What is Environmental Communication? (version 2.0)

Environmental communication is communication about environmental affairs.

As with other forms of communication, environmental communication is both an activity/phenomenon and a field of study that, not surprisingly, studies the activity/phenomenon.

As an activity/phenomenon, environmental communication is all of the diverse forms of interpersonal, group, public, organizational, and mass communication that make up the social discussion/debate about environmental issues and problems, and our relationship to non-human nature. Loosely speaking, we can refer to that discussion/debate about environmental issues and problems as "environmental discourse." And, we can refer to the even broader social discussion about Nature as the discourse of Nature. Environmental communication manifests as the discourse of Nature and its subset, the environmental discourse.

As a field of study, environmental communication is a diverse synthesis of communication and environmental theory that examines the role, techniques, and influence of communication in environmental affairs.

In his textbook Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere, Robert Cox provides a more formal definition that situates environmental communication as a form of symbolic action. In Cox's words (p.12), environmental communication is "the pragmatic and constitutive vehicle for our understanding of the environment as well as our relationships to the natural world; it is the symbolic medium that we use in constructing environmental problems and negotiating society's different responses to them." By pragmatic Cox means the instrumental function of educating, alerting, persuading, mobilizing, solving, etc. By constitutive he means the creative function of helping to shape our perceptions of nature, environmental issues and ourselves.

For Cox, environmental communication has seven major areas of study:

• Environmental rhetoric and discourse
• News media and environmental journalism
• Public participation in environmental decision-making
• Environmental advocacy campaigns
• Environmental collaboration and conflict resolution
• Risk communication
• Representations of Nature in popular culture

Cox, Robert. (2006) Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications. Publisher's Web Site