Greening Cultural Labor

In the early twenty-first century, environmentally friendly accounting practices in the creative industries were confined to site-specific budgets of individual films or studio operations. Any external environmental costs were either ignored or written off as too hard to measure. This chapter considers the media's future by imagining a new kind of accountancy freed from the bonds of corporate media. Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller have devised an imaginary world where accountants, imbued with the values of green citizenship, set off on a quest to uncover the environmental and labor conditions within the global supply chain of consumer electronics and information and communication technologies. This speculative fiction helps the authors conjure up conditions in which media producers and media studies scholars address human-centric despoliation of the Earth's ecosystems and the toxic exploitation of media workers. Keywords: Environment; Ecological; Cultural Labor; Exploitation; E-Waste; Accountancy; Accountants; Media; Information and Communication Technology; Consumer Electronics; Supply Chain; Ethics