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Editorial Necsus

‘Lively, radiant, lush…’ This is how colour authority Pantone Inc. describes emerald green (Pantone code 17-5641), the colour of the year for 2013. Welcome to NECSUS #3_Spring 2013 with a special section on ‘Green’. While springtime is normally an ideal season to evoke the greening of nature, our aim in this special section is to present ‘Greenness’ in a broader pallet of media-related issues, from sustainable media production to the use of the colour green in a variety of films. Emerald City comes to mind in THE WIZARD OF OZ (Victor Fleming, 1939), an iconic rendering of a brilliant Technicolor green forever linked with the annus mirabilis of classical Hollywood cinema. More recently, Isabella Rosselini made it clear that we do not just think of a lush, radiant paradise when thinking about the colour green. In GREEN PORNO (2008-present), a series of short environmental films distributed online (YouTube) and made in the spirit of George Méliès, Rosselini playfully performs as an earthworm, a firefly, a whale, and a shrimp as she guides us through the fascinating (and hilarious) variations on animal reproduction while raising critical awareness of the eco-systems of the earth. ‘Green’ has many connotations. What we offer in the special section of this new issue of NECSUS is a full spectrum of ‘green’ concerns, including a series of explorations of the many different ways in which media and ecology are entangled in our world today, fully acknowledging that media users and the media themselves are in many ways actors against nature on a planetary scale.