Lightning Birds: An Aeroecology of the Airwaves by Jacob Smith (review)

Jacob Smith's Lightning Birds: An Aeroecology of the Airwaves is an accessible work about an esoteric topic: the "aerosphere" as a contact point between birds and radio broadcasts. Smith traces an overlapping history of ornithology and radio, transforming a whimsical observation about the sky into a persuasive and often entertaining case for thinking about media technologies ecologically, in relation to animals and earthly processes.

Smith's work draws on Jussi Parikka's influential book A Geology of Media (2015), which considers the material strata and deep time of media, while also offering an aerial counterpoint to Melody Jue's Wild Blue Media (2020), which looks at the ocean as a media environment. Each of these works makes strides in linking media studies and ecocriticism. What distinguishes Lightning Birds is its format: Rather than a traditional monograph, Smith has produced a five-episode podcast, along with an introductory essay described as "liner notes." It's a smart pairing of form and content—a riff on the radio play—and it largely succeeds in presenting scholarly ideas for a broader audience. As a result of this work, Smith was recently named winner of the 2022 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Anne Friedberg Innovative Scholarship Award.

The project's title comes from Russian futurist Velimir Khlebnikov's 1921 essay "The Radio of the Future," which glorifies emerging radio technology and describes radio waves as a "stream of lightning birds" (5). Smith departs from this metaphorical usage to document the material connections between birds and radio, as well as to explore the rich imaginative space of the sky, where birds often serve as inspiration for human ambitions. He defines radio loosely as "an assemblage of technological devices, along with the protocols for using them" (1). His aim is to recontextualize this assemblage of towers and transmissions and social practices "as it intersects with the aerospheric environment" (3).

Given the potential sprawl of the subject matter—bird migration, radio infrastructures, citizen science, species extinction—Smith relies on a range of storytelling and production techniques to maintain focus. Khlebnikov's essay serves as a framing device across the series, as does Paul Gallico's 1941 novella The Snow Goose, a wartime parable about love, distance, and, as Smith suggests, interspecies kinship. Smith also employs a familiar pod-caster's toolkit of sound effects, music, and archival audio to evoke the dynamic space of the aerosphere. Part of the fun of this project is the mix of scholarly expertise and homespun ingenuity; you can almost picture Smith perfecting his NPR voice and tinkering with samples on GarageBand. Yet the project also responds gracefully to a twofold problem in the environmental humanities: how to manage topics that encompass so much, and how to convey urgent yet complex information to academic and nonacademic audiences alike.

Each episode has a thematic focus. Episode 1, "Station," draws a parallel between the practice of "bird banding"—the earliest technique for studying bird migration, where participants attach a marker around a bird's leg—and amateur radio networks emerging in the 1920s. Smith links the emphasis on distance and hobbyism to Raymond Williams's concept of "mobile privatization," where an increasingly privatized, stationary population turned to technology for a sense of the larger world. Here, Smith explores the central role of aluminum in both processes, as a durable material for the bird bands and as a key component in radio devices and infrastructure. Aluminum becomes another focal point in the series, an elemental anchor, as Smith highlights its centrality to skyward technologies like aviation and radio, as well as its notorious environmental costs—a light, durable material with a massive carbon footprint.

Episode 2, "Tower," looks at "towerkill," a phenomenon where birds crash into tall structures that began with lighthouses and, with the proliferation of radio towers, has led to an estimated 6.6 million bird deaths per year. While experts put...