Two new book and film projects take the contemplative approach to the climate crisis

The mid-20^th-century writer and philosopher Marshall McLuhan first used the phrase “the medium is the message” in his 1964 book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. For McLuhan, the content of a television series or a picture book was less impactful than the way the message itself was delivered. In that same book he distinguished between “hot” media, which overwhelms our critical resistance and washes over us with direct intensity, and “cool” media, the kind that retreats into…