Unfortunately, I will no longer be teaching my long-running course Environmental Communication: Research Into Practice through the International Environmental Communication Association (IECA).
If you are interested in taking this course, drop me a note. If there is enough interest, I’ll offer it in another venue. Thanks.
UPDATE: I am now offering the course again. Details are here.
Next month I will be giving two talks at St. Thomas University in Minneapolis. I’ll be focussing on how environmental communication needs to help build a culture of sustainability (or whatever you prefer to call an ecologically and socially just future) while it tries to address immediate issues. Here are the summaries.
April 25: The Role of Communication in Transitioning to a Culture that Supports Sustainability
Achieving sustainability will require more than just clean energy sources, protecting the oceans, eliminating poverty and the rest of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals. To support all of these, we need a transition to a culture of sustainability. That means our beliefs, values, aesthetics, worldviews, and institutions – in sum, our culture, must change. For that to happen, communication about ourselves and our place in the world must necessarily evolve. We need a new story about who we are as a species.
April 26: Talking Like a Mountain: Climate, Nature and the Futures We Represent
In the short to medium term, environmental communicators urgently need to find more effective ways to convince people and organizations to act to protect the Earth and its inhabitants. That communication must also cultivate the kinds of values and perceptions of the world that will support long-term ecological and social sustainability. That’s “talking like a mountain.”
Last fall I was in Helsinki to give two presentations at the 2nd ICOS Scientific Conference. ICOS is the Integrated Carbon Observation System, a European-wide research infrastructure that is developing a harmonized system for collecting and disseminating carbon cycle and greenhouse gas data. In their words, ICOS is an “organisation of eleven member countries and over 100 greenhouse gases measuring stations aimed at quantifying and understanding the greenhouse gas balance of the Europe and neighbouring regions.”
Needless to say, the conference delegates were almost all bio-physical scientists who, I assumed, knew little or nothing about communication theory generally or climate communication research specifically. Keep that in mind as you read on because that informed my approach to the two talks.
In other words, if you are somewhat familiar with the research on climate communication, this should be pretty familiar ground. But if you are new to the topic, I hope this will be a good primer for you.
The first presentation, a keynote, was about the challenges of communicating about climate change in the Post-COP21 context. The second was about some of the main things we know about good practices in climate communication. Both of these talks were meant to synthesize of some of the current thinking among scholars and practitioners on these topics.
What follows is the approximate text of the first talk, edited somewhat for this context. I’ll do a post on the second talk shortly. Continue reading
Edward Abbey wrote this about 39 years ago and never was it more true than now.
And the Enemy says, “Behold, how sleek and fat I have become. Am I not the wonder of the world?…”
I have just finished up grading and other final tasks for the January 10-week session of IECA’s online course Environmental Communication: Research Into Practice. I almost called it the Winter session, but I am not sure we had Winter here in the northeast US and I know it wasn’t winter in other parts of the world where some of the participants live.
From my perspective, this was a great session, the best yet. The course was over-full and we had an amazing group of participants, including practitioners, graduate students, the curious, and even a couple of profs. They hailed from India, the US, Singapore, Canada, Brazil, Australia, Ecuador, and other places. All of this led to some really rich discussions and the sharing of diverse perspectives and experiences. Continue reading
by Mark Meisner
In the simplest terms, environmental communication is communication about environmental affairs. This includes all of the diverse forms of interpersonal, group, public, organizational, and mediated communication that make up the social debate about environmental issues and problems, and our relationship to the rest of nature.
It is both a lay activity and a field of professional practice
Anyone who is participating in these discussions is engaging in the activity of environmental communication. That includes everyone from the most passionate environmental advocates, to the fiercest opponents of ecological protections. In this sense, it is both a lay activity that anyone can undertake, and a field of practice that professional communicators have created.
It should be noted here that former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for his work in communicating about climate change. That makes him the most distinguished environmental communicator today.
It is also an interdisciplinary field of study
Environmental communication is also an interdisciplinary field of study that examines the role, techniques, and influence of communication in environmental affairs. Basically, it studies the activity and in doing so, it draws its theory and methods primarily from communication, environmental studies, psychology, sociology, and political science. There are university courses and programs in environmental communication, research centres dedicated to its study, scholarly journals focused on the subject, and books on various aspects of the field.
Work in this area is concerned with several interconnected dimensions of the communication. These are most easily explained with reference to the standard questions of who, what, where, when and how. In each of these dimensions, we might also ask why and so what?
Who gets to participate in the discussions? Why are certain voices privileged and others marginalized? Among those are the voices of citizens, politicians, civil servants, scientists, corporations, religious institutions, labour unions, indigenous peoples, environmental organizations, and other civil society groups, not to mention journalists and other media workers.
