Conclusion: Media, Young Audiences, and the More-Than-Human World

Abstract

This book has explored the nexus between children, media, and the environment at a time defined by the “triple crises” of climate change, biodiversity loss, and environmental degradation (United Nations Environment Programme 2021), when increasingly, communicators and thought leaders are recognising the role young people might play in long-term societal change relating to the more-than-human world. Through the various case studies in this book, I have sought to address a question that has hitherto received little scholarly attention in studies of environmental communication: where do children feature in the environmental politics of the twenty-first century, and how is this impacting the production of children’s media and the narratives and representational patterns at work in children’s media products? As this book has shown, children have long been an important market for environmentally themed media, but recent years have seen a proliferation of environmental media texts and products for young audiences, along with a growing recognition of children as audiences for environmental messages. Just as environmental communicators like Naomi Klein and organisations like the United Nations are now developing environmental content specifically for young readers and audiences (see Chap. 1), the makers of children’s news (Chap. 3), television (Chap. 4), and film (Chaps. 5 and 6) are increasingly incorporating content about the environmental crisis into the products and stories they create, or into the paratexts and transmedia extensions that support and surround these products and stories. They are doing so for two reasons. Firstly, there is a long-held cultural assumption that children have an inherent connection to nature and are interested in the more-than-human world—that ‘the environment’ is a topic of interest for young audiences (Phenice and Griffore 2003; Coward 1990; Bell 2014). Secondly, as the environmental crisis deepens, media-makers feel a sense of obligation to raise environmental issues within the stories they tell or use these stories to normalise pro-environmental behaviour (BAFTA Albert 2021). This environmental ethic encompasses the production of children’s media, and resultantly, we are likely to see a deeper pervasion of environmental themes in children’s media and a further proliferation of environmental media texts for children in the coming years.