Environment and society in Átl’ḵa7tsem/Howe Sound Biosphere: towards an integrated media ecology

In 1895, the Lumière brothers’ Workers Leaving the Factory marked the birth of cinema and the mass dissemination of visual communication. The power of screen-based images allowed ordinary people to see their world and their place in it in a new way, with the light of a new unifying force, spoken in silence. Art, entertainment and propaganda, these images and the way they were created in many ways foretold the impacts they would have on their environment, such as in the first documentary, Nanook of the North, shot in the Canadian Arctic about an Inuit man named Allakariallak (1922). The Lumière workers’ factory also marked the industrialisation of cultural storytelling, contributing to the symbolic annihilation of marginalised communities, including Indigenous people and nature, relegated to the backdrop in film studies, rather than character. Moreover, the deregulation of communications industries would lead to a global climate crisis in our media ecology. More than a century since the silent spring of cinema, nature is being granted legal status and has become the central character in determining the outcome of our human story. The Bachelor Degrees of Environment and Society at Capilano University, Canada, endeavour to remediate these education ‘hotspots’ by integrating Indigenous land- and water-based knowledge with environmental studies, science and slow cinema praxis in a sensitive, multi-jurisdictional biosphere region, Átl’ka7tsem/Howe Sound Biosphere, Canada, under the unifying concepts of consilience, decolonisation and sustainability. These educational models attempt to offset the impacts of colonialism and corporatism, creating a balance between humans, industry and the environment, modelling reconciliation as a way forward.