Salma Monani

Oxygen isotope ratios of zircon: magma genesis of low δ18O granites from the British Tertiary Igneous Province, western Scotland

Igneous zircons from granites of the British Tertiary Igneous Province (BTIP), in western Scotland, preserve magmatic oxygen isotope ratios in spite of hydrothermal alteration and thus provide new evidence for the genesis of granites. CO2 laser and mass spectrometer based bulk (1–3 mg) oxygen isotope analyses from individual plutons show remarkable homogeneity in zircon δ18O, regardless of zircon size and magnetism (average reproducibility of δ18O (Zrc) in a single pluton is ±0.2‰). In addition, ion microprobe analysis shows that individual zircons all have the same δ18O and thus, bulk samples are homogeneous. Fourteen granite bodies from the Isle of Skye show extreme variability in zircon δ18O values from pluton to pluton (δ18O (Zrc)=0.6–5.3‰ VSMOW). All the granites record zircon δ18O values less than would be in high temperature equilibrium with ‘normal’ mantle (δ18O (Zrc) ∼5‰) except for the Beinn an Dubhaich granite. Zircons from one intrusion in the mafic Cuillins center also have low δ18O (2.5‰). Similar variability is observed in δ18O amongst three intrusions on the Isle of Mull (δ18O (Zrc)=3.4–5.9‰). Both Mull and Skye are characterized by intense shallow paleohydrothermal systems, and the low and variable δ18O values of the magmas likely result from melting or interaction with hydrothermally altered country rock. Analysis of granites on the Isle of Arran, where the percentage of low δ18O country rocks is much less, yields higher δ18O (Zrc) of 6.8 and 5.4‰. Published trace element and radiogenic isotope data for BTIP mafic and felsic rocks have supported the hypothesis that the granites are formed primarily by differentiation from the mantle with magmas experiencing minimal crustal input [Dickin et al., Phil. Trans. R. Soc. London A 310 (1984) 755–780]. However, conservative estimates based on oxygen isotope compositions suggest that some of the BTIP granites can only be formed from normal magmas (δ18O (WR) ∼6‰) if they assimilated significant amounts of hydrothermally altered crustal material. Some granites require up to 40% bulk crustal input and are better explained as the result of wall rock melting by an adjacent mafic pluton. Whereas Pb and Sr suggest a general trend towards increasing input of shallow crust for the younger granites [Dickin et al., Phil. Trans. R. Soc. London A 310 (1984) 755–780], the correlation between age and δ18O is less apparent suggesting that Pb and Sr isotopic compositions are decoupled from oxygen isotopes. This would be expected of melted country rock that was hydrothermally altered in oxygen isotope ratios, but not in Pb and Sr isotope ratios.

Ecocinema theory and practice

Introduction: Cuts to Dissolves: Defining and Situation Ecocinema Studies Stephen Rust and Salma Monani I. Ecocinema Theory 1. The Eco-Cinema Experience Scott McDonald 2. The Aesthetics and Ethics of Eco-film Criticism David Ingram 3. Ecocinema and Ideology Andrew Hageman 4. An Ecophilosophy of the Moving Image: Cinema as Anthrobiogeomorphic Machine Adrian Ivakhiv II. EcoCinema Practice: Wildlife and Documentary Film 5. Penguins are Good to Think With: Wildlife Films, the Imaginary Shaping of Nature, and Environmental Politics Luis Vivanco 6. Working with Animals: Regarding Companion Species in Documentary Film Jennifer Ladino 7. Beyond Fluidity: A Cultural History of Cinema Under Water Nicole Starosielski 8. Nature Writes the Screenplays: Commercial Wildlife Films and Ecological Entertainment Claire Molloy III: EcoCinema Practice: Hollywood and Fictional Film 9. Hollywood and Climate Change Stephen Rust 10. Appreciating the Views: Filming Nature in Into the Wild, Grizzly Man, and Into the West Pat Brereton 11. Sympathy for the Devil: The Cannibalistic Hillbilly in 1970s Rural Slasher Films Carter Soles IV. Beyond Film 12. Environmental Film Festivals: Beginning Explorations at the Intersections of Film Festival Studies and Ecocinema Studies Salma Monani 13. Everyone Knows This is Nowhere: Data Visualization and Ecocriticism Sean Cubitt

Energizing Environmental Activism? Environmental Justice in Extreme Oil: The Wilderness and Oil on Ice

