Introduction

This chapter explores the potential and significance of digital broadcast archives (DBAs) and associated tools for supporting civic engagement with complex topics. It draws on a three-year Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project, Earth in Vision, which worked with a sample of 50 hours of environment themed broadcasts drawn from over five decades of BBC television and radio archives. The project critically examines the potential of such broadcast archive content as a resource for the making and debating of environmental histories in the context of imagining and planning for environmental futures. It builds on the principles of co-production and social learning and aims to support more plural and dynamic accounts of environmental change. The overarching question the project addresses is: How can digital broadcast archives inform environmental history and support public understanding of, and learning about, environmental change issues?

To answer this question the team – a mix of cultural, historical and environmental geographers – addressed two aims. The first was to draw on a sample BBC archive content to write our own environmental histories (with broadcasting written into the script). Alongside the standard academic currency of academic journal articles (for example, Revill et al, 2018; Smith et al, 2018), the project resulted in the production of over 30 video interviews with media producers and presenters, and three multimedia interactive e-books. These e-books tell three environmental history stories using BBC digital and paper archives, looking at different aspects of the BBC's place and role as itself a maker of environmental histories. In turn the books examine: the iconic role of Sir David Attenborough in BBC environmental programming; the ways in which BBC programming produces and reproduces ideas of British landscape; and TV's role in shaping global environmental imaginations. These three stories illustrate the potential of DBAs (here the BBC broadcast archives) for telling new histories. These have been published as free e-books. The e-books link to a website holding a sample of cleared content and some resources aimed at encouraging visitors to play with this content, with the goal of supporting them as they tell and share their own environmental histories. We conclude that there is a whole range of exciting possibilities, especially for teachers, students, and academics, to work creatively with the releases of DBAs for public use. However, that potential is currently hampered primarily by the institutional and legal contexts of DBAs.