News media coverage of the natural world frames perceptions and policies related to the environment. Studying its reporting brings insight for how meaning is assigned to humanity’s relationship with nature and wildlife. Through qualitative content analysis, this study examines digital articles on the environment, published from March to December 2020, amidst mass lockdowns due to the 2019 coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Claims about the impact of humanity being locked down were analysed using framing theory. Findings revealed four major frames generated in connection to (1) wildlife behaviour, (2) a new normal post-COVID, (3) climate change being displaced and (4) human–nature symbiosis. The results of qualitative inquiry offer a more nuanced understanding of how media frames the complex human–nature relationship, which tends to feature negative and hostile associations. This furthers the notion that such framing can limit perspectives, even if unintended, and arguably weakens viewing our relationship with nature as symbiotic.

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic reminds us that human and more-than-human health is connected to environmental (un)health. This article explores the linkages between health and the environment in cinema. It draws on such issues as pandemics, pollution and air to illustrate how films like Wolfgang Petersen’s Outbreak (1995), Todd Haynes’s Safe (1995), M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening (2008), Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion (2011) and Colm McCarthy’s The Girl with All the Gifts (2016), each in their unique ways, address the problem of planetary health. Airborne zoonoses, monstrous plants, toxic fungi and pollution – the films tackle all these issues to emphasize invisible danger, toxicity and sickness that surround humans and more-than-humans alike. Connecting the ideas of health and well-being to the environment and illustrating how this nexus becomes visible in film, specifically through air, this article calls for justice, consideration and care of planetary health. Explicating the tight linkages between pandemics, climate change and environmental degradation at large, as depicted in the selected cinematic examples, this article claims that the recognition of humanity’s dependence on and responsibility for more-than-humans is crucial in times of environmental and health crises.

This article proposes and interprets the force of an ‘animal effect’ in the films of David Cronenberg. Starting from the concept of zoonosis, or the mingling of human with non-human beings, I argue that beyond the literal hybridizations of man and animal that transpire at the level of narrative in such films as The Fly (1986), Naked Lunch (1991) and eXistenZ (1999), there is a formal dimension of animality that articulates their textual construction. Drawing on the concept of ‘becoming-animal’ in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, I enlist the notion of an animal effect to foreground the importance of form and signification in Cronenberg against the prevailing critical emphasis on ‘the body’ in his work. The article defends these claims through a close reading of Naked Lunch, whose formal strategies imply the presence of non-human perceptual agents shaping the narrative, an aesthetic strategy that requires the viewer to actively make sense of their viewership by grasping the ‘inhuman formalism’ of Cronenberg’s cinema.

This essay examines three films and adjacent performance (The Masked Monkeys 2015; Comfort Stations 2018; and Her Name Was Europa 2020) by the Berlin-based filmmaking duo Anja Dornieden and Juan David González Monroy, who together call themselves OJOBOCA. Drawing on the broadly transdisciplinary scholarly treatments and decolonial imperatives of ferality as a site of human and non-human relationality, I contextualize OJOBOCA’s analogue body of work featuring animal subjects as a feral film habit. In describing a feral film habit through OJOBOCA’s work, I also engage a media archaeological concern with making media histories present in practice alongside the complex of aesthetic, ecological, political and economic sensibilities emergent in contemporary photochemical filmmaking and laboratory culture in the (post-)digital age. Overall, my aim is to clarify an experimental project that points towards possible more-than-human cinema-based forms of collectivity and invites novel forms of cinema-based life.

This article engages with scholarship in media theory and the history of technology and design and delves into case studies of various scales of air purifiers: the Dyson Zone and the Anti-Smog Tower in Xi’an, Shaanxi. I investigate the cultural and political tensions among the air purifier’s users, policy-makers and designers. I argue that within a market economy, the principles of air purifier design ultimately lead to the commodification of air.

This article cross-pollinates environmental media studies with socialist China’s anti-snail fever campaign media, including two 1965 science education films, a 1961 song book, all entitled ‘Song wensheng’ (‘Sending away god of plague’), and a 1970 Chijiao yisheng shouce (‘The handbook for barefoot doctors’). Through studying popular audio-visual and print media produced to support the socialist state-sponsored campaign against snail fever – the longest anti-zoonotic campaign in China – I adopt a cross-media approach to campaign media. Unpacking the environmental unconscious in campaign media, I advance the concept of compost media to intervene in environmental media studies by going beyond critiquing the Capitaloscene, and revealing socialist campaign media as quintessential to environmental media.

This essay theorizes the cinematic experience of apprehension accompanying representations of multispecies relations in the age of global pandemics. Globally synchronous experiences of cascading epidemics in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries have made spectators aware of the microbes that inhabit ‘us’, the animals that carry ‘them’ and the mediums (water, air, soils) that sustain all these forms of life. In this historical situation, cinematic zoonoses generate fear, anxiety and foreboding alongside creative prehensions of living as multispecies: this is the ‘pandemic viewing condition’. I elaborate the claim in three films – Prateek Vats’s first fiction film Eeb, Allay, Ooo! (2020), Amit Datta’s artistic Saatvin Sair (The Seventh Walk) (2013) and Shaunak Sen’s documentary All That Breathes (2023) – that articulate multispecies encounters as spatial experiences. On the one hand, aesthetic compositions of cinematic zoonoses lure spectators into textured cinematic milieus of multispecies encounters, even as the protective cinematic frame provides the comfort of distance; on the other, the historical contingencies of spectatorship induce projections of cinematic surrounds where the multispecies continuum surfaces sensorily, affectively and intuitively. Together the cinematic milieu and cinematic surrounds orient spectators towards their actual living milieu, an unsettling space where neither bodily integrities nor species distinctions hold any longer.

This introduction to The Journal of Environmental Media 4.1 defines and contextualizes the structuring concept of the Special Issue: ‘Cinezoonosis’. It additionally provides a walkthrough of the issues’ included essays and offers ways of reading them in relation to each other.

This article performs a genealogy of how the CDC’s attempt to contain rabies in 1950’s America depicted zoonosis, arguing that these images of diseased animals have consistently been charged expressions of national belonging, anxiety, and paranoia. Closely analysing the aesthetics, production and reception of two midcentury early rabies control films produced by the CDC – ‘Striking back against rabies’ (1950) and ‘Rabies control in the community’ (1956) – as well as the essays on film production in the CDC Bulletin, this article demonstrates how images of zoonotic disease operated as an explicit form of what Neel Ahuja calls ‘the government of species’. Here, as Ahuja argues, the political possibilities for a community are navigated through the contours of interspecies contact. In these CDC films, the particularly American setting of a small town comes to represent the American population as a whole – a community that is uniformly presented as White and heterosexual – which exercises its fears of dissolution through the figure of the rabid animal. Ultimately, the article concludes that such forms of representation, where the body politic is articulated through the representation of animals as disease vectors, has become all the more prevalent and contested as governments struggle to manage changing relationships with nature. The CDC’s images from the 1950s help to position our current media environment, especially with regard to how whiteness is defined in the context of an ecological threat.

Media staple environment to logistics as technologies that mediate the dynamic between contingency and entropy. Contingency interrupts plans. Entropy introduces disorder. Media organize disruption and disorder as constitutive elements in the production of value enabled by technologies of capture and control. The power of logistical media resides precisely in their capacity to organize. Environmental media describe the space of organization. Logistical media govern space with the calibration of time. This article explores these dynamics as they cut across energy infrastructures, technologies of war and the politics of distribution.