By Andrew Kalaidjian. University of Virginia Press, 2025.

What does it mean to watch a disaster unfold? Does exposure to a source of dread spur people to action or lull them into fatalism and complacency? Spectacle Earth is a lively and wide-ranging consideration of media engagement, passivity, and virtual environments in relation to ecological crises and climate change. The book begins by tracing the long trajectory of environmental aesthetics and natural sciences that have led up to the Anthropocene. It then looks at lessons learned from artist and activist movements of the 1960s and 1970s before laying out the new challenges in the digital age of artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and virtual reality. The result is groundbreaking, offering readers a new media literacy that goes beyond individual therapeutic experience to provide forms of expression that can lead to the sorts of solidarity and connection needed to change the planet for the better.

Andrew Kalaidjian is Associate Professor and Chair of English at California State University, Dominguez Hills. He is the author of Exhausted Ecologies: Modernism and Environmental Recovery (Cambridge, 2020). His new book, Spectacle Earth: Media for Planetary Change, is now available from University of Virginia Press as part of their “Cultural Frames, Framing Culture” series. His writing can also be found in Modernist Cultures, La Piccioletta Barca, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.