Spreading Success Beyond the Laboratory: Applying the RE-AIM Framework for Effective Environmental Communication Interventions at Scale*

The RE-AIM framework, created by Russell Glasgow and colleagues, addresses five major factors involved with sustained population-level effectiveness of public health interventions—Reach, Efficacy and/or Effectiveness, Adoption, Implementation and Maintenance. In this article, I illustrate how the framework might be applied to environmental communication interventions, and discuss how the framework needs to be adapted to important aspects of this context. Following that, I address several potential criticisms of RE-AIM or its usefulness for environmental communication scholars. Finally, I discuss how research practices of environmental communication scholars could be changed in light of the insights given by the RE-AIM framework. Much work remains to be done in order to see exactly how RE-AIM, or other frameworks focused on large-scale intervention effectiveness, can be made most useful to environmental communication scholars. However, RE-AIM already provides a valuable way to start thinking about how to best improve large-scale effectiveness of communication interventions.     

The Ecology of Empire: Wal-Mart's Rhetoric of Environmental Stewardship and the Constitutive Power of the Multitude

This essay provides a critical account of Wal-Mart's rhetoric of environmental stewardship. By situating this discourse within a new political economy of production and governance that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have termed empire, I argue that environmental communication scholars should limit the rush to deploy ideological criticism when explaining the corporation's rhetorical motives. Instead, I advocate reading Wal-Mart's rhetoric as a problem of historical conjunctures, a critical move that seeks to highlight, not only the structural interests of capital, but also the centrality of social antagonism. In the case of Wal-Mart, this means accounting for the increased significance of demand to economic production, changes in the composition of sovereignty, and the transgressive function of environmentalism at the beginning of the twenty-first century.     

Application of the Eco-Industrial concept to community environmantal management

This study is aimed at studying the feasibility of applying the Eco-Industrial concept to community environmental management and then investigating factors and appropriate means. In-depth interviewing of scholars and authorities and surveying of five sample communities representing the four different regions in Thailand is carried out to search for the feasibility of applying the concept. The results show that it is feasible, especially in rural areas, where dependence on the local resources and the community members in doing activities in the communities in accordance with the ecological context still exists. Factors and conditions involved in applying the concept include analysis of resources, participation of the people, community leaders, formulation of community development plans, good communication, sharing of knowledge, and provision of appropriate support to create network of communities. The appropriate means of applying the concept to community environmental management entails promoting involvement in the part of the local people and sustainability in the cooperation, with appropriate channels of communication and under the guidance of the leaders, who are the community’s central figures with the determination and ability to motivate and navigate the people in the community. Importantly, there must be analysis on the economic, social, environmental, and health benefits resulting from such application.     

Reform,Justice, and Sovereignty: A Food Systems Agenda for Environmental Communication

Food ecologies and economies are vital to the survival of communities, non-human species, and our planet. While environmental communication scholars have legitimated food as a topic of inquiry, the entangled ecological, cultural, economic, racial, colonial, and alimentary relations that sustain food systems demand greater attention. In this essay, we review literature within and beyond environmental communication, charting the landscape of critical food work in our field. We then illustrate how environmental justice commitments can invigorate interdisciplinary food systems-focused communication scholarship articulating issues of, and critical responses to, injustice and inequity across the food chain. We stake an agenda for food systems communication by mapping three orientations—food system reform, justice, and sovereignty—that can assist in our critical engagements with and interventions into the food system. Ultimately, we entreat environmental communication scholars to attend to the bends, textures, and confluences of these orientations so that we may deepen our future food-related inquiries.     

Beasts,Burgers, and Hummers: Meat and the Crisis of Masculinity in Contemporary Television Advertisements

This paper examines three recent television advertisements that symbolically link meat not only with masculinity, but specifically with the “crisis in masculinity.” Using an ecofeminist lens, I engage in an intersectional analysis of these advertisements to demonstrate how they articulate the eating of meat with primitive masculinities as a response to perceived threats to hegemonic masculinity. These advertisements demonstrate that scholars interested in the status of masculinity must pay attention to the “threats” to masculinity posed by environmental and animal rights movements, and that scholars interested in environmental movements must pay attention to the role of masculinity in resisting moves toward sustainability. This analysis demonstrates the utility of ecofeminism in understanding the relationship between hegemonic masculinity and environmentalism while also pointing to the need for ecofeminism to continue to explore the implications of intersectionality for ecofeminist theory and criticism.     

