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Environmental Communication is a growing and diverse area of thinking, scholarship, and professional practice. As such, it is difficult to provide a specific and narrow definition that suits all of its various iterations. Below you will find a selection of perspectives about Environmental Communication.
Word cloud of terms related to environmental communication drawn from recent issues of Environmental Communication and from trends in the field.
Tema Milstein, Associate Professor of Environment & Society at the University of New South Wales, describes Environmental Communication as a field of academic study focused on “the ways people communicate about the natural world.” She writes:
Environmental Communication is a field within the communication discipline, as well as a metafield that cuts across disciplines. Research and theory within the field are united by the topical focus on communication and human relations with the environment. Scholars who study environmental communication are particularly concerned with the ways people communicate about the natural world because they believe that such communication has far-reaching effects at a time of largely human-caused environmental crises.
Phaedra C. Pezzullo, Professor of Communication at University of Colorado, Boulder and Robert Cox, Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, authors of Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere: "We use the phrase environmental communication to mean the pragmatic & constitutive modes of expression—the naming, shaping, orienting, and negotiating—of our ecological relationships in the world, including those with nonhuman systems, elements, and species."
Casey Schmitt, former President of the Environmental Communication Division of the National Communication Association, defines Environmental Communication (EC) as a perspectival shift in how to understand, discuss, and engage in communication. EC considers symbolic exchange, persuasion, meaning-making, and discourse as situated processes, and thus attends especially to the physical environments in which these communication events develop and to their environmental repercussions which shape the spheres in which future events will play out. EC recognizes that communication shapes and articulates places and contexts but also that communication is itself, in turn, shaped and articulated by places and contexts. EC as a discipline, thus, pays special attention to the ways communication events affect and impact the physical and biophysical environments in which they take place. Accordingly, it attends to the most pressing environmental changes, challenges, and threats of the current time.
Kevin Ells, Texas A&M University-Texarkana, provides a definition as broad as his ecocentered perspective:
Environmental Communication encompasses the study or performance of all discourse pertaining to the history, present condition, and plausible future of the biosphere, the solid, liquid, and gaseous shell of Earth wherein all living beings interact with minerals, waters, atmospheres, and one another—in short, what is generally called the environment. Environmental Communication researchers examine the practice and critique of such discourse in all media for all potential purposes.
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