ABSTRACT
Environmental communication research and practice exist in a time of accelerating urgency. Anthropogenic environmental crisis is now the daily content and context of communication, making the field’s early self-definition as a “crisis discipline” (Cox, 2007) ever more apt. The ways we understand and practice communication are also deeply implicated in the unfolding of, and offering solutions to, anthropogenic climate catastrophe. At this moment—as scientists warn we have under a decade left to avert the worst effects of climate change and as a global pandemic caused by unsustainable exploitation of the natural world upends lives across the planet—we survey environmental communication as a field of inquiry and as a transformative force in our current trajectory. We address communication and environment through an ecocultural lens, understanding ecological crisis as a manifestation of untenable sociocultural orientations. In this context, we examine current imperatives and exigencies in communicating “the environment.” We argue that there has never been a more urgent time to better understand the role of communication in the shaping of our socio-environmental futures. The ways we succeed or fail in this endeavor will have profound implications for how—or indeed whether—we address the existential challenges we face.
