Narratives,Rhetorical Genres,and Environmental Conflict: Responses to Schwarze's “Environmental Melodrama”

The appearance of Steven Schwarze's essay, “Environmental Melodrama” (Schwarze, 2006) as the lead article in a recent issue of The Quarterly Journal of Speech marks an important moment of recognition for environmental communication scholarship. Schwarze's essay demonstrates how studies of environmental rhetoric can contribute to rhetorical theory more generally, while addressing practical questions regarding the rhetorical aspects of environmental conflict. The contributors to this forum respond to Schwarze's arguments, drawing in part upon their own case studies of rhetorical action and narrative in environmental conflict.     

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.     

External Communication About Sustainability: Corporate Social Responsibility Reports and Social Media Activity

External communication about corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainability activities may vary significantly across firms. Communication channel, content, and frequency may reflect a company’s resource allocation priorities, its culture, and its leadership in the sustainability domain. This empirical research compares n?=?11 global consumer apparel companies, with brands ranging from Adidas to Prada to Wrangler, in terms of their communication about CSR and sustainability in both formal outlets (annual CSR reports), informal channels (Twitter and Facebook social media), and voluntary participation in external rankings (the Global Reporting Initiative). In addition, the sample is divided into “High-Ranked” and “Low-Ranked” subsamples, using Newsweek’s Greenest Companies 2014 rankings, to examine if companies ranked highly by Newsweek communicate more often and display higher levels of engagement in sustainability reporting, compared to low-ranked firms. Results provide support for our research propositions. We conclude with recommendations for companies seeking to strengthen their CSR external communication.     

Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency: Constructing “Certainty” as Rebuttal

Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency was the first Supreme Court opinion generated specifically as a response to the issue of anthropogenic CO₂ emissions, alleging that Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) failure to regulate is leading to environmental harms for plaintiffs. This essay examines the majority opinion of Justice Stevens and his use of presumption and burden of proof, within a logic of problematic integration, to construct “certainty” as a rebuttal to and rejection of the “uncertainty” offered by EPA. I examine how this strategically constructed rebuttal to “uncertainty” functions as a declarative act of “certainty,” advancing a proposition whose scientific, legal, or political acceptance could function as a tipping point away from the claims of “uncertainty” used by opponents on this contentious issue. Because of the court's influence, the implications of their “certainty” extend beyond the case and into the broader discussion of climate change science and environmental communication.     

Green Lawfare: Environmental Public Interest Litigation and Mediatized Environmental Conflict

Communication strategies involving news media and environmental groups are well documented and research into protest politics and other forms of environmental communication has made considerable progress in the analysis of the strategies that various actors use to influence environmental policy. There is less scholarship, however, on the journalistic representation of the legal strategies employed by environmental non-government organizations, such as the mediatized debates about the use of law by these groups and the laws themselves. Further, while legal scholarship observes the role of public interest litigation in environmental matters, the role of news media as an influential force in public opinion formation and mobilization in the context of environmental litigation as an activist strategy remains less understood. Using the 2015 “green lawfare” debate in Australia that followed a successful Australian Federal Court challenge to a coalmine, this paper argues that the “mediatized visibility” inherent in public interest litigation is an important, but mostly overlooked, element of mediatized environmental conflict.     

Environmental Communication as a Discipline of Crisis

This essay interprets Cox's keynote as a call for environmental communication to reorient itself as a form of ideological criticism and identifies the potential pitfalls of heeding that call. First, the author revisits key arguments surrounding the practice of ideological criticism in Communication Studies and articulates their relevance to discussions about the mission and purpose of environmental communication. Second, he suggests that an uncritical embrace of the rationale for a “crisis discipline” may perpetuate problematic assumptions about communication, both as a social practice and as a scholarly discipline. Third, he argues that such problems may be sidestepped by making environmental crisis itself a central concept and object of environmental communication inquiry, such that environmental communication does not merely respond to crisis but becomes a discipline of and about crisis. A focus on the dynamics of crisis, the author concludes, entails a persistent concern with judgment in its political, scholarly, and pedagogical contexts.     

