘out there’ must always be encountered through the lens of their own ideas and imaginings. Cultural visions of Nature are an important yet neglected consideration in the field of environmental politics. While my literature review demonstrated that art historians and literary scholars have long contemplated the relationship between landscape and human, it is a remarkably neglected area of film and media research. Nature documentaries in particular have largely been ignored by historians, cultural critics, and media scholars. Despite this fact, nature imagery and cultural notions of nature figure more prominently in advertisements and media today than ever before.287

I included the example of “Bliss” because, like wildlife film, it draws on deep-seated and taken-for-granted meanings of nature and the natural, reworking them to promote neoliberal ideologies regarding consumption, labor and technology. “Bliss” not only epitomizes the term

“mass-market nature image,” but it also sheds light on the sheer ubiquity and elusiveness that

287 A. Hansen. “Discourses of nature in advertising,” Communications 27(4), 499-511. 119 make such images so powerful. I am acutely aware that readers may be shocked to learn that

“Bliss” was ever presented as a real representation of nature. This is precisely the point. I invite readers to decipher for themselves what is and what is not part of collective public, visual vocabulary of Nature. My literature review shows that there is much scholarship to suggest that constructions of Nature are nationally and culturally specific. How do media constructions of

Nature draw on and, in turn reinforce, notions of national and cultural identity? And what are the implications of these constructions for effective environmental politics? I ultimately point to constructivist critiques of Nature to invite readers to consider, in a more metaphysical sense, what real Nature is.

The story of Chuck O’Rear serves as a microcosmic example of and justification for the creative combing of methods and methodologies in this study. To study mass-market images of

Nature, one must not only analyze the discourses within the media texts themselves but also examine the conditions of their production. I imply that, without O’Rear’s interview, there would be no images to juxtapose. Interrogating the specific decisions and aesthetic considerations, whether conscious or subconscious, that are made by media labor when curating mass-market nature imagery is therefore imperative to accessing cultural visions of nature.

The concept of the production of Nature dovetails with a production studies approach and provides a useful framework for evaluating the symbolic power of media institutions in shaping environmental discourse and cultural understandings of Nature. There is, in fact, nothing natural about the processes by which audiences learn about or understand the concepts of ‘Nature’ and

‘environment’ and studying cultural understandings of nature necessarily involves studying of consciousness and the objects of direct experience in the phenomenological tradition.

Additionally, while political economy theories tend to be apathetic towards micro-level analyses 120 of particular media institutions, cultural critical theories are well-equipped for media production studies, especially research that considers the everyday dynamics of media production. This concept can be summarized by Vicki Mayer’s notions of “culture as production” and “production as culture.”

The primary method of data collection in this study was qualitative in-depth interviews.

My data set is comprised of 13 phone and Skype interviews with freelance wildlife filmmakers.

My research employed both maximum variation and snowball sampling. Chapters III and IV examined emergent themes from a systematic analysis of the interview texts to develop a preliminary grounded theory. Codes were categorized as falling under one of two major umbrellas: production of Nature and media production. These umbrellas eventually dictated the organization of each analysis chapter.

For instance, Chapter III initially asked the following research questions (1) How does the production ecology of wildlife filmmaking shape the content of specific wildlife films? And

(2) what are the dominant interests of the wildlife film industry? While both questions are open- ended, they are firmly grounded in a Gramscian labor studies framework that focuses on the everyday dynamics of media production. In the analysis stage, however, several codes emerged related to the construction of scientific discourse in wildlife film. I revised this first question to ask: In what ways are filmic representations of animals embroiled with human matters, norms, and ideologies? More specifically, what is the legacy of the scientific theory of behaviorism, or ethology, in wildlife film, and what are its implications for cultural understandings of the non- human world? I similarly revised and specified my second question to ask how has the wildlife film industry worked to establish itself as a legitimate and trustworthy source of scientific information over the past several decades? For centuries, wildlife film has helped audiences 121 make sense of the world they inhabit. I cite the genre’s transition from showmanship to science,

‘making-of’ promotional materials, and the figure of ‘the telenaturalist’ to highlight the process of historically constructing the genre’s identity as a trustworthy and reliable source of scientific information. By interrogating the specific conditions of production in interviews, I was ultimately able to access social production of nature theories through the reservoir of perspectives and worldviews provided by my participants.

In Chapter III, I sought to not only problematize framing wildlife in terms of its usefulness for humanity as a resource for the production of knowledge but also to critique the legacy of ethology. Animals and nature do not exist to hold a mirror to society or a source of social-political order. In the age of the Anthropocene, we must destabilize the binary between nature and culture and human and animal in order to see the human as part of nature and the environment rather than distinct from it. I argue that, when filmmakers claim to objectively represent nature with technology, they draw a categorical distinction between nature and culture.

The wildlife genre, as much, if not more than other cinematic genres, presents itself as an objective record of natural and obvious meaning when it is in fact like any other representational medium, a carefully chosen, framed, and edited set of signs. In effect, the wildlife genre de- politicizes nature and prevents audiences from imagining what a healthy and sustainable relationship with nature might look like.