What are the facets of the environmental issues that are being discussed? Why are some emphasized over others? What are the implications? Among the key facets that might be discussed are the science, costs, risks, problem definitions, possible responses, values, agency, responsibilities, future visions, and ideas about nature, as well as the patterns of those discussions known as discourses.
Where and when does the communication take place? What are the limitations and opportunities associated with those different contexts? These include traditional news media, public participation fora, policy-making venues, advocacy campaigns, advertising, street protests, social media, popular culture and the public sphere generally.
How are people communicating? Why are they using certain words, metaphors, visuals, frames, music, art, narratives, and other rhetorical devices? Why not different words, etc.? What are the consequence for those who hear and see these messages? How should people be communicating?
A central goal of the field is to discern and promote good practices
These are some of the core questions that environmental communication researchers explore and practitioners face. However, despite tremendous growth in the literature of environmental communication in the past two decades, there is still much to learn and a lot of work to be done in order to fully answer them.
Because many of the people who study this field see it as a “crisis discipline,” akin to conservation biology, their work often goes beyond describing, explaining, or critiquing the communication. They feel a responsibility to see that communication concerning environmental affairs be as ethical and effective as possible. That’s because such communication is essential if we are to avoid violent conflicts and address environmental health and justice issues in the most effective ways possible. Accordingly, a central goal of the field is to discern and promote good practices.
Environmental communication is a practical, and indeed essential, tool for action
As with communication in general, environmental communication serves two broad social functions. The first is that we use communication to do things. For example, we communicate in order to inform, persuade, educate, and alert others. Similarly, we use communication to organize, argue, reconcile, and negotiate with each other, among other things. In this way, environmental communication is a practical, and indeed essential, tool for action. As such, it deserves careful scrutiny.
Whether you are using environmental communication to advocate for a policy, raise awareness, change behaviour, influence public opinion, collaborate to address conflicts, pass legislation or challenge assumptions, how you communicate will affect your outcomes. Whether you seek technological, political, economic, behavioural or cultural solutions, you need effective communication to succeed.
Communication shapes how we see and value the world
The second broad social function of communication is that it plays an important role in creating meaning. Communication shapes how we see and value the world of things, events, conditions, ideas and so forth. In environmental affairs, communication guides our understanding of the issues, the problems that underlie them, the people and organizations involved, the possible approaches that can be taken, potential futures, and most importantly, the natural world itself.
Many people working in this field understand how important meanings and values are to guiding everything from the kinds of technologies people develop to the policies they support to the day to day personal choices they make. Of course, meanings and values don’t fully determine how people act, but they can greatly influence it.
How well we communicate with each other about nature and
environmental affairs will affect how well we address the ecological crisis
Better policies, cleaner energy sources, new technologies, carbon taxes and all of the other innovative approaches to dealing with environmental issues will only take us so far. In order to achieve lasting ecological sustainability, human culture (especially in wasteful Western societies) is going to have to change as well. This will require some significant shifts in our views and values towards the natural world, ourselves, and each other. So, how well we communicate about nature and environmental affairs will affect how quickly and thoroughly we can transform our cultures and ultimately how well we address the ecological crisis.
Get the PDF of this: Environmental Communication: What it is and Why it Matters
Copyright Mark Meisner. All rights reserved.
Over at the International Environmental Communication Association (IECA), we have finally completed work on Communication for the Commons: Revisiting Participation and Environment. It’s an anthology that pulls together selected papers and posters from the 2013 Conference on Communication and Environment. The conference took place in Uppsala, Sweden, June 6-11, 2013.
The book is edited by myself, Nadarajah Sriskandarajah of the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, and Stephen P. Depoe of the University of Cincinnati. Continue reading
Routledge has a new book out now on Visual Environmental Communication, edited by Anders Hansen and David Machin. The book contains a number of papers that were part of a special issue of Environmental Communication. My paper with Bruno Takahashi, “The Nature of Time: How the Covers of the World’s Most Widely-Read Weekly News Magazine Visualize Environmental Affairs” is included in the book.
It’s a great collection of papers, certainly suitable for a course. And in case you are wondering, I get no money from the book sales. I signed the paper over to Routledge and that’s that. Continue reading
What should environmental and sustainability communication focus on?
Should it emphasize the science of environmental issues or the risk of what could be lost? Should it focus on the responsibility people have to do something? Should it stress the future we want and the implications for nature? These are complex questions that we should be asking before we start talking about what frames, language, and images to use in our communications. Continue reading
Once again I will be offering an online introductory course on environmental communication through the International Environmental Communication Association (IECA). Environmental Communication: Research into Practice will run for 10 weeks from September 15 to November 21. Continue reading
Mark Meisner 
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