Last semester the IMS Green cluster became the IMS Environment cluster, thus opening up the group for examining how media and signs participate in the making and unmaking of environments. We organized readings of key theoretical texts from media ecology -- Mark B.N. Hansen on the concept of phenomenotechnics -- and hosted a lecture by semiotician Claudio Paolucci on semiotic lifeworlds. Additionally, we organized in collaboration with Chiel Kattenbelt a workshop on Lars Elleström's semiotic modalities with the aim to open a conversation about to what extent they are affected by recent media technological developments such as LLM:s and other machine learning algorithms.

A basic idea that we came back to time and again during these events is that the relation between an organism and its environment is recursive: the environment is made by the organism and the organism made by the environment. In human environments or lifeworlds, this recursive process is mediated by -- among other things -- technologies and signs. The human ecology is a semiotic techno-ecology.

As a next step to both widen and deepen these questions we operationalize the theoretical work by focusing on a question that is central in environmental politics and that may be very interesting for us as environmental or intermedial humanities scholars. We want to enter the mitigation vs. adaptation debate which originally is a debate about how to respond in the most efficient way to the climate-ecological crisis, but that will have crucial implications for cultural criticism too. It is our goal to expand it to include both the relation between society and nature and the relation between society and technology. We plan to develop these ideas for a while, with a sort of culmination in autumn 2028 where we will host the Association of Adaptation Studies conference in Växjö, on the theme of exactly these questions.

So, to begin our investigations we are sharing four texts for our meeting. The IPCC Summary for policymakers is of course a standard document that it is good to be familiar with, both as an intermedial communication effort and as a political document. Then we have the short 2005 “Introduction to papers on mitigation and adaptation etc…” that has some valuable phrasings for us. And then Wang et al’s “Climate Change: strategies for mitigation and adaptation” from 2026. A visually appealing and thus intermedially interesting presenting of our thematic. Read as much as you can of the three texts, they are meant to be a sort of basis for our future discussions.

And then finally, the proposal call for the 2028 Adaptation conference, where we continue classic intermedial discussions while also driving it towards environmental and adaptation questions.