ABSTRACT
Research on media, communication and the environment dates back to the 1970s. Early pioneering studies that have been influential in shaping the development include Anthony Downs’ (1972) examination of the public careers of social issues, including the environment as a social problem, David Sachsman’s (1976) study of source-influence on environmental reporting, and Harvey Molotch and Marilyn Lester’s (1975) study of news reporting of a major oil spill. At the end of the 1970s came one of the first studies to offer a comprehensive perspective on the key role of the news media in the public construction of the environment as a social problem, namely the study by Schoenfeld, Meier and Griffin (1979). The 1980s saw the publication of important work that in several ways was directly relevant to the rise of media/communication research on the environment: this included work on media and nuclear power (Mazur, 1984; Rubin, 1987; Gamson and Modigliani, 1989), crises/disasters (Nimmo and Combs, 1985; Walters et al., 1989), environmental news journalism (Lowe and Morrison, 1984), and media and science/technology communication (Friedman et al., 1986; Nelkin, 1987). While the 1970s and 1980s thus produced a steady trickle of media and communication studies relevant to or directly touching on the environment and environmental issues, the 1990s can be characterized as the decade where these trends first coalesced into a distinctive focus on ‘media and the environment’. A special issue entitled ‘Covering the Environment’ of the journal Media, Culture and Society in 1991 provided an early thematic focus on media and environment, and this was consolidated further in one of the first book-length academic collections of its kind on The Mass Media and Environmental Issues (Hansen (ed.), 1993). This was followed by several book-length introductions with a core focus on media and the environment (Hannigan, 1995; Anderson, 1997; Chapman et al., 1997; Lacey and Longman, 1997; Shanahan and McComas, 1999) as well as others touching directly or indirectly on the key roles of discourse, rhetoric and communication in relation to the environment and nature (Cronon, 1995; Hajer, 1995; Cantrill and Oravec, 1993 and 1996; Macnaghten and Urry, 1998). The 1990s consolidation of environmental communication research has continued and become significantly more pronounced during the start of the present century. This is evident not just in a marked increase in scholarly research on media, communication and the environment, but in the embedding of environmental communication research within university-level curricula and in sections and groups within national and international communication associations. Sustaining this trend and its consolidation is the growing body of books on environmental communication and closely related fields (e.g. Allan et al., 2000; Allan, 2002; Senecah, 2004 and 2005; Cox, 2006 (3rd edition 2013); Corbett, 2006; Hannigan, 2006; Boyce and Lewis, 2009; Cottle, 2009; Hansen, 2010; Lester, 2010; Hendry, 2010; Doyle, 2011; Boykoff, 2011; Lester and Hutchins, 2013; Merry, 2014; Todd, 2014), and the rapid growth in environment-focused journal articles across a range of science/environment/health and communications journals, including the establishment of academic journals specifically focused on environmental communication. In Chapter 1, Robert Cox and Stephen Depoe set the scene by tracing the emergence and growth of the field of environmental communication. They examine the field’s institutional bases and delineate some of its key assumptions and research questions. Focusing on four emerging issues – climate change communication, sustainability science, visual communication or the ‘imaging’ of nature, and the problematizing of the human/nature binary – they demonstrate the rapid expansion and diversification that the field has experienced in the recent decades. What is clear, and evident in the chapters of the Handbook, is that the broad field of research, that we can now label as ‘environmental communication’ research, owes much of its innovativeness, dynamic
development and diversity to the fact that it draws from a wide range of theoretical and disciplinary traditions. Research has developed in and from such varied fields as sociology, geography, political science, historical studies, psychology, social psychology, media studies, cultural studies and literary, linguistic and rhetorical studies. Theoretically, key inspiration has come from a similarly diverse range, although several dominant trends – often cutting across traditional disciplinary boundaries – can be identified. Social constructionist theory in the tradition of Blumer (1971) and Spector and Kitsuse (1977) has featured prominently. In Chapter 2, Anders Hansen traces the application of social constructionist theory in environmental communication research, showing, inter alia, how social constructionist perspectives merged, in the 1970s and 1980s, with other developments in the sociology of news to help propel journalism and news research out of theoretically limited and circular concerns about bias, balance and objectivity in news reporting. Given the social constructionist perspective’s central emphasis on communication in the form of ‘claimsmaking’, its attractiveness to communication researchers, sociologists and others interested in the role of media and communication processes in relation to defining the environment as an issue for public and political concern can hardly come as a surprise. A common feature across much analysis of media, communication and the environment is the close attention often paid to language, rhetoric and discourse in public communication about the environment. There is thus a clear recognition that lexical choice, narrative and discursive practices are central components of how issues are rhetorically constructed and ‘framed’ and how in turn particular messages/ meanings are conveyed and boundaries set for public understanding and public interpretation/opinion regarding environmental issues. Jennifer Peeples (Chapter 3) traces the influence of rhetorical and discourse analytical approaches in environmental communication research, and she shows how the insights afforded by these approaches have proved particularly productive in uncovering the meanings of media content and other public communication about the environment. Much study in the field of environmental communication, but also cutting across the closely adjacent fields of science and risk communication, has drawn on German sociologist Ulrich Beck’s work on ‘risk society’ (1992, 1995, 1999, 2009) and to a lesser extent on prominent globalization scholar Manuel Castells (1997, 2009). Work in psychology, including cognitive psychology, has been an important inspiration particularly for research on environmental risk communication and associated public perception. The work of Slovic, Fischhoff, Renn and associates (e.g. Slovic and Fischhoff, 1982; Slovic et al., 1985; Renn et al. 1992; Morgan et al., 2002) has provided key models for understanding public perception of risk and much work in recent decades on climate change communication and public perception similarly draws on psychology and social psychology for understanding some of the complexities of how publics perceive and make sense of media and public communication about climate change and other environmental risks (Leiserowitz, 2006; Butler and Pidgeon, 2009; Pidgeon and Fischhoff, 2011). In Chapter 4, James Cantrill – demonstrating the importance of interdisciplinary approaches in environmental communication – charts the contribution to environmental communication from six central disciplines in the social sciences: economics, history, human geography, political science, sociology and psychology. Providing a synopsis of the development of an environmental focus in each of the disciplines and their particular conceptual and methodological approaches, he offers illustrative examples – and a critique – of how research in these core social science disciplines can inform our current understanding of the relationship between media, communication and the environment at large. A sign of the increasing maturity of ‘environmental communication’ is the increasing diversification and broadening of scope, both in terms of theoretical and disciplinary traditions, and significantly in terms of the types of media, communications genres and communications processes studied. This widening of scope is reflected throughout the Handbook in the range of media, genres, cultural representations and communication forms that are considered.
