Due to its proximity to the renewal of new art and communication forms and their placement at the vanguard of politically engaged fields, film and media studies has proudly asserted itself as a leading academic voice of sociopolitical commentary. Today, as screen culture is diversified across new technologies and media and moves us beyond the filmic, screen theory remains the chosen arena of innovation for thinkers and activists coming from other fields. There remain those, myself included, who agree with David Rodowick's claim that the real accomplishment of cinema studies “is to have forged more than any other related discipline the methodological and philosophical bases for addressing the most urgent and interesting questions, both aesthetic and cultural, of modernity and visual culture” (2001, 1403). However, the more optimistic among us would like to encourage more focus on adding “ethical” to the important types of questions, and to continue to push film and media studies to engage with the pressing issues of the day, even to have the foresight and honesty to acknowledge what will be the pressing issues to come. Therefore we must now ask: What is the defining problem that civilization is and will be facing in the years to come?

The environment. Climate change, global warming, sea level rise, natural resource use and scarcity, the epic climax of this long slough of humanity's carbon footprint. As Sean Cubitt claims with casual poignancy, ecopolitics is the last master narrative (2005, 9). Identity difference and geopolitical struggle will mean nothing if this planet becomes uninhabitable, which most scientific and critical studies point to in an increasingly near future; we are today starting to reap the harvest of what Marx referred to as “metabolic rift,” a term McKenzie Wark has resurrected to refer to the lasting geological, atmospheric and elemental impact of human industry as we wade out of prehistory and into the endgame era commonly known as the Anthropocene (2015, viii). Awareness of and concern for ecological issues have risen greatly in the past two decades, and the past halfcentury has seen an intellectual and activist evolution from environmentalist writing to ecocriticism, alongside a trending wave of environmentally focused films, media texts and screen studies.