While the subsequent analysis in Chapter IV is slightly more theoretical, it is still firmly rooted in both interview texts and the everyday dynamics of media production. For example, I provide a technological history of wildlife photography that contextualizes what I call ‘the adventurist’ or ‘hobbyist’ model of the freelance filmmaker. A phenomenological analysis of interview-based narratives and secondary source material illuminates industry practices that 122 explain the lack of environmentalist content in blue chip wildlife films. These industry-level contexts provided the foundation for theorizing relationship between wildlife film and the tourist gaze.

I argue that wildlife film participates in the sewing of what I call “Nature’s Veil,” in other words warping the reality of Nature and masking the absence of a mythical pristine Nature. I find the metaphor of ‘Nature’s veil’ to be useful for bridging theories of the dualistic construction of human-Nature and postmodern theories of film and media. The masking and perversion of a basic reality, as well as the masking of the absence of a basic reality, represent phases two and three of Baudrillard’s “Successive Phases of the Image.”288 The presence of real physical animals and Nature seems to be the only thing preventing these films from being pure simulation/simulacrum.

Starting from the simple recognition of the complex and historically changing meanings around Nature, this project critiques the de-politicization of Nature imagery by media producers.

While millions of viewers tuned into Animal Planet in the year 2000, as many of a quarter million species had gone extinct and the great majority of these species disappeared from the face of the earth before scientists could describe them or filmmakers could film them. Scientists fear that, at the current rate, ten to twenty times as many species will disappear in the twenty-first century. Despite the political potential of wildlife film for biological diversity legislation, namely national conservation and perseveration policies, the gap between mass-market nature imagery

288 Baudrillard, 6. 123 and real social and environmental change is widening. As Chapter III argues, the genre fails to accurately represent basic ecological principles.

Since the 1980s, discussions of anthropogenic climate change and later the Anthropocene had been largely confined to scientific communities, but it has particular implications for existing critical practices in the field of cultural studies of media. The Earth’s climate is far more complex than ethology or population ecology, as it involves subtle and imperfectly understood relationships between the Sun, the atmosphere, oceans, lithosphere, pedosphere and terrestrial biosphere.289 Although the twenty-first century portends still greater pressure on biodiversity than did the twentieth, the climate crisis will likely set the twenty-first century apart. In all of my research however, I came across only one documentary, Our Planet (2019), that mentions the climate crisis. Contemporary wildlife filmmakers have their work cut out for them.

The assumption behind research into the media representations of Nature is logically that these play a role in influencing political decision making. While the field of media studies has generally moved away from reductive notions of ‘direct effects’ of media on audiences, scholars can still think of wildlife films as interacting forums of learning and meaning creation. Studying media at the intersection of Nature and culture requires pushing beyond the question of ‘what are the effects of the media?’ To begin to understand the role of media in the communication of environmental issues, we need a different vocabulary and visualization.

Debbie Lee and Kathryn Newfont’s The Land Speaks introduces us to a new paradigm for the environmental humanities at the “intersection of oral and environmental history.” The

289 J.R. McNeil and Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration, 63. 124 authors present this paradigm as “a kind of knowledge” that represents the rich and complex language of the land, “full of subtlety and nuance,” as well as the oral histories of those who have already developed and honed “detailed and extensive knowledges of beyond-human nature.”290 As Lee and Newfont point out, many of these voices, including indigenous peoples as well as many non-indigenous naturalists, artists, activists and farmers, have been marginalized and excluded in traditional written history. The structure of The Land Speaks is unconventional yet highly effective, as it provides readers with the opportunity to develop and practice their own fluency in the language of the land before we are presented with the author’s critical commentary. They write

The Land Speaks. On some level we all know this … Indigenous people have long recognized and studied this speech… but we need not be as deeply versed in as they to hear the land. No matter where we are or where we live, we startle when we hear a branch snap, grab jackets if there is frost on the windowpane.291

I witnessed this idea that the land speaks emerge in my own interviews. Many filmmakers describe wildlife encounters as communicative experiences. This claim is not simply metaphorical. Filmmakers tell me that they observe animals communicate with one another, with their habitat and even with the filmmakers all the time.292 Their oral histories tell us about this fluency. In the words of Lee and Newfont, within the “tapestry of human experience” are new vistas for environmental humanistic research that are “so vast that they defy the imagination.”293

They conclude: “The practice or oral history, that deeply humanist endeavor” might suddenly

290 Debbie Lee and Kathryn Newfont, The Land Speaks. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017): 2-3. 291 Lee and Newfont, 3. 292 Refer to the author’s discussion of Habituation in Chapter III. 293 Lee and Newfont, 10. 125 become “an invaluable tool for fields often seen as removed from the humanities: ecological research, environmental problem solving, land management, and wilderness policy, to name a few.”294 Take the following chapters as an example of the materialization of these lofty aspirations.