On Seeing “Places” for What They Are,and Not What We Want Them to Be

For more than 40 years, scholars have been investigating psychological and communicative implications for the concept of place. During that time, a variety of methods have been employed, yet often without an obvious concern for the extent to which investigative conclusions match perceptions held by respondents who originally generate data the analyses rely upon. Although this distinction between actors’ and informants’ meanings for place is a subject most in the field of environmental communication encounter in their formative education, the actual practice of place-based research sometimes fails to adequately address the issue. Thus, the following commentary explores various threats to representational validity and suggests a number of areas we researchers should consider when conducting our place-based studies. In urging ourselves to rise to the challenge of self-skepticism, I hope my analysis provides a modestly novel take on empiricism regarding what places mean to those we study.     

Pedagogy for Sustainability Science: Case-Based Approaches for Interdisciplinary Instruction

Sustainability science represents a fundamental shift in the nature of research on environmental problems, calling for specialists to expand beyond their disciplinary perspectives in order to cooperate together to understand and address systemic problems. This shift demands a corresponding shift in education in order to equip students with the skills, theories, and methods they need to address contemporary challenges. We argue that case studies are a productive pedagogical approach to teaching about sustainability and teaching for sustainability. Case-based approaches equip students to encounter complexity, manage uncertainty, and generate innovative strategies. In laying out of the pedagogical challenges inherent in sustainability education, we highlight opportunities and demands for environmental communication scholars to contribute to the emerging discipline of sustainability science.     

FORUM Communicative Action in Response to a Nuclear Crisis: Representations of Fukushima across Communication Contexts

The 2011 disaster at Japan's Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant poses important questions for environmental communication scholarship and practice. This forum examines questions that were emerging one month into the Fukushima crisis, when a panel examined its implications as part of North Carolina State University's second annual research symposium on Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media (details available at http://crdm.chass.ncsu.edu/symposium2011/). Expanding those initial analyses, we identify implications across the contexts of environmental communication, expert-public engagement, public discourses of nuclear energy, uses of new media, risk and crisis communication, and organizational and institutional communication. The first essay (Kinsella) addresses some implications of Fukushima from the perspectives of constitutive communication theory, risk analysis, and risk communication. The second essay (Ionescu) examines an effort to foster dialog between technical experts and a concerned public audience, made by a nuclear energy institute in Germany. The third essay (Binder) explores uses of Twitter by people in the USA as a tool for following the rapidly evolving events at Fukushima. The final essay (Kittle Autry and Kelly) analyzes public discourse surrounding a proposed merger of two US energy companies with substantial nuclear operations, before and after the onset of the Fukushima disaster.     

Locating Co-presence in Media Messages about Global Warming

This paper responds to recent calls for alternative approaches to the analysis of environmental communication that uncover overlooked voices in the discussion of environmental issues. Borrowing core principles from critical rhetoric, it suggests a way to categorize media messages according to how human–nature relationships are constructed in media discourse. The paper illustrates how, in presenting contrasting and often oppositional constructions of human–nature relationships, the media messages examined articulate three recurrent (but not equal) discourses on global warming. These discourses include (1) nature-as-out-of-reach discourse, (2) nature-as-antagonist discourse, and (3) nature-as-co-present discourse. By juxtaposing these discourses, the paper shows how environmental communication scholars can engage in critical realism and political advocacy to illuminate latent public discourse that holds the potential to champion marginalized voices of nature and accentuate the interconnectedness of humans and the environment.     

A review of regulatory decisions for environmental protection: part II - the case-study of contaminated land management in Portugal

This paper provides a case-study analysis of the challenges in the implementation of national soil policies, which was developed by the authors in Part I of the review of regulatory decisions for environmental protection [Rodrigues SM, Pereira ME, Ferreira da Silva E, Hursthouse A, Duarte AC. A review of regulatory decisions for environmental management: Part I-challenges in the implementation of national soil policies. Environ Int 2009. doi:10.1016/j.envint.2008.08.007]. The Portuguese case was selected as a case-study since specific regulatory decisions for contaminated land management are still in the early stages of development. Given the gap between the situation at the EU level and the state of Portuguese soil policy development, it is of merit to consider national contaminated land policy regimes already in place within the EU and to see if these provide a suitable basis to define the main challenges and research needs for the implementation of a Portuguese contaminated land management strategy. A framework combining the D-P-S-I-R (drivers-pressures-sources-impacts-responses) structure of policy evaluation with the Source-Pathway-Receptor approach to health risk assessment is proposed to derive an effective regulatory framework for managing contaminated land in Portugal, using available information and only to develop new data and research where knowledge gaps exist. Funding site clean-up and assigning liability were identified as relevant factors currently hampering site remediation. Most relevant research needs for the development of contaminated land management practices in Portugal are those associated to the definition of a risk assessment framework and setting guidelines for the evaluation of risks posed to both humans and ecosystems. Other relevant and innovative features are the integration of soil function analysis into site investigations and the definition of a framework that combines risk assessment with soil function analysis. The analysis of the Portuguese case also provides insight into the discussions needed for the effective development of regulatory decisions for contaminated land management in countries with no history of implementing specific soil policies.     

