Good Food,Good Intentions: Where Pro-sustainability Arguments Get Stale in US Food Documentaries

Focusing on recent documentaries about sustainable agriculture in the US—Food, Inc., The Garden, Fresh, and Farmageddon—this paper examines how pro-sustainable food arguments fail to merge environmentalism and environmental justice. By framing their approach to sustainable food production around the normative issue of “good food” for capitalist consumers, such documentaries ignore questions about community and cultural conceptions of farmers. In the process the films promote a problematic vision of the white family farm. As a consequence, these films limit a reimagining of alternative food systems, the roles for diverse actors within those systems, and possibilities for eaters beyond “voting with your fork.” Several exceptions, most notably The Garden, are used to suggest how cinema might radically re-envision participation in alternative forms of agriculture.     

Engaged Communication Scholarship for Environmental Justice: A Research Agenda

ABSTRACT

As a discipline of crisis and care, environmental communication needs to address questions of environmental justice. This article argues that the most appropriate approach to studying environmental justice communication is engaged scholarship, in which academics collaborate with community partners, advocates, and others to conduct research. The article reviews prior engaged communication scholarship on environmental justice, and proposes four streams of future research, focused on news and information, deliberation and participation, campaigns and movements, and education and literacy.     

Food for Thought: Audience Engagement with Sustainability Messages in Branded Content

Branded platforms are a growing “gray-zone” of marketing and media messages, in which corporations and news journalists partner to create content that supports strategic corporate goals while aligning with a publication’s scope of editorial coverage. As corporations are key influencers of and contributors to environmental communication, this trend has the potential to change environmental dialogue. In this article, we closely examine messages about food and sustainability, created in partnership by Chipotle Mexican Grill and the Huffington Post news site. We illustrate how use of a branded platform expanded the scope of environmental topics, issues, and frames that Chipotle addresses, how frames identified here connect to frames in coverage of science-related issues, as identified by other scholars, and discuss how branded platforms allow corporations to draw attention to polarizing environmental issues while protecting stakeholder relationships and brand reputation.     

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 Dakota Access Pipeline and the Breakdown of Participatory Processes in Environmental Decision-Making

This article employs a close reading of documents related to the permitting process for the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) and ensuing legal battle in order to argue that extant regulatory frameworks for environmental decision-making are insufficient to promote environmental justice outcomes. By analyzing the US Army Corps of Engineer's responses to comments made during the public comment phase of the NEPA evaluation of the DAPL, I argue that regulatory frameworks may exacerbate environmental justice concerns by incentivizing decision makers to prioritize justification for their decisions and avoiding legal battles over meaningfully engaging with communities. This finding leads me to call for more engagement with energy democracy's orientation toward community-led processes as a corrective to current regulatory systems. This article expands on extant work in environmental communication by more thoroughly investigating the flaws in extant regulatory frameworks and calling for a perspectival shift in environmental decision-making.     

食物安全:基于食品系统理论的探讨

在经济发展、消费升级、资源短缺和环境问题凸显的新的外部环境背景下,本文引入了国外新兴的食品系统理论,探讨并提出了可持续的食物安全保障的新观念.食物安全始终是中国经济发展、社会稳定和国家自立的基础.国内多数学者仍然用30年前食物匮乏时期的思路来研究现代的食物安全问题,其结果导致研究结论与现实情况不符.如何在节约资源、减少浪费的同时又能够满足人们不断升级的食物消费需求,是对未来食物安全保障的新要求.本文首先分析了我国食物安全研究的现状,指出了不足和问题,然后引入国外新兴的食品系统理论,在探讨其概念内涵的基础上,剖析了食品系统与食物安全的关系,影响食物安全的因素和研究视角,并进一步提炼出基于食品系统理论的新的食物安全保障观念,为我国研究食物安全提供借鉴.     

