Environment Media And Communication

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.

Communication about ‘the environment’ in and through a broad array of news, advertising, art and entertainment media is one of the major sources of public and political understanding of definitions, issues and problems associated with the environment. Environment, Media and Communication examines the social, cultural and political roles of the media as a public arena for images, representations, definitions and controversy regarding the environment. The book starts by discussing and outlining a framework for analyzing media and communication roles in the emergence of the environment and environmental problems as issues for public and political concern. It proceeds to examine who and what drives the public agenda on environmental issues, addressing questions about how governments, scientists, experts, pressure groups and other stakeholders have sought to use traditional as well as newer media for promoting their definitions of the key issues. The media are not merely an open public arena or stage, but rather themselves a key gate-keeper and influence in the process of communicating about the environment: the role of news values, organizational arrangements and professional practices, are thus examined next. Recognizing the importance of wider popular culture narratives to public understanding and communication about the environment and nature, the book proceeds with a discussion of the messages and moral tales communicated about the environment, science and nature in a range of media, including film and advertising media. It shows how this wider context provides important clues to understanding the successes and failures of selected environmental issues or campaigns. The book finishes with an examination of the key approaches and models used for understanding how the media influence and interact with public opinion and political decision-making on environmental issues. Offering a comprehensive introduction to theoretical approaches and models for the study of media and communication roles regarding the environment, and drawing on empirical research evidence and examples from Europe, America, Australia and Asia, the book will be of interest to students in media/communication studies, geography, environmental studies, political science and sociology as wll as to environmental professionals and activists.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In 2008, the editors published a well-cited journal paper arguing that while scholarly work on media representations of environmental issues had made substantial progress in textual analysis there had been much less work on visual representations. This is surprising given the increasingly visual nature of media and communication, and in light of emerging evidence that the environment is visualized through the use of increasingly symbolic and iconic images. Addressing these matters, this volume marks out the present state of the field and contains chapters that represent fresh and exciting high quality scholarly work now emerging on visual environmental communication. These include a range of fascinating and often alarming topics which draw on a variety of methods and forms of visual communication. The book demonstrates that research needs to think much more widely about what we mean by the ‘visual’ which plays a massive yet under-researched role in the politics and ideology of public understanding and misunderstanding of and the environment and environmental problems. The book is of relevance to students and researchers in media and communication studies, cultural studies, film and visual studies, geography, sociology, politics and other disciplines with an interest in the politics of visual environmental communication. This book was published as a special issue of Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture.