The Local And The Digital In Environmental Communication

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.

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.

How do we talk about the environment? Does this communication reveal and construct meaning? Is the environment expressed and foregrounded in the new landscape of digital media? The Environment in the Age of the Internet is an interdisciplinary collection that draws together research and answers from media and communication studies, social sciences, modern history, and folklore studies. Edited by Heike Graf, its focus is on the communicative approaches taken by different groups to ecological issues, shedding light on how these groups tell their distinctive stories of "the environment". This book draws on case studies from around the world and focuses on activists of radically different kinds: protestors against pulp mills in South America, resistance to mining in the Sámi region of Sweden, the struggles of indigenous peoples from the Arctic to the Amazon, gardening bloggers in northern Europe, and neo-Nazi environmentalists in Germany. Each case is examined in relation to its multifaceted media coverage, mainstream and digital, professional and amateur. Stories are told within a context; examining the "what" and "how" of these environmental stories demonstrates how contexts determine communication, and how communication raises and shapes awareness. These issues have never been more urgent, this work never more timely. The Environment in the Age of the Internet is essential reading for everyone interested in how humans relate to their environment in the digital age.

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.

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.

Sara Nofri combines several research methods (multilingual bibliographic research, quantitative content analysis, semiotic text analysis, interviews to journalists) and a cross-cultural, interdisciplinary perspective for investigating environmental communication in the daily quality press of Germany, Italy, Sweden and UK. She provides an in-depth portrait of the features, the focus, the themes and stakeholders involved, individuates different "cultures of environment" and "cultures of communication", and provides insights and practical tools to analyze and then evaluate environmental communication. The methodological approach of this study can be readily transposed to studies investigating other contexts, cultures and media.

Voice and Environmental Communication explores how people give voice to, and listen to the voices of, the environment. This foundational book introduces the relationship between these two fundamental aspects of human existence and extends our knowledge of the role of voice in the study of environmental communication.

There are many current socio-environmental conflicts and problems around the world that affect distinct nationalities, races, or ethnicities. Part of the solution to these issues involves interdisciplinary scholarship to make sense of the communication challenges that are involved. However, current research in this area has lacked clear focus on the ways in which environmental issues are culturally and socially constructed by racial and ethnic minorities. This volume aims to improve our understanding of culturally bounded rationalities across racial and ethnic groups facing environmental challenges, as they relate to the formation of environmental identities, environmental injustice, political activism, public engagement, and media representations, among others. The ideas presented in this book dovetail with the idea that environmental communication scholars and practitioners can effectively intervene to engage ethnic groups that traditionally are not included in decision making or deliberation processes that directly affect their livelihoods. Considering problems such as the siting of industrial facilities, flooding, droughts, climate change, and air and water pollution, this book will be of great interest to students, scholars, and practitioners of environmental communication.

This handbook provides a comprehensive review of communication around rising global environmental challenges and public action to manage them now and into the future. Bringing together theoretical, methodological, and practical chapters, this book presents a unique opportunity for environmental communication scholars to critically reflect on the past, examine present trends, and start envisioning exciting new methodologies, theories, and areas of research. Chapters feature authors from a wide range of countries to critically review the genesis and evolution of environmental communication research and thus analyze current issues in the field from a truly international perspective, incorporating diverse epistemological perspectives, exciting new methodologies, and interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks. The handbook seeks to challenge existing dominant perspectives of environmental communication from and about populations in the Global South and disenfranchised populations in the Global North. The Handbook of International Trends in Environmental Communication is ideal for scholars and advanced students of communication, sustainability, strategic communication, media, environmental studies, and politics.

While digital media give us the ability to communicate with and know the world, their use comes at the expense of an immense ecological footprint and environmental degradation. In Finite Media Sean Cubitt offers a large-scale rethinking of theories of mediation by examining the environmental and human toll exacted by mining and the manufacture, use, and disposal of millions of phones, computers, and other devices. The way out is through an eco-political media aesthetics, in which people use media to shift their relationship to the environment and where public goods and spaces are available to all. Cubitt demonstrates this through case studies ranging from the 1906 film The Story of the Kelly Gang to an image of Saturn taken during NASA's Cassini-Huygens mission, suggesting that affective responses to images may generate a populist environmental politics that demands better ways of living and being. Only by reorienting our use of media, Cubitt contends, can we overcome the failures of political elites and the ravages of capital.