The decades-long Arctic National Wildlife Refuge debate is a focal point of the US environmental movement. This debate over drilling in what many consider America’s last great wilderness is fueled by fears about the war on terror, energy dependence, global warming, and the desire for additional jobs in the state of Alaska. Even as pleas for wilderness and development are considered, the people who arguably will be most directly affected by the outcome are the local communities of the Inupiat Eskimos and the Gwich’in Athabascan Indians. While the Inupiat generally view oil drilling in the Refuge’s coastal plain favorably, the Gwich’in oppose it and the impact it could have on the Porcupine caribou herd that calve in the coastal plain. The Gwich’in depend upon the caribou for their cultural and physical subsistence. In essence, this debate is no longer simply about saving nature. It is also about environmental justice. Two documentaries about the Refuge*Extreme Oil: The Wilderness, part of a PBS series about global oil production, and Oil on Ice, an independent project that premiered at the Mountain Film festival in Telluride but eventually also aired on local television channels*describe the Refuge debate. Oil on Ice has an environmental agenda (preserving the Refuge as wilderness), whereas The Wilderness shies away from explicitly taking sides and instead focuses on the question: ‘‘where will tomorrow’s oil be found?’’ Despite this, both are characteristic of approximately hour-long socialissue documentaries, emphasizing politics within the context of socio-economic institutions of capital, labor, and technology (Nichols, 2001). Both address petroleum practices in and around the Refuge, such as oil development at Prudhoe Bay and the Exxon Valdez oil spill, and cover the environmental justice stakes in this debate by presenting the Alaskan Natives as people who live, work, play in this environment. Nevertheless, each film’s narrative reveals a different conception of environmental justice that articulates a different idea of environmental activism*one limits agency whereas the other encourages it. As such, I suggest that comparing the films can serve as an effective pedagogical tool in introductory environmental communication

How Learning Styles Impact E-Learning: A Case Comparative Study of Undergraduate Students Who Excelled, Passed, or Failed an Online Course in Scientific/Technical Writing.

Online classes appear increasingly popular, making it critical in each discipline to study the advantages and disadvantages of learning online. Following up on anecdotal impressions that scientific/technical writing students appeared to do either better or worse in an online course than an offline equivalent (unpublished data), it was decided to study the impact of learning style and experience in using the Internet on grades. The 60 students who participated in an online course on scientific/technical writing were emailed post-course evaluations which included questions on learning styles. Of these, 37 (62%) returned the evaluations, revealing a clear and significant pattern of results. While the groups did not differ in hours spent studying online, or in total hours spent online, students who excelled in online learning reported spending significantly more hours per week online for work, and less hours online contacting families/friends than students who passed or students who failed. Students who excelled differed significantly from other students in their learning strategies and study habits and frequency with which they contacted the instructor. Students who excelled in this online class appear more experienced both in working online and have study habits conducive to the online environment. Curiously, students who performed marginally or failed were more likely to rate themselves as making good use of study time, and may spend significantly longer online on assignments than the moderate students. The need to design courses that elicit specific habits or to teach students study habits specific to online learning appear critical tasks to improve the success and retention rates in online courses.

Wind Power! Marketing Renewable Energy on Tribal Lands and the Struggle for Just Sustainability

Using a case study approach and employing the critical framework of just sustainability, this article examines the ambivalent intersections of marketing and social/environmental justice as articulated through the public rhetoric of corporate entities that promote renewable energy generated on American Indian tribal lands. Because of its critical interest in the empowerment of disenfranchised communities through a shift away from traditional ways of valuing environmental sustainability and economic activity, just sustainability provides a valuable frame through which to interrogate not only articulations of economic development but also the use of popular American Indian archetypes like “the Ecological Indian” in the marketing of sustainable energy. We suggest that both our corporate case studies, NativeEnergy, which markets carbon offsets to clients, and the public utility company San Diego Gas and Electric, demonstrate efforts to advance many of the goals of just sustainability, and are successful in some respects, but fall short in others. We argue that shifts towards just sustainability in renewable energy projects on tribal lands, from management to the ways in which they are communicated to the public, will lead to more equitable economic, representational, and environmental conditions for participants.

Healthy Options: A Community-Based Program to Address Food Insecurity

The objectives of this study are to better understand the lived experience of food insecurity in our community and to examine the impact of a community-based program developed to increase access to local, healthy foods. Participants were given monthly vouchers to spend at local farmers’ markets and invited to engage in a variety of community activities. Using a community-based participatory research framework, mixed methods were employed. Survey results suggest that most respondents were satisfied with the program and many increased their fruit and vegetable consumption. However, over 40% of respondents reported a higher level of stress over having enough money to buy nutritious meals at the end of the program. Photovoice results suggest that the program fostered cross-cultural exchanges, and offered opportunities for social networking. Building on the many positive outcomes of the program, community partners are committed to using this research to further develop policy-level solutions to food insecurity.

