Abstract
Increasing public awareness of ecologically degradative practices is essential for supporting sustainability transformations in the Anthropocene. As the world’s dominant land use, agriculture embodies unsustainable characteristics and practices exceeding planetary boundaries (Campbell et al., 2017; IPCC, 2020: 7). As industrial agricultural systems increase in scale, intensity, and move further beyond the visibility of urban centres, awareness of the commonplace nature and makeup of agribusiness decreases (Zeunert, 2024a,b,c,d). The extent of food systems’ negative ecological impacts warrants closer public scrutiny (Campbell et al, 2017; Poore & Nemecek, 2018; IPBES, 2019; Benton et al, 2021 Zeunert, 2018), a task that can be assisted by systematic environmental communication modes visually communicating scale and impact.
Sustainability and environmental citizenship is of central importance to visual culture, which can perpetuate capitalist industrial economies at the cost of the more-than-human world (Greenwalt & Creech, 2018). Imagery can evoke profound emotional and intellectual affect (Holm, 2020). Socially motivated image-making through visual communication mediums such as photojournalism or documentary filmmaking can connect seeing with action, witnessing with deliberation, and visual representation with political action (Latour, 1986: 9; Fish & Zeunert, preprint).
This research responds to a current lack of systematic visual evidence beyond satellite imagery conveying Australia’s current state of agricultural landscapes, as well as a dearth of innovative methods connecting consumers with agricultural landscapes. It explores how digital methods might improve agricultural and food literacy through linking consumers to the environments that produce their foods. It focuses on Australia as a case study of industrialised agriculture, having wider application to global landscapes similarly impacted by agribusiness. Australia offers a useful case, with industrial practices dominating yet obscured by geographic distance from urban centres, a lack of inclusion in State of the Environment reporting, ag-gag legislation, and pervasive idealised rural imagery failing to convey frequently degraded states of food production environments (Zeunert, 2024a,b,c,d).
Research is grounded in a visual sociology methodology that developed novel methods of harnessing drone technology, creative visual capture and subsequent dissemination of all major Australian agricultural elements. Discussion centres on Zeunert’s original critical dissensus (2023) archive titled ‘Food Landscapes Australia’ (http://foodlandscapes.com.au/) that distils 10,000 drone aerial captures from 38,000 kilometres of a continental-scale field research of Australian agriculture into 881 cinematographic videos within an interactive online assemblage. The method captured all major Australian commodity typologies by value and spatial area. Footage spans all Australian states and territories, commodities, major industries, and commercial farming scales. The interdisciplinary and original creative research work thus explores how digitalization can advance visual communication methods to promote sustainability transformations of agrifood systems requiring disruption (Oels, 2019). Though focusing on the Australian context, research methods have wider application to communicating Western agrifood systems’ landscape impacts.
The research contributes to shifting profit-centric major agribusinesses narratives through a disruptive and innovative socio-technical archive seeking to catalyse sustainability transformations by facilitating visual agency and affect (Forno et al, 2022). It furthers digital communication methods for sustainability transformations through increasing consumer awareness of agribusiness’ environmental impacts, while systematically illuminating states of Australia’s agricultural environment. Separation between food consumers and agricultural production environments results in shadow practices that might otherwise be considered unacceptable if more visually perceptible and if links between industrial production chains were better articulated and understood (Plumwood, 2008; Zeunert, 2024c).Creative digital methods and communication modes can produce counter imagery to heighten comprehension and interrogate the status quo of agri-food industries.
Informed individuals and consumers are important for food sustainability choices (Kirveennummi et al., 2013: 89). Increasing the visibility of industrial agriculture’s scale and effects and linking foods and production landscapes can assist increasing producer and consumer accountability of sustainability ramifications, ecological consequences and animal suffering directly linked to food choices. The critical dissensus aerial digital archive ‘Food Landscapes Australia’ (FLA) offers a model of a counter image repository to challenge agriculture’s existing dominant visual narratives through drone cinematography revealing landscape degradation by industrial agribusiness.