This book is part of a series that is devoted to environmental communication and the media, which requires a look at how the field of communication has evolved, and where environmental communication falls under its disciplinary umbrella.
From my perspective, communication is one element—and a critical one—in how people learn what things mean. From a broad perspective, this book examines how meanings are constructed in communication: a scholarly area referred to as social constructionism. Writers like me—who try to understand how the processes of communication help create meanings—examine the structural and cultural forces that shape how we understand our world.
To begin, I will briefly unpack some of the structural and cultural forces that shape communication.
Scholarly attention to communication in the West grew swiftly after the end of World War II, according to the National Communication Association (NCA).1 In the aftermath of “fascism and violence in Europe and Asia,” universities—which had traditionally offered courses in rhetoric and public speaking—expanded their curriculums to explore effects of communication and mass media on a variety of publics, adopting empirical methods from the social sciences. New courses in mass communication effects, persuasion, interpersonal communication and social influences were offered.2 Today more than 240 subcategories of peer-reviewed communication scholarship are included in the research resource called the Oxford Bibliographies and range from advertising to whistleblowing and, of course, environmental communication.3
Environmental Communication
In many ways, the subcategory of environmental communication reflects the range of interests in the discipline as a whole. That is, some researchers are keen to discover whether green advertisements—those designed to appeal to ecologically minded consumers—are more effective than other forms of advertising, while their colleagues might examine how the civic actions of whistleblowers—such as the Ohio townsfolk and attorneys who successfully sued DuPont for polluting the environment—yielded a $671 million settlement in 2017.4
Communication scholar James Shanahan notes in the Oxford Bibliographies that some academics consider science, environmental, health and risk communication a single discipline,5 while, for others, environmental communication, health communication and risk communication fall under the rubric of science communication. An illustration is seen by the formation of the Science Communication Interest Group in 1991 as a sub-unit of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC)—one of the oldest organizations for teachers and scholars in communication in the United States. Eighteen years later, the group enlarged its focus, which is reflected in its current name that reveals a wider scope: The Communicating Science, Health, Environment and Risk Interest Group.
Shanahan adds that environmental communication traces its beginnings to the 1962 ground-breaking book, Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson, an American naturalist who revealed the harmful effects of bug-killing chemicals on living organisms. Carson’s cri de coeur pointed out the unchecked power of industry, and her whistleblowing manuscript bolstered a nascent social movement keen on making transparent the health effects wrought through commerce for the sake of progress . Environmentalist Bill McKibben said Carson “was the very first person to knock some of the shine off modernity.”6
From my perspective, the underpinnings of the culture of science—as a discipline, as a practice and as a social value—provides a shared foundation for research in the areas of environment, health and risk communication. Modern, Western views on science shifted dramatically beginning in the period known as the Enlightenment, when empiricism, logic and facts began to assume greater currency than faith and religion. While the practice of faith was associated with questions of the soul and free will, questions about the moon’s orbit and the cure for tuberculosis landed in the bailiwick of the scientist. How we think about the environment, health and risk in our Western culture arises from a foundation of scientific empiricism and practice. And while Western scientific perspectives are often presented as free from bias and subjectivity, my colleagues who examine communication from environmental, health and risk perspectives are quick to point out that the notion of value-free science is a contrivance. That is, scientific perspectives are shot through with cultural values.
James Robert Cox’s best-selling textbook on environmental communication—now in its fifth edition—is considered a core text, according to Shanahan. Cox defines environmental communication in a way that grounds the concept in the tradition of rhetoric and the transactional model of communication:
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 response to them.7
Three key elements comprise the definition. Cox describes human communication as a pragmatic and constitutive vehicle, which encompasses a range of activities, from cognition to persuasion, and through a range of channels, from face-to-face conversation to the Internet. “Pragmatism”—the first element—refers to communication functions, such as educating and mobilizing. As for “constitutive”—the second element—Cox means communication is more than the transmission of information. Rather, communication is an active process where meanings are “constituted” and negotiated. And third, Cox refers to environmental communication as a “symbolic medium” that “helps to constitute, or compose, representations of nature and environmental problems … as subjects for our understanding.”8
Because communication is more than spoken and written expression, it can be described also as a symbolic act, where “we draw upon language and other symbols to construct a framework” to understand the world.9 Cox borrows from the tradition of linguistics and semiotics, particularly from Ferdinand de Saussure, in describing communication as symbolic, meaning, words are signs or symbols that represent things or ideas. After more than 100 years, Saussure’s theories on language continue to be included in communication textbooks, where the word is an arbitrary sign (the signifier or signifiant) for the concept it represents (the signified or signifié). Saussure deftly points out that the meanings of words shift over time and depend on context and history. A contemporary example that L. David Ritchie and I studied is the term “designer baby,” which refers to a human embryo fertilized outside the womb and selected for eye color or gender: a baby designed and then chosen for certain features. But designer baby might also refer to an infant sporting a Gucci onesie: dressed in designer duds. Thus, the meaning of the term designer baby depends on the context of its use.10
The Public Sphere and Social Discourse
Communication students wisely ask how and where meanings such as designer baby emerge, tak...