Mountaintop Removal as a Case Study: The Possibilities for Public Advocacy through Virtual Toxic Tours

This paper argues that geo-spatial technologies (GST) such as Google Earth and Google Maps offer the potential for environmental advocates to generate virtual toxic tours. By analyzing the use of GST by I Love Mountains, a coalition of organizations attempting to stop the practice of mountaintop removal, this paper illustrates how a virtual tour generated through GST such as Google Earth can be a means to generate presence and promote identification between those local residents impacted by the practice and those who inhabit places seemingly distant from the same practice. The study not only acknowledges the limits of virtual tours but also identifies specific qualities not evident in tours of physical environments. Due to the potential virtual tours, this study also seeks to prompt further consideration of the use of GST and their role in contemporary environmental advocacy efforts.     

Blogging for Sustainability: The Intermediary Role of Personal Green Blogs in Promoting Sustainability

The rise of social media radically broadens the sources and platforms used for environmental communication. Especially personal green blogs are worthy of study as they are spaces of everyday cultural politics through which people make sense of sustainability issues, and because they entail a radical break from conventional media in terms of legitimacy, form, and content of environmental communication processes. This paper studies the representation of sustainability on personal green blogs, and the communication processes through which these representations are constructed. It does so through a qualitative study of Swedish-language blogs. We study three blogs in-depth: a living experiment blog on sustainable food practices; a lifestyle blog centered around green family life; and a blog about consuming green beauty products. The analysis shows that all three blogs translate the complex landscape of sustainability to individual everyday practices. Yet, what these sustainability practices entail differs considerably between the blogs, ranging from a-political and doable lifestyle choices to an onset to radical redefining of consumption. Also, the communication processes on the blogs differ in quality and quantity. The paper uses these insights to reflect on the debates about how environmental communication is shaped by blogging and social media practices.     

Communicating Haze Crisis Online: Comparing Traditional Media News and New Media Perspectives in Singapore

ABSTRACT

To understand haze-related online communication in Southeast Asia, this exploratory study took a mixed method approach to conduct web analysis of online communication during haze crisis in Singapore, followed by textual analysis of traditional and new media content during peak days. First, web analytics showed that Singapore’s haze online communication occurred mostly on the Twitter platform with primary negative sentiments. Next, textual analysis results found that majority of traditional media-affiliated news provided informative haze reports and centered on positive measurements taken by government and authorities, similar to Public Information Model for crisis management. In comparison, haze-related new media content had diverse topics reflecting laymen’s viewpoints with critical tones and negative sentiments. News portals and blogs used two-way asymmetrical and symmetrical model for crisis management, respectively. Additionally, Social Cognitive Theory’s media diversity perspectives were applied to understand people’s media choices among traditional and new media during natural crisis with environmental influences.     

Rhetorical Recommendations Built on Ecological Experience: A Reassessment of the Challenge of Environmental Communication

This article reconsiders the challenge of environmental communication by inquiring into the fundamental rhetorical difficulty of thinking in terms of ecology. We discuss two essential yet bewildering aspects of ecology: its focus on interconnection and its use of multiple scales. On this basis, we distil six rhetorical recommendations: a shift from appealing to pre-existing values to avenues for transforming values; a shift from arguments from authority to addressing legitimate resistances; a shift from a focus on mutual agreement to a mutual bewilderment; a shift from intellectual comprehension to personal experience; a shift from negative effects to positive connections; and, finally, a shift from a focus on political results to local transformations. We experiment with this rhetorical approach through two applications: for critical reassessments of past articulations we consider the Gaia Hypothesis and Deep Ecology, and for current refinements to environmental problems we consider controversies around Marcellus Shale gas development     

Researching Visual Environmental Communication

In 2008, we published a journal paper arguing that while scholarly work on media representations of environmental issues had made substantial progress in textual analysis, there had been much less work on visual representations. This special edition has a number of aims in this respect. It seeks to mark out where there has been progress since 2008, and the papers in this collection represent some of the fresh and exciting high quality scholarly work now emerging on an expanding number of topics and using different methods. We argue that we need to think more openly about what we mean by “the visual.” We begin by placing research into visual representations of the environment into the wider trajectory of visual studies research. We then proceed to review key trends in visual environmental communication research and to delineate core dimensions, contexts and sites of visual analysis.     

