Visual Climate Change Communication: From Iconography to Locally Framed 3D Visualization

Climate change is an urgent problem with implications registered not only globally, but also on national and local scales. It is a particularly challenging case of environmental communication because its main cause, greenhouse gas emissions, is invisible. The predominant approach of making climate change visible is the use of iconic, often affective, imagery. Literature on the iconography of climate change shows that global iconic motifs, such as polar bears, have contributed to a public perception of the problem as spatially and temporally remote. This paper proposes an alternative approach to global climate change icons by focusing on recognizable representations of local impacts within an interactive game environment. This approach was implemented and tested in a research project based on the municipality of Delta, British Columbia. A major outcome of the research is Future Delta, an interactive educational game featuring 3D visualizations and simulation tools for climate change adaptation and mitigation future scenarios. The empirical evaluation is based on quantitative pre/post-game play questionnaires with 18 students and 10 qualitative expert interviews. The findings support the assumption that interactive 3D imagery is effective in communicating climate change. The quantitative post-questionnaires particularly highlight a shift in support of more local responsibility.     

From Environmental Campaigns to Advancing the Public Dialog: Environmental Communication for Civic Engagement

This essay examines the claims of environmental identity campaigns regarding the issue of climate change. Identity campaigns are based on the idea that more effective environmental messages developed through the application of cognitive science by professional communications experts can favorably influence public opinion, and thus support legislative action to remedy this issue. Based on a review of the sociological and psychological literature regarding social change and mobilization, I argue that while this approach may offer short term advantages, it is most likely incapable of developing the large scale mobilization necessary to enact the massive social and economic changes necessary to address global warming. Specifically, theoretical and empirical research on the role of the public sphere, civil society and social movements shows that democratic civic engagement is core to successful social change efforts. However, identity campaigns focus on a communications process that centers on elite led one way communications, which falls to allow for any form of civic engagement and public dialogue. This undermines the creation of a democratic process of change and reinforces the professionalization of political discourse, leading to a weakening of the mobilization capacity over this issue of global warming. The essay concludes with the outlines of an environmental communication process that aims at enhancing civic engagement and democratic decision making.     

Mobilizing Artists: Green Patriot Posters,Visual Metaphors,and Climate Change Activism

This essay examines the Canary Project's Green Patriot Posters campaign as activist art that collectively comments on the cultural coherence of our current relations to the environment, particularly in terms of global warming, sustainability, and the concept of linear economic growth. Aspiring to bring together artists under the eco-activist umbrella, the Canary Project relies on an old WWII-inspired frame with a narrow premise of that period's conservation efforts. Within this framework, a range of visual designs question, subvert, and promote continued economic growth and an ontology that “more” equals “better.” An analysis of the up–down orientational metaphors underscores a typology of these valuations and reveals one way to assess implications of such artistic efforts. That is, artistic expressions adapt and play with the contingent nature of metaphors, offering elaborations, extensions, and alternatives on basic structural elements and, hence, remark on how we orient ourselves and productively imagine being of/in the world anew.     

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.     

Interpreting Images of Fracking: How Visual Frames and Standing Attitudes Shape Perceptions of Environmental Risk and Economic Benefit

The news media’s increased reliance on visual communication to illustrate complex processes and promote learning stresses the importance of investigating how visual content impacts the understanding of scientific issues. In this paper, we investigate how members of the public interpret and make sense of differentially framed images of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) depicting environmental risk, economic benefit, or issue protest. For the analysis, a repeated measures online experiment was conducted with 250 participants to evaluate 40 photographs of fracking operations and consequences. Quantitative coding and thematic analysis of open-ended responses to the images reveal that standing attitudes, operationalized as support, opposition, or indecision about fracking, segments viewers into distinct groups and shapes interpretations of environmental risk and economic benefit. Issue opponents are more likely to indicate concern for the environment regardless of frame shown, whereas undecideds and supporters cite the impact on human health more frequently, largely in relation to job site safety. Supporters also see the least ambiguity, and most economic gains, in images about the controversial production practice.     

The Nature of Time: How the Covers of the World's Most Widely Read Weekly News Magazine Visualize Environmental Affairs

Scholars of environmental communication acknowledge the importance of visual representations in shaping perceptions and actions in relation to environmental affairs. Unlike with other media, including newspapers, television and film, research on the visualization of nature and environmental issues in magazines is rare. This study focuses on the covers of Time magazine, one of the world's most influential news weeklies. A dataset that includes all relevant covers from 1923 to 2011 is examined using a combination of quantitative and qualitative content analysis to analyze the visual representation of nature and environmental issues. The results show that the presence of environmental issues and nature on the covers has increased over the decades. Furthermore, Time takes an advocacy position on some environmental issues, but it is a shallow one that is weakly argued through less-than-engaging imagery and fails to offer much in the way of solutions or agency to the reader.     

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.     

