Essential Concepts of Environmental Communication

An A–Z Guide

Pat Brereton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000564853
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Media & Communications Industry
• Index: Business

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.

E

DOI: 10.4324/9781003123422-6

Ecological Modernism and Sustainable Development: Our Common Future in Crisis

As science communications and journalism scholar Declan Fahy affirms in a chapter on Ireland’s weak layers of eco-modernism, ‘ecological modernisation, or ecomodernism, or eco-restructuring, is a theory of social change that describes the process of sustainable development’ (Fahy 2020: 131). Fahy argues that ‘economic development can proceed in tandem with ecological protection’. More fundamentally, such a proposition suggests that ‘economic growth depends on the preservation of the environment, the material base of society, and the provider of natural resources on which human society depends’ (ibid.: 131–148). This evolving concept remains totally opposed to the philosophy around de-growth or de-modernisation, which alternatively argues that the best or only way to address environmental problems is to slow down or even halt economic growth. Ecomodernism rejects such apocalyptic visions of the future and perceives environmental problems as simply challenges that can in turn catalyse systemic and productive social reform. A clear set of ideas that constitute eco-modernist thought was developed by European sociologists in the 1980s and these ideas were codified in the 1987 UN report Our Common Future – usually referred to as the Brundtland Report after its chair, former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland.

This remains a landmark document in the history of sustainable development, which it defined as ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (UN World Commission on Environment and Development 1987: 41). Written before the full realisation of climate change’s consequences, its authors noted that it ‘is not a prediction of ever-increasing environmental decay, poverty, and hardship in an ever more polluted world among ever decreasing resources. We see instead the possibility of a new era of economic growth, one that must be based on policies that sustain and expand the environmental resource base’ (UN World Commission on Environment and Development 1987: 1).

In order for such a sustainable society to develop, eco-modernists argue that political and economic systems must be reformed along ecological lines. This means all the core systems and institutions of modern society – market economies, industrial production, welfare states, agricultural production and scientific and technological institutions – must be restructured to protect their precious environment. As a large-scale theory of social change, eco-modernism examines and explains how these systems and institutions of modern societies can be reformed. As a specific political programme, eco-modernism can be regarded as direct policies that seek to conserve the environment. For the political environmental scholar John Dryzek most notably, eco-modernism aims to reform, not to replace the capitalist economic system. It aims at nothing less, he wrote (2013: 145), than ‘the ecological restructuring of capitalism’.

There is a growing tension across such discussion, which is constantly referred to in several entries in this volume between so-called ‘green growth’, which can be characterised as a more acceptable mode of modern development, as against more radical left-leaning ‘no-growth’ or de-growth approaches, which call for the end of neo-liberal, much less eco-modern capitalism. Basically, those who call for degrowth believe reformism of established systems are considered too little and probably too late in facing up to the global climate emergency.

For a radical critique of eco-modernism and conventional green political approaches, John Barry (Queens University, Ireland) provides a provocative analysis in a paper from October 2020. Barry talks of himself in clear terms as a ‘left-libertarian (verging on anarchist) with a normative predisposition towards non-state institutions and practices’, which in turn calls attention to his very forthright green political writing and activism. At the outset of his polemical essay, Barry (2020) affirms that the system of liberal representative democracy within a market-based capitalist system is simply incapable of adequately and equitably responding to the planetary emergency we face. Most pointedly he asserts how ‘the system is not broken – it is made that way’! Accepting this proposition, Barry suggests that ‘we have to transcend liberal democratic capitalism’ (98), without necessary clarifying the roadmap to follow, much less outlining the full implications of such a radical position, which of course is difficult to assess.

Somewhat dismissively, much of the ecological modernist project is seen as ‘wishful thinking – recalling the dominance of techno-optimism, as modes of framing solutions to the climate crisis’, not to mention calling up ‘policy thinking within the state’ (Barry 2020: 99). Recounting well-versed, but by all accounts science fiction-like proposals for carbon capture and sequestration or solar radiation, Barry cites the eccentric mega-entrepreneur Elon Musk and his dreams of colonising Mars, as being like many of these half-baked proposals – ‘off the radar’. Incidentally, in July 2021 while the pandemic was still raging, there was extensive media coverage of Richard Branson’s Virgin Atlantic space tourism experiment, followed closely by his rival Jeff Bezos’s Amazon trip to space – which by any measure could also be characterised as ‘off the radar’. At the same time for many entrepreneurial citizens, more ‘down to earth’ yet radical views concerning the need to transition beyond capitalism and liberal democracy can appear, albeit secretly at least, for many well-healed citizens of planet earth – off the radar.

Most pointedly and interestingly, Barry calls for accepting a plurality of voices – beyond the dominant ecological modernist approach – especially within Irish and global thinking:

• Any ‘just transition’ to a post-carbon, post-capital society will produce ‘winners and losers’, this in turn necessitates conflict across transformation process and within any sustainability transformative process.
• Furthermore, such dissent and disagreement needs to be recognised and included in any process, instead of being marginalised or suppressed.
• Oppositional, non-conformist and sometimes an outright confrontation characterisation of such non-state actors, often contain the energy and insight for greater improvement and social progress (Barry 2020: 99).

By all accounts, Barry is correct in recognising little evidence – unlike in dealing with the 2020/21 pandemic – of governments making hard decisions concerning climate change. Querying, why our politicians do heed the science regarding COVID-19, but not regarding climate change, remains an important discussion point into the future. Most environmentalists would agree with Barry that this form of cognitive dissonance is encouraged by the belief that there are no fixed, not to say easy solutions to the climate emergency/crisis, only adaptive and ongoing coping strategies and these have to be negotiated over a much longer period of time. Meanwhile, government bailouts following the shock and urgent necessity to cope with the 2020/21 global pandemic, need to be further reimagined and re-used, according to Barry and others, to help create a ‘sustainable, climate resilient, post-carbon, post-growth and post-capitalist economy’ (Barry 2020: 104).

