Professor encourages sustainability using media

For anyone that’s stepped onto Middlebury’s campus, the bent toward environmental awareness quickly becomes apparent. Reminders to save energy grace signs above light switches, a plethora of recycling bins dot dorm rooms and offices and even the toilets in the Axinn Center save water by reneging on the routine downward push of the handle. And if students were not already breathing, thinking and sleeping “green,” the environment has even seeped its way into academics. Students are now able to make any major they’d like “green,” with environmental studies running the gamut from specialties in literature to economics.

It is no surprise, then, that the environmental spirit has now infiltrated the Film and Media Culture department. This Winter Term, Associate Professor of Film and Media Culture and American Studies Jason Mittell will offer a class titled “Sustainable TV: Producing Environmental Media,” that will ask students to “produce a nonfiction television program discussing sustainability and energy issues.”

With the College’s involvement last year with Planet Forward, Mittell became inspired to create this type of course.

Frank Sesno ’77, former CNN anchor and current journalism and public affairs professor at George Washington Universtiy, began Planet Forward as a way to spread the message of environmental awareness through media methods. Designed as a Web site where people can generate a dialogue about climate issues, the project has become an example of how pivotal a role media can play in the public sphere. People give their opinions not only through mere writing, but use video content to generate a message.

“The goal is to hear from a variety of people who aren’t getting their voices heard otherwise,” Mittell said

Last December, Sesno arrived at the College to generate enthusiasm among students about creating videos for his Web site, which by then had become a successful endeavor. Five videos appeared on the Web-site in March, and can still be seen at http://www.planetforward.org.

“Two of those videos ended up getting chosen for the PBS special that aired in April,” Mittell said. “And one of them was actually the most popular video on the site.”

That video was called “Going Under,” a two-and-a-half minute animation “about Bangladesh being submerged under water.” Created by Farhan Ahmed ’09, Luisa Covaria ’09, Ioana Literat ’09 and Louis Lobel ’08.5, the short uses collage-like figures to send a warning about the havoc that will result from the melting icebergs. After the video became popular, the students received the opportunity to see the taping of the PBS special, and Ahmed even made an appearance on the show in a panel discussion with Carol Browner, the director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy.

When Mittell later saw Sesno at last year’s commencement, they hatched a plan for a class to unite the issues of environmental studies and media students had only been doing in their spare time.

“One of the impetuses of the course is to generate material for Planet Forward,” Mittell said. “Every one of the short segments that they produce can be submitted to Planet Forward. It’s up to the students whether they want to or not, obviously. The idea would be they would create things that would go into Planet Forward, that potentially, when they do their next taping, which will be in April, again we could have Middlebury participation, which would be really great — a really great opportunity for our students.”

Changing his title from “professor” to “executive producer” who will only have final say in the products generated, Mittell emphasizes that student choice will dominate how the class works. In a largely collaborative model, students will have the opportunity to create what they want, switch roles as they please and play at different ways of production.

Unfortunately for students, one freedom they will not have is the power to procure a celebrity spokesperson like Al Gore or Leonardo DiCaprio. Although Middlebury might appear to be riding the wave of the use of media to instigate environmental awareness, Mittell believes that media retains a power even when separated from the celebrity culture that has powered it recently in such films as “An Inconvenient Truth” and “11th Hour.”

“I think one of the challenges that the environmental movement has faced,” Mittell explained, “is that they’ve been branded as something for celebrities — sort of, ‘It’s chic to drive a Prius.’”

Without a celebrity behind the project, the professor still envisions the course as a powerful tool to spread environmental activism.

“I think that one of the other problems is that the issue is too global to make a difference,” he said. “So what I really want to have happen is make this a sort-of grass roots media project focused at least in part on local actions and local decisions [in order to] make it empowering for people to say, ‘Okay, watching this makes me think of here are some things I can do, here are some changes I can make in my life, here are some things I can advocate for that will make a difference.’”

If the projects are successful, Mittell intends to have a screening here on campus in the spring. In that way, the movies will continue to educate and raise awareness about what students believe are the central issues of climate action.

Although Mittell himself admits to never being centrally involved in the environmental movement, he sees media as one of the foremost forms for spreading such knowledge.

“I’m always interested in thinking about how you can use moving images and media to make social criticism or commentary,” he said.