ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that, in order to understand environmental values and behaviors in cross-cultural contexts, environmental communication researchers must develop an ethnographic understanding of those values and behaviors within the community of study. It examines the interaction of local cultural values and environmental communication in Nicaragua in three contexts: a national environmental education campaign, a local grassroots environmental education message, and a community member’s reflections on their participation in environmental activities. I contend that environmental values in Nicaragua are not isolated, but rather exist in an inseparable bundle with other cultural values such as an orientation to public health, respect for institutions, and the hygiene of public and private spaces. In each of the contexts observed, from national, governmental discourse to local, grassroots messages, environmental values are constructed as inextricable from these public health and aesthetic values. The importance of understanding this system of cultural values becomes especially salient in an example of unsuccessful cross-cultural environmental communication which ultimately reinforces detrimental environmental behaviors. Many Nicaraguans are disproportionately affected by both local and global environmental crises, but in order to work with local communities to address these impacts, development workers and researchers of intercultural environmental communication need to understand the locally relevant systems of values in which environmental values are positioned. In planning and analyzing environmental communication across linguistic, racial, or cultural contexts, then, this chapter argues that researchers and practitioners will benefit from ethnographic methodologies and understandings of the relevant community.
