ABSTRACT
Introduction The first decade of the twenty-first century may be considered an inflection point for scholarship in environment and communication. In asking whether such scholarship was a “crisis discipline,” the inaugural issue of Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture (2007) posed explicitly, for the first time, the question of why, and in what ways, studies investigating the nexus between environment and human communication constituted an academic “field” as such. By 2011, scholars and practitioners had also launched the International Environmental Communication Association, “to advance the practice, study, and teaching of Environmental Communication in civic, political, educational, business, and cultural contexts” (IECA, 2013, para. 2). This chapter traces the growth of research and institutional support that, by the early twenty-first century, purported to define a field of inquiry in environment and communication, as well as where this field has gone since. Following a summary of the early history, we identify major areas of research, key assumptions and questions defining this field, and emerging issues and controversies in the field.