Blogging about Climate Change in Russia: Activism,Scepticism and Conspiracies

The article explores the new media’s role in climate change communication in Russia. By providing an open space for the expression of very diverse points of view, the internet creates a substitute media reality where both climate activists and climate sceptics can question the established discourse. Analysis of 374 entries published on the LiveJournal blogging platform has resulted in the identification of four discursive categories: “conspiracies of climate change,” “climate change impact,” “political games of climate change” and “online (anti-)environmentalism.” Each category demonstrates how the same topic can be framed in very different ways depending on bloggers’ worldview rather than the nature of the discussed environmental problem. The findings also show that the blogs act as “echo-chambers” for both climate deniers and climate activists reinforcing their behold beliefs. Finally, the analysis discovers some parallels with the traditional media coverage in their minimal critique of Russian state policy on climate.     

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.     

The Moral Appeal of Environmental Discourses: The Implication of Ethical Rhetorics

Environmental sustainability demands civic action through both changes in individual and community behaviors in addition to national and international agreements and cooperation. In moral appeals to the environment, individuals are often called upon to behave in “good” ways—reduce, reuse, recycle—to “save the planet.” Behavior, and our attitudes about it, is therefore an important component to ongoing sustainability efforts. This pilot study, conducted in Fall 2009, brings together research methods in sociolinguistics and rhetorical studies to examine the discourses that students produce when describing issues and practices concerning sustainability. In interviews with 15 students in an earth sustainability general education core, our study found that students were knowledgeable about environmental issues and expressed intentions to engage in sustainable behaviors. Yet, students produced accommodating discourses when addressing competing demands on their time and resources. The sociolinguistic analysis of interview data shows a disassociation from environmental issues at the symbolic level of language use. The rhetorical analysis shows that this disassociation manifests as guilt, largely because when choosing between various moral appeals in their social context, students are left without tangible direction for engaging in new sustainable behaviors.     

Towards a Paradigmatic Shift in Sustainability Studies: A Systematic Review of Peer Reviewed Literature and Future Agenda Setting to Consider Environmental (Un)sustainability of Digital Communication

The materiality of digital communication inflicts substantial environmental damage: the extraction of resources needed to produce digital devices; the toxicity of e-waste; and the rapidly increasing energy demands required to sustain data generated by digital communication. This damage, however, is paradoxically under-theorized in scholarship on environmental sustainability. Despite the existing critique of the “techno-fix” approach in sustainability studies, digitization – and digital communication in particular – continue to be celebrated as the tool for environmental sustainability; an approach we coin “digital solutionism.” The article presents the first systematic review of the literature to map the implicit assumptions about the relationships between digital communications and environmental sustainability, in order to examine how digital solutionism manifests, and why it persists. We propose a concept matrix that identifies the key blind spots with regards to environmental damages of the digital, and call for a paradigmatic shift in environmental sustainability studies. An agenda for future research is put forward that advocates for the following: (1) a systematic account of material damages of devices, platforms and data systems adopted into sustainability research and practice, resulting in changes in both research framing and methodological foundations; (2) a reconceptualization and denaturalization of the digital itself as a promising solution; (3) a theoretical dialogue between sustainability studies and environmental communication. (4) an expansion of environmental communication as a field, from focusing on the communication aspect of environmental change to include the environmental footprint of communication itself.     

Heidegger and Being at the Hanford Reservation: Standing Reserve,Enframing, and Environmental Communication Theory

This essay examines the potential of Heidegger's phenomenology as a foundation for environmental communication theory, emphasizing his critiques of modern science, technology, humanism, and metaphysics. A phenomenological approach to environmental communication provides resources for recognizing metaphysical assumptions that endanger both humans and nature. The Hanford nuclear reservation serves as an illustrative text, exemplifying Heidegger's reading of nuclear energy as a culmination of both Western metaphysics and the instrumental stance that he calls “enframing.” In Heidegger's view, the ordering and control accomplished through enframing obscures the mutually constitutive relationship between humans and nature, and in doing so, diminishes the possibilities for authentic human existence. The chapter examines how both representational and constitutive models of communication contribute to those conditions, and adopts a set of concepts from Heidegger's phenomenology as a foundation for an alternative, “bounded constitutive” model.     