Earth-a-lujah!: The Prophetic Environmental Discourse of Reverend Billy

Although rhetorical scholars often examine forms of prophetic discourse, such efforts have primarily focused on the jeremiad or similar rhetorical forms that place emphasis on exhorting the people to return to following the covenant or face negative consequences. However, such messages do not represent the breadth of rhetorical techniques utilized by the biblical prophets. Thus, this study will suggest a new genre of prophetic discourse that activist and performance artist Reverend Billy embodies in his environmental critique of JP Morgan Chase. Implications from this analysis concern both the importance of identifying and understanding this rhetorical form of the “imaginative prophet” and how Reverend Billy uses this approach to advance his view of environmental agenda.     

Understanding levels and trends of BDE-47 in the UK and North America: an assessment of principal reservoirs and source inputs

Despite increasing interest in the occurrence of Polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) in the environment, there has been only limited effort expended to identify principal source input reservoirs and pathways into the environment. Taking a single congener BDE-47, an important component of the penta commercial product, we have estimated principal contemporary reservoirs and emissions in two regions with very different historical use patterns. In North America, production and use of the penta-product has been rising steadily for the last 20 years, whilst in the UK, use has been restricted over the last 10 years, and most recently, there has been an EU ban on use. Mass balance models have been applied using our contemporary emission estimates to predict environmental levels. Results highlight that contemporary emissions to air can account for contemporary air concentrations but cannot account for measured concentrations in principal reservoirs such as soils and sediments. Future efforts are needed to improve our knowledge of the stocks of PBDEs in use, and emission factors from those stocks, to better understand/predict past and likely future trends.     

Land Community Participation: A New “Public” Participation Model

This essay presents a new “public” participation model that responds to contemporary participation problems. The author extends criticism of a false nature/culture dualism and responds to calls for pragmatic ways to expand participation to an expressive land community. The essay draws on existing scholarship that treats a range of direct to indirect forms of participation in environmental decision-making to argue for and explicate the land community participation model (LCP). The model features participation, power, and chronemics along three distinct and intersecting continua that bind and constitute participatory communication in environmental decision-making. Combining professional field experiences with rhetorical criticism, the author pilots the LCP model in a wilderness dispute resolution case study and suggests additional ways for using LCP as an interpretive guide and design tool in pursuit of environmental democracy.     

The Misdiagnosis: Rethinking “Nature-deficit Disorder”

This study examines and critiques “nature-deficit disorder” (NDD), Richard Louv's popular theory of how and why children are alienated from nature. Specifically, I explore NDD within the context of one forest conservation education program that aligns with and operationalizes Louv's message. Underlying Louv's and forest educators' discourses are culturally specific assumptions about human-nature relationships. Both evoke a fall-recovery narrative—that children are separated from nature and must return—and promote science and naming to reconnect. I argue that, in the absence of deeper cultural examination and alternative practices, NDD is a misdiagnosis—a problematic contemporary environmental discourse that can obscure and mistreat the problem. I call on adults to rethink human-nature disconnectedness by returning to the psyche, digging deeper to the problem's cultural roots, and using nontraditional communication practices such as emotional expression and non-naming.     

Translocal anti-fracking activism: an exploration of network structure and tie content

ABSTRACT

In order to develop conceptual models that reflect the realities of networked communicative processes scholars must examine both the underlying network structure and the content of these ties. Using mixed methods, I apply a relational perspective to the role of digital technologies in transnational organizing, using activism against high-volume hydraulic fracturing as a case study. In-depth interviews are combined with social network analysis of hyper-linkages between organizations supporting a day of action calling for a ban on fracking, Global Frackdown. Analysis shows that activism against unconventional fossil fuels brings together very localized concerns about environmental risks associated with extractive industries with more abstract global concerns. I apply the concept of translocal to examine environmental organizations and movements. This conceptual shift focuses on the brokerage role of global-minded local groups in mediating global issues back to the hyper-local scale. While international NGOs play a coordinating role, local groups with a global worldview can connect transnational movements to the hyper-local scale by networking with groups that are too small to appear in a transnational network.