The Many Modalities of Social Networking: The Role of Twitter in Greens Politics

The popular microblogging service, Twitter, contains a variety of potential orientations—interpersonal, broadcast, news, advertising, public service, political, and so on—in its operation and applications. As an evolving social media platform, specificity and context are essential in understanding its significance and use-value. This paper investigates the multiple modalities of Twitter in the context of formal politics and, in particular, the Greens party in Australia. Presenting original evidence drawn from the Greens Members of Parliament and their advisers, it is shown how Twitter is mobilized in response to particular news agendas and stories, unfolding political events and processes, and an ongoing need for the Greens to speak simultaneously to committed environmentalists and the broader electorate. These uses reveal that Twitter is an important addition to the “media ecology mix” in the conduct of environmental politics, playing a direct role in political communication, strategies, and actions.     

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.     

The Country,the City,and the Corporation: Rio Tinto Kennecott and the Materiality of Corporate Rhetoric

Contributing to extant discourses about corporate environmental advocacy, this paper argues that corporations can embed discursive rhetorical strategies in material places and spaces. This argument contributes to environmental communication by bridging divisions between discursive and materialist approaches to corporate rhetoric. Corporate materiality is realized in the study of Rio Tinto Kennecott (RTK) at places of corporate community where RTK enunciates a dominant environmental discourse about the necessity of the Bingham Canyon Mine through strategies such as the technological shell game, the hypocrite's trap, and corporate heterotopia, which are made manifest materially alongside cultural values such as epistemic trust, technological progress, community, and home. Using participatory critical rhetoric as a methodology, I analyse RTK's material rhetoric at the Natural History Museum of Utah, the Rio Tinto Soccer Stadium, and the Daybreak suburban community. This case study reveals that corporations are assemblages that assert many different, and sometimes competing, arguments that can deflect environmental criticism, materially.     

气候正义视域下的气候变化损失与损害救济路径分析

气候变化对生态环境和人类健康造成的影响一直受科学家和国际组织的广泛关注。在现有的科学技术无法确切论证气候变化对环境的总体影响及对小岛和低地国家带来损害情况下,该议题自提出至今的进展都举步维艰。本文对议题谈判进展及各方立场进行梳理,提出未来谈判和规则的制定应以全球气候正义为价值衡量标准,树立整体观上的气候正义理念。并对气候正义内涵进行具体解读:一是以人权保护为维度,指出保护小岛和低地国家的基本人权是实现气候正义的逻辑前提;二是指出应当基于分配正义与矫正正义的传统分析视角,将共同但有区别责任原则作为设定权利与义务分配机制时的基础标准;三是气候正义要求一国在行使权利时应遵循领土无害使用原则,负有不污染和破坏他国环境和生态的义务,如违反便可能引发国家责任或惩戒。本文进而以气候正义为价值指引提出三种救济路径:一是国家责任路径,以国际人权法、国际环境法的规则或原则为法律依据,根据一定的规则,来判断当事国的损害行为或结果是否构成国际法上的国家责任;二是国际环境规制路径,即在《联合国气候变化框架公约》(以下简称《公约》)所确立的遵约与履约机制下解决问题,利用市场机制和激励手段如基金和保险支持制度来救济或补偿损失与损害;三是国际环境争端解决路径,主要以磋商、协商、和解、谈判等非强制性方式及国际仲裁、国际司法的法律手段解决气候争端。在救济路径上,应以全球规制路径为主,以国家责任路径为补充,以环境争端解决方式为程序性保障。中国基于全球气候治理的积极推动者,应表明立场,以共同但有区别责任原则为谈判基础,加强南南合作,履行国际气候承诺,发展低碳经济,积极推进该议题的国际谈判。     

The ecological footprint: an exhibit at an intergenerational trial?

