Environmental Communication Notes

Defining Environmental Communication

Environmental communication encompasses various elements:

  • Media
  • Environment
  • Ideology
  • Communicating Risk

Environmental Movement

The environmental movement is a diverse set of philosophical, social, and political ideas that advocate for environmental stewardship through public policy and individual behavior.

Romantic Movement (approx. 1800-1850)

The Romantic Movement influenced early environmental thought:

  • Nature as a living force.
  • Nature as an expression of the divine spirit.
  • Nature as the "language of God."

This movement was an artistic, literary, musical, and intellectual movement originating in Europe, impacting visual art, poetry, literature, and music.

Key Historical Context

  • Mid-20th Century: Indigenous land politics gained prominence.
  • 1962: Publication of Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring."
  • 1960s/70s: Environmental protests increased.
  • Early 19th Century: Industrialization began transforming landscapes and raising environmental concerns.

Defining Environmental Communication (Robert Cox, 2010)

Environmental communication is the pragmatic and constitutive vehicle for understanding the environment and our relationship with the natural world. It's the symbolic medium we use to construct environmental problems and negotiate society's responses (p.20p. 20).

  • It is the symbolic representation of most any topic about the natural world.

  • Meaning: Symbols

  • Health and environment: communicating the risks

  • Key terms include: “nature,” “ecology,” “the environment.”

  • Our beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors toward the environment are shaped by how we communicate about it.

Shaping Attitudes and Beliefs

Addresses how communication shapes our collective attitudes, beliefs, and values about the environment.

  • Pragmatic: Educates, alerts, persuades, mobilizes, and helps us solve environmental problems.

  • Constitutive: Represents nature and environmental problems as subjects for our understanding.

  • Care Discipline

  • Crisis Discipline

  • Environmental Justice

Media, Environment, Ideology

Explores the intersection of media, environmental issues, and underlying belief systems.

The Environmental Public Sphere

Encompasses any exchange about the environment communicated to—or by—an attentive audience. Includes:

  • Citizens and community groups demanding accountability from the government.
  • Environmental groups engaging in public advocacy.
  • The scientific community communicating research results.
  • Corporations and business lobbyists advocating for economic interests.
  • Anti-environmentalist groups fueled by the fear of limiting civil liberties.
  • Environmental journalism shapes public opinion on environmental issues.
  • Public officials/regulators tasked with developing and enforcing laws, regulations, and agreements.

Advertising and Visualizing the Environment

Advertising's role in shaping perceptions of the environment:

  • As a space to conquer.

  • As a space for therapy.

  • As an ethic for consumption.

  • "Greenwashing": The dissemination of false or deceptive information regarding an organization’s environmental strategies, goals, motivations, and actions (Nemes et al, 2022).

News Media and Environmental Science

  • Balance: Presenting pros and cons, arguments for and against, affirmative and negative perspectives.
  • Rhetorical Technique: Presenting science through the lens of "scientific uncertainty."

Communicating Risk

Focuses on the exchange of information about threats to health, economic stability, or social well-being.

  • Risk Communication: The exchange of real-time information, advice, and opinions between experts and people facing threats to their health, economic or social well-being. Its ultimate purpose is to enable people at risk to take informed decisions to protect themselves and their loved ones (World Health Organization).

  • Pragmatic

  • Media coverage of environmental risk is not related to the seriousness of the risk in terms of health; instead, it relies on journalistic criteria like timeliness and human interest.

  • Most media coverage isn’t about risk but instead about blame, fear, anger, and other nontechnical issues.

Merchants of Doubt

Highlights the strategic manufacturing of uncertainty to undermine public trust in science.

  • There is virtually no science to support the argument that climate change is not happening and that human-generated CO2CO_2 emissions are not a central contributor to it.

  • Examples: California + BC wildfires, 2020; Hurricane Maria, 2017.

  • Communicating science often involves dealing with the perceived "distance" of the issue (e.g., the polar bear) and its impact on news coverage and political decision-making.

  • Memes

  • 2030

Regulation and Fear

Examines the role of regulation in environmental protection and the fear-based arguments against it.

  • Naomi Oreskes (Science Historian)
  • Fear
  • Neoliberalism (1980s)
  • Civil Liberties

Re.Climate & Communicating for Change

Highlights resources and programs focused on environmental communication and action.

Wrapping Up

Key Takeaways:

  • The underlying beliefs we have about the non-human world result of the ways we as humans communicate about it.
  • The “environmental public sphere” comprises media that both intentionally and non-intentionally presents the non-human world.
  • Environmental communication involves the politically charged task of communicating risk for the best interest of the population.