Rapid Issue Tracking: A Method for Taking the Pulse of the Public Discussion of Environmental Policy

Environmental communication professionals and other decision makers need to understand public sentiment toward environmental issues to effectively carry out their stewardship responsibilities. However, it is often difficult to obtain timely and reliable information about public discussion and debate regarding these issues. This paper describes an approach designed to address this dilemma: Rapid Issue Tracking is a method for quickly “taking the pulse” of public and other stakeholder discussion. The data source for Rapid Issue Tracking is online media stories, including traditional news media, social media, and other textual data such as public comments received by an agency. Two US Forest Service cases of Rapid Issue Tracking are presented to explicate the method and its usefulness in environmental communication and decision making.     

Solidarity Between Human and Non-Human Animals: Representing Animal Voices in Policy Deliberations

In this paper, we discuss the bridging potential of “interspecies” solidarity between the often incommensurable ethics of care and justice. Indeed, we show that the Environmental Communication literature emphasizes feelings of care and compassion as vectors of responsibility taking for animals. But we also show that a growing field of Political Animal Rights suggest that such responsibility taking should instead be grounded in universalizable terms of justice. Our argument is that a dual conception of solidarity can bridge this divide: On the one hand, solidarity as a pre-political relation with animals and, on the other hand, as a political practice based on open public deliberation of universalizable claims to justice; that is, claims to justice advanced by human proxy representatives of vulnerable non-humans. Such a dual conception can both challenge and validate NGOs’ claims to “speak on behalf of animals” in policy following the Aarhus Convention, indeed underwriting the Convention by insights from internatural communication in solidarity as relation, and by subjecting it to rational scrutiny in mini-publics in solidary as practice.     

Contemporary Environmental Art in China: Portraying Progress,Politics, and Ecosystems

Art has long been an important force in environmental movements. In China, environmental art is a fast-growing sector of the art scene. This new area of emphasis is expanding the function of art and aiding in China’s environmental movement by challenging both imported Western practices and Maoist era philosophy, thereby opening up new ways of considering the relationship between human “progress,” political systems, economic practices, and their repercussions on existing ecosystems. I turn to artist Xu Xiaoyan’s paintings to explore how the notion of “progress” can be challenged through art. I use Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of deterritorialization and reterritorialization to map how Xu’s art offers viewers space to think outside dominant paradigms, creates the potential for changes in human consciousness, considers the environment as a composition of relationships and interactions, and provokes discussion concerning the impact of linear notions of time on human conceptions of nature.     

From Frames to Resonance Machines: The Neuropolitics of Environmental Communication

George Lakoff 's work in cognitive linguistics has prompted a surge in social scientists’ interest in the cognitive and neuropsychological dimensions of political discourse. Bringing cognitive neuroscience into the study of social movements and of environmental communication, however, is not as straightforward as Lakoff 's followers suggest. Examining and comparing Lakoff's “neuropolitics” with those of political theorist William E. Connolly, this article argues that Connolly's writings on evangelical-capitalist and eco-egalitarian “resonance machines” provide a broader model for thinking about the relations between body, brain, and culture. Environmentalists, it concludes, should pluralize their “frames” and pay greater attention to the micropolitical and affective effects of their language and practices on the communities within which they act, communicate, and dwell.     