This paper aims at assessing the extent to which the ecological footprint indicator (EF) can be regarded as an exhibit allowing an intergenerational trial about the use of natural resources. For that purpose, we examine various criticisms questioning the relevancy of EF measures for the study of environmental justice between generations. We explore the difficulties raised by the physical—and highly aggregated—nature of EF measures, as well as problems related to the number, the possible non-existence, and the tastes of future generations. The extent to which postulates on nature’s regeneration and technological progress affect the significance of EF studies is also discussed. It is concluded that those criticisms, by identifying various weaknesses of EF measures for the study of intergenerational justice, point to several crucial refinements of existing EF-based analyses.

Belligerent broadcasting,male anti-authoritarianism and anti-environmentalism: the case of Top Gear (BBC, 2002–2015)

ABSTRACT

This article considers the format and cultural politics of the hugely successful UK television program Top Gear (BBC 2002–2015). It analyzes how—through its presenting team—it constructed an informal address predicated around anti-authoritarian or contrarian banter and protest masculinity. Regular targets for Top Gear presenter’s protest—curtailed by broadcast guidelines in terms of gender and ethnicity—are deflected onto the “soft” targets of government legislation on environmental issues or various forms of regulation “red tape. Repeated references to speed cameras, central London congestion charges and “excessive” signage are all anti-authoritarian, libertarian discourses delivered through a comedic form of performance address. Thus, the BBC’s primary response to complaints made about this program was to defend the program’s political views as being part of the humor. The article draws on critical discourse analysis and conversation analysis to consider how the program licensed a particular form of engagement that helped it to deflect criticisms, and considers the limits to such discursive positioning. We conclude by examining the controversies that finally led, in 2015, to the removal of the main presenter, Jeremy Clarkson, and the ending of this version of the program through the departure of the team to an on-demand online television service.     

Reconnecting with nature for sustainability

Calls for humanity to ‘reconnect to nature’ have grown increasingly louder from both scholars and civil society. Yet, there is relatively little coherence about what reconnecting to nature means, why it should happen and how it can be achieved. We present a conceptual framework to organise existing literature and direct future research on human–nature connections. Five types of connections to nature are identified: material, experiential, cognitive, emotional, and philosophical. These various types have been presented as causes, consequences, or treatments of social and environmental problems. From this conceptual base, we discuss how reconnecting people with nature can function as a treatment for the global environmental crisis. Adopting a social–ecological systems perspective, we draw upon the emerging concept of ‘leverage points’—places in complex systems to intervene to generate change—and explore examples of how actions to reconnect people with nature can help transform society towards sustainability.     

Debating ecological justice: implications for critical environmental education

This article will briefly discuss the implications of recognition of ecological justice in relation to environmental education (EE) and education for sustainable development (ESD). It is argued that the present conception of environment taught through EE and ESD negates the subjectivity of non-human species and ignores the ethical imperatives of ecological justice. Evocating environmental ethics, major directions integrating ecological justice into EE and ESD are proposed.     

The Weyekin Principle: Toward an Embodied Critical Rhetoric

This essay offers the weyekin principle to address the symbol–material, human–nature dualisms found in much of our theory and critiqued by a growing number of environmental communication scholars. The authors see two core requirements for transforming our engagement with the nonhuman: first, a way of attending to or interpreting natural phenomena that opens our awareness to other-than-symbolic modes of experience; and second, an embodied critique that expresses the inherent tensions of the symbolic–material interface.     

Remedies for loss and damage caused by climate change from the dimension of climate justice

