Chapter Summary: This chapter explores the intersection of media, education, and environmental justice in the context of the accelerating climate crisis. It delves into how modern media technologies, driven by profit motives and advertising, contribute to overconsumption, disinformation, and environmental degradation. By adopting a critical media literacy pedagogy, educators can empower students to question mainstream narratives, identify biases, and create alternative media that promote social and environmental justice. The chapter emphasizes the importance of systemic thinking, analyzing media texts, and amplifying marginalized voices to challenge harmful ideologies perpetuated by commercial media. Through activities such as meme creation, examining environmental racism, and ad-busting, students can develop critical thinking skills and contribute to changing the narrative surrounding the climate crisis. Ultimately, the chapter advocates for critical media literacy as a tool for fostering a more informed and empowered citizenry capable of confronting the challenges of global warming by creating alternative stories based on critical hope for social and environmental justice.

Bio: Jeff Share (PhD, University of California, Los Angeles) teaches in the School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA. Jeff's research and practice focuses on preparing educators to teach critical media literacy for social and environmental justice. He worked as an award-winning photojournalist for a decade then taught bilingual elementary school for seven years in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Since 2007, he has taught teachers and students how to think critically about media and how to teach critical media literacy. The second edition of his book, Media Literacy is Elementary: Teaching Youth to Critically Read and Create Media was published in 2015. Two years later, Share co-authored Teaching Climate Change to Adolescents: Reading, Writing, and Making a Difference. Collaborating with Douglas Kellner (2019) they published, The Critical Media Literacy Guide: Engaging Media and Transforming Education. Jeff is a Fulbright Specialist who has taught critical media literacy in Argentina, China, Germany, India, and Mexico. https://jshare.wixsite.com/jeffshare

Lesson Plan on Ecomedia Literacy, "The Natural World Speaks: Writing for the Rights of Nature": https://tinyurl.com/4mecx82b

Short videos of "Nature is Speaking": https://tinyurl.com/3p3wryc7

The UCLA Library Research Guide on Critical Media Literacy. This section focuses specifically on Climate Change and Environmental Justice with lots of links to free articles, videos, lesson plans, etc.: https://guides.library.ucla.edu/educ466/climate

My recent book: For the Love of Nature: Ecowriting the World. Peter Lang.

Here is a link to the Critical Media Literacy Framework: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CPu-dgi8qQvE64mLnCQG8AllO1_7Hg8t/view

Figure 1. Undergraduate university students created this ad-buster poster to respond to the Fiji water ads by adding an image of plastic pollution with the Fiji bottle and the company’s tag line “Earth’s Finest Water.”