Merging Duke Energy and Progress Energy: Online Public Discourse,Post-Fukushima Reactions,and the Absence of Environmental Communication

This article examines online discourse in 2011 surrounding the proposed Duke Energy and Progress Energy merger in the Carolinas. It explores how issues pertaining to the merger, including constructing new nuclear plants, are discussed in media coverage and by citizens using social media. Overall, we find that the merger discourse focuses on economic concerns rather than the environmental concerns we had anticipated. However, post-Fukushima discourse appears to have become more inclusive of environmental concerns. We conclude that environmental discussions and efforts are likely to be globally informed andlocally situated, discussing the implications for environmental communication research exploring online discourses, specifically through social media. Future research must address how to locate and delineate constellations of locally situated discourse to provide a clearer picture of environmentally focused social media communication.     

Prolepsis and the Environmental Rhetoric of Congressional Politics: Defeating the Climate Stewardship Act of 2003

As a device of argumentative anticipation, prolepsis use generally is considered a positive rhetorical strategy. Turning to the Climate Stewardship Act (CSA) of 2003, this article contributes to our understanding of environmental communication, political argumentation, and rhetorical theory by examining how proleptic miscalculation can actually produce devastating consequences against one's cause when used as a source of invention. Proponents of the CSA relied on creating proleptic arguments grounded in a scientific understanding of climate change to such an extent that they mistakenly downplayed the economic arguments against the Act. This orchestrated miscalculation was encouraged and strengthened by key US senators. This article concludes by discussing contributions to scholarly understanding of prolepsis use in public policymaking and offers practical suggestions for improving communication in future considerations of environmental legislation.     

The Structuration of Public Participation: Organizing Environmental Control

A growing body of participation literature muses over why current mechanisms of public participation persist when they so often fail; calls for expanding the conceptual boundaries of participation beyond institutional mechanisms, and highlights the role communication, and allied concepts such as discourse and rhetoric, play in participatory processes. Given these diverse calls, environmental public participation can benefit from building a mid-level theoretical terrain. In this essay, I draw upon the sociological tradition of Anthony Giddens’ structuration theory and parallel systems thinking which foreground a structure-action mode of analysis. Through this lens I articulate the basic premises of a structuration model for environmental public participation, pointing especially to issues of agency, which involves ontological security and ontological competence, social systems, and various elements within duality of structure, with an eye toward communication-centered research. This theoretical space further indicates the possibilities of connecting the material realm of action/practice with the symbolic domain of environmental self.     

Muting the Voice of the Local in the Age of the Global: How Communication Practices Compromised Public Participation in India's Allain Dunhangan Environmental Impact Assessment

Public participation is widely lauded as a way to make environmental decisions more democratic, to improve their quality, and to enhance their legitimacy. Scholars and citizens around the world repeatedly complain, however, that public participation frequently serves primarily as a pro forma exercise to defend predetermined decisions rather than as a meaningful opportunity for the affected public to influence decision-making. These critiques persist despite considerable research suggesting ways to improve the quality of public participation. This essay explores this problem by analyzing citizen involvement in the environmental impact assessment (EIA) processes for the Allain Duhangan hydropower project in northern India. It describes how meaningful public involvement was compromised—despite repeated objections by citizens and independent consultants—by four communication practices: (1) failing to provide adequate access to information; (2) predetermining EIA outcomes by controlling the definition of issues (“definitional hegemony”); (3) privileging scientific/technical discourse; (4) utilizing “consultative” forms of communication that promote one-way flows of information rather than more interactive forms that encourage the joint construction of information and values. This study further argues that these practices persist because they serve as acts of power that privilege dominant actors and interests in the larger socio-political context. This analysis thus suggests that altering communication practices that compromise the quality of public participation may require attending to the interaction between communication practices, relations of power, and the larger socio-political context in which public participation takes place.     

环境CGE模型的发展及特征分析

随着CGE模型在环境与经济政策分析领域中的应用不断拓展 ,环境CGE模型的研究和应用也逐渐走向深入。本文在简要介绍CGE模型的发展状况和主要特征之基础上 ,对环境CGE模型的发展、类别、特征及其局限性进行了较为详细的分析     

环境规制和农业科技进步的关系分析——基于波特假说的研究

波特假说主要从动态的角度论证了环境规制和农业科技进步之间的正向变亿关系.而在安徽省1990 -2008年的农业生产数据的基础上,选择合适的环境规制和农业科技进步的指标变量,运用Johansen协整分析方法验证了安徽省农业生产中的环境规制和农业科技进步的关系也符合这一假说,Granger因果关系检验说明了安徽省环境规制是农业科技进步产生的原因,脉冲响应分析和方差分析则更深入地从定量的角度分析了环境规制对农业科技进步影响滞后的趋势和影响程度.由实证分析可以看出,只是从静态角度来分析,环境规制是不利于农业的科技进步的;但从长期效益来看,环境规制有利于农业的科技进步.因此,在农业生态环境恶化的形势下,严格对农业废弃物的排放限制,制定较严格的农产品生产标准和产品质量标准,提高农民的环境意识和科技意识,通过强化环境规制来促使农业生产者提高农业生产技术,提高农产品品质和产品的市场竞争力就显得尤为重要.     

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.