Critical Environmental Communication

How do contemporary critical thinkers find a way to work between the doubt that grounds their thinking and the knowing needed to ground emancipatory political struggles? In this overview of four contemporary thinkers’—Timothy Morton, Peter Sloterdijk, Slavoj Žižek, and Bruno Latour—approaches to critique and climate change, communication scholar Murdoch Stephens discusses and analyses the fissures, elisions, and paradoxes that inform critical theory. This book delves into how critical theory offers important insights for those interested in climate change, but also how critical theory faces challenges to its constitution when faced with issues that are both urgent and yet require a scientific rigour that is not the specialty of critique. Written from the perspective of the interdisciplinary field of environmental communication, Critical Environmental Communication: How Does Critique Respond to the Urgency of Climate Change? argues for re-orienting the field towards the tensions and possibilities drawn from these four authors.

This book draws on a broad spectrum of environmental communications and related cross-disciplinary literature to help students and scholars grasp the interconnecting key concepts within this ever-expanding field of study. Aligning climate change and environmental learning through media and communications, particularly taking into account the post-COVID challenge of sustainability, remains one of the most important concerns within environmental communications. Addressing this challenge, Essential Concepts for Environmental Communication synthesises summary writings from a broad range of environmental theorists, while teasing out provocative concepts and key ideas that frame this evolving, multi-disciplinary field. Each entry maps out an important concept or environmental idea and illustrates how it relates more broadly across the growing field of environmental communication debates. Included in this volume is a full section dedicated to exploring what environmental communication might look like in a post-COVID setting: • Offers cutting-edge analysis of the current state of environmental communications. • Presents an up-to-date exploration of environmental and sustainable development models at a local and global level. • Provides an in-depth exploration of key concepts across the ever-expanding environmental communications field. • Examines the interaction between environmental and media communications at all levels. • Provides a critical review of contemporary environmental communications literature and scholarship. With key bibliographical references and further reading included alongside the entries, this innovative and accessible volume will be of great interest to students, scholars and practitioners alike.

Environmental professionals can no longer simply publish research in technical journals. Informing the public is now a critical part of the job. Environmental Communication demonstrates, step by step, how it’s done, and is an essential guide for communicating complex information to groups not familiar with scientific material. It addresses the entire communications process, from message planning, audience analysis and media relations to public speaking - skills a good communicator must master for effective public dialogue. Environmental Communication provides all the knowledge and tools you need to reach your target audience in a persuasive and highly professional manner. "This book will certainly help produce the skills for environmental communications sorely needed for industry, government and non-profit groups as well as an informed public". Sol P. Baltimore, Director, Environmental Communications and Adjunct faculty, Hazardous Waste management program, Department of Chemical Engineering, College of Engineering, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan. "All environmental education professionals agree that the practice of good communications is essential for the success of any program. This book provides practical skills for this concern". Ju Chou, Associate Professor, Graduate Institute of Environmental Education National Taiwan Normal University Taipei, Taiwan

Media and communication processes are central to how we come to know about and make sense of our environment and to the ways in which environmental concerns are generated, elaborated, manipulated and contested. The second edition of Environment, Media and Communication builds on the first edition’s framework for analysing and understanding media and communication roles in the politics of the environment. It draws on the significant and continuing growth and advances in the field of environmental communication research to show the increasing diversification and complexity of environmental communication. The book highlights the persistent urgency of analysing and understanding how communication about the environment is being influenced and manipulated, with implications for how and indeed whether environmental challenges are being addressed and dealt with. Since the first edition, changes in media organisations, news media and environmental journalism have continued apace, but – perhaps more significantly – the media technologies and the media and communications landscape have evolved profoundly with the continued rise of digital and social media. Such changes have gone hand in hand with, and often facilitated, enabled and enhanced shifting balances of power in the politics of the environment. There is thus a greater need than ever to analyse and understand the roles of mediated public communication about the environment, and to ask critical questions about who/what benefits and who/what is adversely affected by such processes. This book will be of interest to students in media/communication studies, geography, environmental studies, political science and sociology as well as to environmental professionals and activists.