Adverse consequences to the ecological system and human health caused by impacts potentially attributable to climate change have already drawn great and widespread concern of many scientists and international organizations. However, we still have a hard time determining exactly the impact of climate change on the environment or the damage that climate change inflicts on countries comprising small islands or low-lying lands in light of today’s science and technology. The progress for dealing with the issue of loss and damage has been struggling for a long time from the beginning to the present. In this paper, the author begins by summarizing talks on the concept and the positions of commentators. The author is proposing that the development of future climate negotiations and rule-making process be based on global climate justice as a standard for measuring value. Also, the author proposes that a holistic view of climate justice be established. Generally, three aspects of climate justice can be derived. First, the dimension of human rights protection shows that protection of fundamental human rights is a logical precondition if small-island and low-lying countries are able to achieve climate justice. Second, the definite and traditional concepts of distributive justice and corrective justice hold the view that the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities should be upheld as a basic standard of allocating rights and duties associated with climate change. Third, climate justice requires that any state follow the “no-harm principle,” which is regarded as an international customary rule. According to the principle, the obligation of states to prevent the use of their territory for causing trans-boundary harm to the environment shall be a violation of state responsibility, which incurs international punishment. Then we put forward three remedial approaches in light of climate justice, including the approach of State Responsibility (SR) based on the principles and rules of international human rights law and international environmental law. Based on clear rules, the judge can determine whether the damaging behavior or the damage perpetrated by a state party constitutes a state responsibility. The International Environmental Regulation (IEB), which means solving the problems within the framework established by the Conventions on Climate Change, takes advantage of the market mechanisms and incentives such as fund and insurance support system to relieve or compensate the loss and damage. International Environmental Dispute Settlement Mechanism (IEDSM), which includes the means such as consultations, negotiations, nonmandatory ways and international arbitration, international judicial ways to solve these disputes, functions as a procedural safeguard. As an active promoter of global climate governance, China should no doubt stand by the principle of Common But Differentiated Responsibility (CBDR) and take it as a basis for negotiations, actively strengthen the work of South-South cooperation, fulfill her international climate commitments without reservation, vigorously develop a low-carbon economy, and actively promote international negotiations on the subject of loss and damage.     

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.     

Climate Communications: Conflicts and Opportunities

The occasion for this forum was sparked by a front-page story in the New York Times by John M. Broder entitled, “Seeking to Save the Planet, with a Thesaurus” (May 1, 2009, p. A11). The article focused on the non-profit EcoAmerica's report, “Climate and Energy Truths: Our Common Future,” which shares research on communication approaches to engaging climate change and energy issues. The Broder article included commentary from Robert J. Brulle, Professor of Sociology and Environmental Science at Drexel University. In response, George P. Lakoff, Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at UC-Berkeley, published an essay in The Huffington Post, “Why Environmental Understanding, or ‘Framing,’ Matters: An Evaluation of the EcoAmerica Summary Report” (May 19, 2009). The discussion about this report and differing approaches to environmental communication continued on blogs, in emails, and through various other forums. The editorial leadership team of this journal thought such prominent attention to environmental communication in the nexus of so many disciplines and professional investments was exciting. We are pleased the following scholars and practitioners are willing to elaborate on the stakes of this discussion in this forum.     

Integrating Media Studies of Climate Change into Transdisciplinary Research: Which Direction Should We Be Heading?

Research in the area of media coverage on climate change communication represents one of the most prolific areas of inquiry within communication and mass communication studies. This body of literature, which ranges from empirical to critical studies, continues to expand. Much research has focused on representations of climate change causes, effects, and human actions, while some has assessed the impacts of these representations. What is broadly missing from this literature, however, is a discussion of how we might integrate media analysis into transdisciplinary collaborative research aimed at creating solutions to the social, environmental, and economic issues intertwined with climate change. Given the magnitude of problems the society and science are currently grasping with, it behooves us to understand how media studies can contribute most effectively to characterizing and solving problems. We maintain that the move toward integrating media studies into transdisciplinary collaborative research marks an essential transition for environmental communication in general, but climate change communication in particular, given the urgency and magnitude of creating meaningful adaptation and mitigation strategies to address this pressing, complex challenge. Drawing on our work as part of a large transdisciplinary sustainability science team, we provide a case study for understanding what collaborations are key to moving media studies into a transdisciplinary context and the key opportunities and barriers that come along with that move. We argue that media studies must increasingly engage directly in collaboration with other researchers, stakeholders, and communities to serve on-the-ground decision-making and enhance society's ability to take action.