Flood risk and climate change in the Rotterdam area,The Netherlands: enhancing citizen's climate risk perceptions and prevention responses despite skepticism

Effective communication about climate change and related risks is complicated by the polarization between “climate alarmists” and “skeptics.” This paper provides insights for the design of climate risk communication strategies by examining how the interplay between climate change and flood risk communication affects citizens’ risk perceptions and responses. The study is situated in a delta area with substantial geographic variations in the occurrence and potential impact of flood risk, which has led to initiatives to make the area more “climate proof.” We developed a research model that examines individual differences in processing information about climate change related flood risk, based on the postulate that individuals often make an implicit trade-off between motivation to know “what is real” and motivation to maintain prior beliefs. A field experiment, embedded in a survey (n = 1887), sought to test out how the participants responded to risk frames in which a story on flood was either or not combined with climate change information. The results show that it was possible to increase the participants’ local climate risk perception in combination with increased motivation for flood damage prevention, despite a certain level of climate change skepticism. A general implication of our study is that relevant and diagnostic information about local climate-related flood risks can stimulate citizens’ need to know “what’s real” and their willingness to take responsibility for preparedness.     

Teaching Amid Despair: Global Warming and Israeli Wars on Lebanon

Editor's Note: For the past two years, Rania Masri has been an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Science and a researcher at the Institute of the Environment at the University of Balamand in Lebanon. Prior to that, she was the Director for the Southern Peace Research and Education Center at the Institute for Southern Studies in North Carolina. As a human rights advocate and environmental scientist, she has served as the coordinator of the Iraq Action Coalition (1995–2005), an elected national board member of Peace Action (1997–2005), an elected member of the United for Peace and Justice steering committee (2003–2005), and a state board member of the American Civil Liberties Union (2002–2004). Her research and activism has centered on US domestic and foreign policy on issues ranging from environmental justice and civil rights to anti-war (Iraq) and anti-occupation (Palestine). She has been a regular contributor to a wide range of print, radio, and television media, including Alternative Radio, “Democracy Now!,” International Socialist Review, and Znet.     

Sporting Nature(s): Wildness,the Primitive,and Naturalizing Imagery in MMA and Sports Advertisements

This essay examines two Nike commercials, a TapOut commercial, and the proliferation of mixed martial arts (MMA) t-shirt visual culture, all of which symbolically link wildness and “nature” as primitivity to their particular sport contexts. MMA in particular, it is argued, is more symbolically available to symbolic discourses of the “natural” and the “primitive” because of the sport's technological minimalism. The MMA t-shirt is posited as a safe, masculine primitive performance, functioning as an expressive personal substitute (or supplement) to the analogous tattoos “worn” by many fighters and fans. Additionally, this paper reviews and connects several disparate bodies of literature, moving from a discussion of eco-critical principles for critiquing the cultural production of nature / the natural, to an assessment of “nature” as primitivity, and finally to highlight how critical analyses of sport and MMA implicate related categories. While environmental communication has addressed the place of “nature” in advertising, little has been written about how discourses of nature, gender, and the environment intersect with the highly mediatized culture of sports. This article adds to the subfield by initiating just such a critical discussion. Finally, I contend that one of the main ideological functions of the employment of nature imagery here is to implicitly authorize notions of wildness or the “primitive” in close association with a male animal ideology, and also to symbolically reinforce existing narratives which naturalize aggression. These advertisements posit, I argue, a metaphysical rather than realist ecological discourse, enabling an unsustainable narrative of the naturalness of human-on-human violence and aggression.     

Anthropomorphic Anthropocentrism and the Rhetoric of Blackfish

The documentary film Blackfish has made a splash at the box office, impacting millions of viewers and prompting calls to legislatively prohibit orcas from being held in captive environments. This essay analyzes Blackfish in terms of its anthropomorphic communication techniques that attribute human qualities to orcas. We introduce the term “anthropomorphic anthropocentrism” to argue that the anthropomorphic construction of orcas in Blackfish may well be a story that is more about what it means to be human than a story about what it means to be orca. Furthermore, we explain the importance of anthropomorphic anthropocentrism as an analytical tool that navigates environmental and ecological frameworks. We conclude that anthropomorphic anthropocentrism’s analysis of anthropomorphic rhetoric and the human epistemological assumptions it reflects, when taken together, offer significant insights into the ways environmental communication creates and/or disrupts human–nature relationships.