At the Intersections of Ecosee and Just Sustainability: New Directions for Communication Theory and Practice

Kevin Deluca’s Image Politics: The New Rhetoric of Environmental Activism (1999) and Sidney Dobrin and Sean Morey’s more recent edited collection Ecosee: Image, Rhetoric, Nature (2009) are perhaps the most prominent book-length studies on images within the environmental communication framework. Both discuss images broadly, folding cinema and related variants of moving images (such as television, and new media platforms such as video games and the Internet) in with still images such as paintings and photographs, and both make a strong case for recognizing visuals as unique communicative devices, related to but distinct from written discourse. As this journal’s own pages reveal, the study of what Dobrin and Morey term ‘‘ecosee’’*‘‘not (only) the analysis of existing images’’ but also ‘‘ways of thinking of the relationship between image and environment, nature, and ecology’’* is vibrant (2009, p. 2). In particular, there has been plenty of attention directed at platforms that incorporate moving images; articles within the journal critically examine cinema, television, and various internet formats to better understand their role in environmental discourse and action (see Craig, 2010; Mellor, 2009; Slawter, 2008; Wolfe, 2009). At the same time that environmental communication scholars engage with ‘‘ecosee,’’ the field has also embraced the concept of just sustainability. Again, the journal’s own pages reveal this commitment, as is clear from the ‘‘Aims and Scopes’’ section of its website and Julian Agyeman’s opening editorial ‘‘Communicating ‘Just Sustainability’’’ in the November 2007 issue. As a follow-up to Agyeman’s keynote address at the Conference of Communication and Environment (COCE) meeting that year, the editorial reiterates the paradigm’s central point*if environmentalism is

Loving Glacier National Park Online: Climate Change Communication and Virtual Place Attachment

We evaluate the use of place attachment and recommend best practices for the use of this tool in communicating climate change online. Focusing on the case study of Glacier National Park, Montana, USA, we used a mixed methods approach to: (1) design a website to evoke senses of identity, dependence, and emotion central to place attachment while also incorporating information on climate change science, adaptation, and mitigation; and (2) assess visitors’ sense of climate change concern at various geographic levels via pre- and post-website viewing survey analyses. Quantitative survey results show statistically significant differences between climate change concerns before and after viewing the website, with concern increasing for Glacier National Park irrespective of demographic and ideological identification. Qualitative analyses of survey comments adapted Schweizer et al.’s (Environmental Communication 7(1):42–62, 2013) and Leiserowitz et al’s (Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, New Haven, 2009) Six Americas categories to interpret how respondents’ engage with climate change. The results of this pilot study indicate that place attachment shows promise as a tool for online climate communication and is useful in engaging different types of audiences.

In God ’ s Land : Cinematic Affect, Animation, and the Perceptual Dilemmas of Slow Violence

This chapter examines Pankaj Rishi Kumar’s documentary feature In God’s Land (2012). In extending literary critic Rob Nixon’s (2010) notion of “slow violence” to cinema, it considers how a postcolonial Indian filmmaker uses animation to mediate socio-environmental injustices that are not spectacular but instead accumulate over long periods of time. In illuminating In God’s Land’s dark and discordant mode of animation, I also suggest that such postcolonial cinema expands eco-film scholarship’s current preoccupations with primarily Western/Japanese animation and with its predominant focus on animation as playful. In all, the essay argues for furthering our understanding of Indian and eco-animation.

Indigenous Film Festivals as Eco-Testimonial Encounter: The 2011 Native Film + Video Festival

In struggles for political and cultural recognition many Indigenous groups employ visual media to make their concerns heard. Amongst these various channels for media activism are Indigenous film festivals which, in the words of festival coordinator Amalia Cόrdova, work to convey ‘a sense of solidarity with Indigenous struggles’. Cόrdova’s essay on Indigenous film festivals appears in the collection Film Festivals and Activism (2012). In the introduction to the collection co-editor Leshu Torchin writes about activist festivals as testimonial encounters or fields of witnessing where the films offer testimony and the audiences serve as witnessing publics, ‘viewers [who] take responsibility for what they have seen and become ready to respond’. To better understand how Indigenous film festivals embody these activist imperatives as eco-activism I consider the case of the 2011 Native American Film and Video Festival (NAFVF) with its special eco-themed focus Mother Earth in Crisis. In my analysis of NAFVF I consider both the testimonies of the films and the festival context in which they are placed; by doing so I add to the growing scholarship in ecocinema studies which within the last ten years has become a legitimate and crucial aspect of ecocriticism’s purview – though surprisingly, with little attention devoted to film festivals. Through this analysis, by articulating what I term the oblique testimony, I argue that Indigenous film festivals are often strongly reflective of the environmental concerns and hopes of Native peoples and suggest ecological engagements that place them in the terrain of environmental film festivals. [excerpt]