ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews Western environmental communication scholarship and the role of publics, particularly in the US and Europe. In the West, therefore, increased attention toward the role and value of publics to environmental communication is timely to revisit. Despite finding the metaphor of spheres productive to study green contemporary Chinese publics, G. Yang and C. Calhoun acknowledged that importing it to Eastern cultures has not been without friction. Given the rhetorical constraints and possibilities, J. Liu and G. T. Goodnight argued that the norms of public sphere debate are not what are animating green publics in China. While green publics might mobilize around ecological crisis in the hopes of intervening, the norms of engagement and practice vary in significant ways. The ideal of public spheres and democratic theory was imagined as more compelling than feudal governance, in which the land-owning elite ignored the voices of everyday people.