“Resurrecting Dead Lands” tells the story of two urban explorers near Cleveland, Ohio.

During Bunting’s interview with Muscedere, they engage in a discussion about what constitutes an environment as ‘wild’ or ‘wilderness.’ Muscedere notes: “you talk about the wilderness of

[urban environments], and for me it was always the inherent mediator between the wild and society.” Later in the dialogue, Muscedere ponders, “I think [occupying wilderness] is largely a mental space.”295 I find it fascinating that Muscedere is engaging with the same complex philosophical and theoretical questions that Nash does in his 400-page historical monograph. In a way, he takes Nash’s thesis a step further by challenging essentialist depictions of ‘wilderness’ and Nature. These urban environments not only tell a story about wilderness, but they also tell a story of a society or civilization in flux. Bunting calls “rust belt” cities like Cleveland and Kent emblematic of an industrial economy that has not yet transitioned to an economy based on

“tourism and technology.”296

“Filling the Gaps with Silence,” in particular, speaks to the utility of oral history in environmental policy and land management. The author recovers the story of Women’s historic involvement in sand dune preservation efforts connecting this movement with ecofeminist

294 Lee and Newfont, 10. 295Lee and Newfont, 122-123. 296 Lee and Newfont, 133. 126 activism. Fremion argues that “women wielded power over the preservation initiative, which was intimately connected to their familial obligations and gender expectations,” but ultimately helped politically establish a national lakeshore.297

I point scholars to this anthology because it provides a preliminary, albeit patchy, roadmap for pursuing more radical and innovative research at the intersection of society and nature. The Land Speaks has truly served as an invaluable model for my own research. Although the authors build on the central premise of the environmental humanities: that non-human nature has agency, their analysis suggests two profound and related conclusions. They are (1) that human beings and non-human nature co-create the world, and (2) that both scholars and community members co-create meanings around Nature. In this sense, I see The Land Speaks as a philosophical contribution that has the potential to fundamentally alter the way that we understand and do humanistic environmental work.

297 Lee and Newfont, 198. 127

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APPENDIX A: INTERVIEW GUIDE

Introduce self and research. Inform participants that this interview is designed to take 45 min to 1 hour, but I am flexible. Explain that this interview is relatively informal and comprised of open-ended questions. Explain that this research is primarily focused on the experience of wildlife filmmakers, so there are no “right and wrong answers.” In fact, it’s important that they express their views in their own words and bring up any questions or issues that are relevant to the discussion, but I may not have known enough about to ask. Ask if they have any questions before getting started. a) How and why did you get involved with wildlife filmmaking? b) Could you tell me a little bit about the kind of work that you do? What are a couple of major projects that you have worked on? c) How do you understand the role of the filmmaker in speaking for Nature and wildlife? d) How do you communicate environmental issues to audiences? e) What are the goals of wildlife film? f) Could you give an example of a film that, in your opinion, successfully or unsuccessfully communicates environmental issues? g) In terms of content and/or style, what are some contemporary trends in wildlife film? h) What are some similarities and differences among wildlife film production companies? Do all production companies share similar goals? i) Can you tell me about an experience related to the success or challenges of communicating environmental issues to audiences? j) Are there major differences in styles or types of wildlife film? To what do you attribute these differences? a. What are the major differences between a high-budget and low-budget wildlife films? k) Could you walk me through a typical film shoot? l) Where does funding come from? m) Where does research come into play? n) Have you ever experienced challenges with ethics and honesty in the industry? Could you tell me a little bit more about this? o) Is there anything that we’ve missed that would be important for me to know? Would you like to add to anything you’ve said today? p) I’ve asked all the questions so far. Do you have any questions for me? 146

APPENDIX B: SAMPLE RECRUITMENT E-MAIL

Dear [Insert Participant Name],

I hope this e-mail finds you well. My name is Addison Kennedy and I am a graduate student in American Cultural Studies at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. I am currently developing a thesis that involves a qualitative study of the wildlife filmmaking community, genre, and industry. My research interests lie at the intersection of environmentalism and film/media. I want to explore the various ways in that wildlife film affects the collective understanding of conservation and other environmental issues. The purpose of this study is to better understand the wildlife filmmaking community, genre, and industry from the perspectives of individual wildlife filmmakers like yourself. The benefits of the study include bringing increased scholarly attention to wildlife filmmaking, a currently under-researched area of film and media production.

Your involvement in the study would consist of a phone or Skype interview that will be recorded and transcribed. The interview is designed to take approximately 45 minutes to 1 hour. Would you like to be interviewed? If you're interested, please read the attached consent form for more information. If you would like to move forward with the interview, please email me to arrange a date and time. You can find my contact information in the consent document. If you have any questions at all, please do not hesitate to ask.

Best wishes, Addison Kennedy ______American Culture Studies M.A. Student and Teaching Assistant Bowling Green State University [email protected] 978.289.2602

147

APPENDIX C: CONSENT FORM

148

149

APPENDIX D: INSTITUTIONAL REVIEW BOARD APPROVAL LETTER