Certainly much more radical thinking and reimagining of how to effectively deal with the ongoing environmental crisis needs to be fuelled by well-thought out environmental communication processes and protocols. There are unfortunately no simple Right/Left, much less ecological modernist or quick fix solutions that can address all our environmental and climate crisis concerns. Most certainly, credit needs to be given to the insightful work of Barry and others in rethinking future scenarios for dealing with the almost insurmountable challenges that need to be faced while fully addressing the climate crisis.

References

Barry, John. ‘The Planetary Crisis; Brexit and the Pandemic’. The Journal of Cross Boarder Studies in Ireland: 97–108. 2020. https://crossborder.ie/site2015/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Final-Digital-Journal-Cross-Border-Studies.pdf

Dryzek, John. The Politics of the Earth: Environmental Discourses. Oxford University Press. 2013.

Fahy, Declan. ‘Ecological Modernisation, Irish-Style: Explaining Ireland’s Slow Transition to Low-Carbon Society’ (131–148). In Robbins, D., Torney, D. and Brereton, P. (eds.) Ireland and the Climate Crisis. Palgrave Macmillan 2020.

UN World Commission on Environment and Development. Bruntland Report: Our Common Future. United Nations 1987.

Eco-villages – Case Study of Cloughjordan: An Irish Transitional and Sustainable Project

In coping with so much negative analysis of the effects of climate change, we need practical illustrations of how to build low-carbon, resilient communities. The development of so-called eco-villages provides examples of how such communities can work in practice. The Irish rural eco-village of Cloughjordan, located in County Tipperary, provides one such case study. The village houses 55 dwellings and was initially built with a population of 100 adults and 35 children. It is now considered within Europe as one of the 23 most successful ‘anticipatory experiences’, showing the way to create a low carbon society.

The small community achieves this accolade by essentially integrating with the natural environment, while at the same time promoting new modes of biodynamic food production and farming. A final third of the site is devoted to woodland with 17,000 trees planted in 2011 that mainly consist of native species like Oak, Ash, Scots Pine, Birch, Rowan, Cherry, Hazel and Alder.

The eco-village supports communal work on the land and recalls the active celebration of an old-Irish mode of community cooperation called ‘Meitheal’; using low-energy technologies and robust as well as sustainable forms of community living. An image showing the community building houses with wood, reminds one of the Amish community in America and fictional representations like the Peter Weir film Witness (1985), which was analysed in (Brereton 2011).

The eco-village also revolutionised its energy output, using a distinctive heating system powered by renewable energy sources. They also kick-started the first community supported agricultural farm (CSA), which in 2020/21 grew four acres of vegetables, as well as an acre of cereal and green manure (humus building), with over six acres left in permanent pasture. Such a communal mode of food production and consumption embodies a sustainable template for post-commodification and post-supermarket exchange of food scenarios, where the members pay a modest monthly fee per family for all their needs. For a full analysis of the pros and cons of this ongoing experiment, see a historical overview by one of its founders, Peadar Kirby (2020: 287–305).

By any measure this is a tangible model for environmental media communication students to visit and learn more about. The eco-village is focused around local food production, farming energy conservation and communal living. In modern Ireland, such practices are all but lost or forgotten. In turn this very practical example feeds off a primary environmental media concern around how to reimagine sustainable living, while making a virtue out of old, often disused rural practices, together with various modes of sustainable resilience. This often-frugal philosophy in turn helps promote a key environmental literacy message around connecting with all citizens, beyond the bubble of committed environmentalists and activists working in an evangelical and political way. Such a community which has an active educational agenda is essential for environmental communication students and society in general to basically touch and feel what a sustainable community actually embodies. Urban dwellers certainly need far more on the ground and organic models and ‘creative imaginaries’, featuring successful stories that show the way towards creating a post-carbon future.

Eco-villages embody and actively serve as a beacon of hope for a future low transitional carbon society. Reminiscent of pro-active museums or heritage centres (see entry elsewhere), including those sites that promote new forms of eco-tourism, such nature-based habitats replicate many core aspects of the paradigm shift needed in moving to a more environmentally sustainable future society.

References

Brereton, Pat. ‘An Ecological Approach to the Cinema of Peter Weir’. Quarterly Review of Film and Video 28(2): 120–134. 2011.

Kirby, Peadar. ‘Cloughjordan Ecovillage: Community-led Transitioning to a Low Carbon Future’ (287–304). In Robbins, David et al. (eds) Ireland and the Climate Crisis. Palgrave 2020.

Ecocriticism and the Growth of Environmental Communication

Ecocriticism, as an academic concept and process, basically involves uncovering the environmental theme or preoccupations embedded within various forms of arts, including literature and film. It has traditionally been attached to high art and more recently popular culture including film, while frequently emphasising aesthetic, ethical and activist traditions within various societies around the world. Meanwhile, environmental communications embedded in the social sciences has tended to lean towards practical issues, manifested especially within environmental journalism, together with the sociology and historical mapping of such counter-cultural movements and their...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• A–Z Audio Visual Case Studies
• Acknowledgements
• General Appeal: Essential Concepts for Environmental Communication
• A
• B
• C
• D
• E
• F
• G
• H
• I
• J
• L
• M
• N
• O
• P
• Q
• R
• S
• T
• U
• V
• W
• The Future of Environmental Communications Overcoming Anxiety