I’ve been teaching an undergraduate media and the environment class for a dozen years. When I first started, it was challenging to find works in media studies that connected media with environmental issues. This is partially owing to a Western cultural legacy based on the body/mind duality, which leads to a belief that anything related to thoughts, images or ideas is primarily immaterial. The dearth of environmental connections is also related to the way that the media ecology tradition inspired by McLuhan and Postman has evolved. Their exploration of how medium reshapes perception has led to a convoluted understanding of media environments as purely technological and
abstracted from their physical ecologies. To this day, the average media scholar (based on anecdotal evidence) still does not immediately grasp the intimate connection between media and their impact on the environment (and if you are wondering what that is yourself, I will get to it shortly).