The vast majority of the world’s population lives on or near the coast. These communities are an extraordinary and largely untapped resource that can be used to mitigate planetary disaster and foster environmental stewardship. Repeated waves of scientific fact and information are not inciting action, nor apparently producing enough momentum to change voting behaviour towards a progressive environmental politics. A critical coastal policy, underpinned by a deeper understanding of environmental communication, can offer something new to this status quo. Environmental Communication and Critical Coastal Policy argues that more science and ‘better’ communication has been largely responsible for the lacklustre response by citizens to environmental challenges. Foxwell-Norton asserts that the inclusion of a range of local meanings and cultural frameworks with which experts could engage would better incite participation in, and awareness of, local environmental issues. The value and possible role of ‘geo-community media’ (mainstream, alternative and social media) is examined here to illustrate and support the key argument that meaningful local engagement is a powerful tool in coastal management processes. This is a valuable resource for postgraduates, researchers and academics across environmental science and management, policy studies, communication studies and cultural studies.

The acceleration of global climate change creates a nexus for the examination of power, political rhetoric, science communication, and sustainable development. This book takes an international view of twenty first century environmental communication to critically explore mediated expressions of climate change.

Participatory Media in Environmental Communication brings together stories of communities in the Pacific islands – a region that is severely affected by the impacts of climate change. Despite living on the margins of the digital revolution, these island communities have used media and communication to create awareness of and find solutions to environmental challenges. By telling their stories in their own way, ordinary people are able to communicate compelling accounts of how different, but interrelated, environmental, political, and economic issues converge and impact at a local level. This book fills a significant gap in our understanding of how participatory media is used as a dialogic tool to raise awareness and facilitate discussion of environmental issues that are now critical. It includes a section on pedagogy and practice – the undergirding principles, the tools, the methods. The book offers a framework for Participatory Environmental Communication that weaves three widely used concepts, diversity, network and agency, into a cohesive underlying system to bring scholars, practitioners and diverse communities together in a dialogue about pressing environmental issues. This book is a valuable resource for researchers and students in communication and media studies, environmental communication, cultural studies, and environmental sciences, as well as practitioners, policy makers and environmental activists.

This volume interrogates the intertwining of the local and the digital in environmental communication. It starts by introducing a wave metaphor to tease out major shifts in the field, and situates the intersections of local places and digital networks in the beginning of a third wave. Investigations that feature the centrality of place and digital communication platforms show how we today, as researchers and practitioners, communicate the environment. Contributions identify the need for critical approaches that engage with the wider consequences of this changing media landscape, unpacking local and global tensions in environmental communication research. This empirical case study collection from different parts of the world shows that environmental activists and citizens creatively use digital technologies for campaign purposes. It identifies new environmental communication challenges and opportunities, as well as practices, of environmental activists, NGOs, citizens and local communities, in the fight for social and environmental justice.

The Fifth Edition of the award-winning Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere is the first comprehensive introduction to the growing field of environmental communication. This groundbreaking book focuses on the role that human communication plays in influencing the ways we perceive the environment. It also examines how we define what constitutes an environmental problem and how we decide what actions to take concerning the natural world. The updated and revised Fifth Edition includes recent developments, such as water protectors and the Dakota Access Pipeline, the Flint Water Crisis, and the March for Science, along with the latest research and developments in environmental communication.

Editorial ScopeThe Environmental Communication Yearbook is a multidisciplinary forum through which a broad audience of academics, professionals, and practitioners can share and build theoretical, critical, and applied scholarship addressing environmental communication in a variety of contexts. This peer-reviewed annual publication invites submissions that showcase and/or advance our understanding of the production, reception, contexts, or processes of human communication regarding environmental issues. Theoretical expositions, literature reviews, case studies, cultural and mass media studies, best practices, and essays on emerging issues are welcome, as are both qualitative and quantitative methodologies. Areas of topical coverage will include: *participatory processes: public participation, collaborative decision making, dispute resolution, consensus building processes, regulatory negotiations, community dialogue, building civic capacity; *journalism and mass communications: newspaper, magazine, book and other forms of printed mass media; advertising and public relations; media studies; and radio, television, and Internet broadcasting; and *communication studies: rhetorical/historical case studies, organizational analyses, public relations/issues management, interpersonal/relational dimensions, risk communication, and psychological/cognitive research, all of which examine the origins, content, structure, and outcomes of discourse about environmental issues. Submissions are accepted on an ongoing basis for inclusion in volumes published annually. Audience Researchers, scholars, students and practitioners in environmental communication, journalism, rhetoric, public relations, mass communication, risk analysis, political science, environmental education, environmental studies, public administrations; policymakers; others interested in environmental issues and the communication channels used for discourse and information dissemination on the topic. For more information and guidelines for submissions, visit www.erlbaum.com/ecy.htm.