Environmental Communication Theories

Environmental communication is a field within the communication discipline, as well as a meta-field that cuts across disciplines. Research and theory within the field are united by the topical focus on communication and human relations with the environment. Scholars who study environmental communication are particularly concerned with the ways people communicate about the natural world because they believe that such communication has far-reaching effects at a time of largely human-caused environmental crises. This entry outlines some ways researchers who study environmental communication use existing theory to investigate their particular questions about human-nature relations. The entry also illustrates ways scholars have developed and are currently developing theory that is specific to environmental communication. The final section of this entry explores the ways some environmental communication scholars see their goals of applying and creating theory not only as trying to understand and explain but also as striving to improve human relations with nature.

[Page 345]Central to environmental communication theory are these assumptions: The ways we communicate powerfully affect our perceptions of the living world; in turn, these perceptions help shape how we define our relations with and within nature and how we act toward nature. Thus, environmental communication scholars often speak of communication as not only reflecting but also constructing, producing, and naturalizing particular human relations with the environment.

Many environmental communication theories include the assumption that human representations of nature, be they verbal or nonverbal, public or interpersonal, face-to-face or mediated communication, are interested. This, in part, means that communication about nature is informed by social, economic, and political contexts and interests. These contexts and interests help to shape our communication, often in ways we are unaware of, and direct us to see nature through particular lenses while also obscuring other views of nature.

The theories that scholars use to investigate these assumptions range widely in their epistemological and methodological orientations. Because human relations with nature are negotiated within cultural communication, mass media, public communication, interpersonal communication, popular culture, and so forth, environmental communication theory draws from cultural theory, media theory, rhetorical theory, social movement theory, pop-culture theory, and many other areas. In this way, environmental communication researchers have accessed existing theories to serve as conceptual frameworks for their questions and studies.

For example, in media studies of environmental communication, researchers have at times used framing theory to analyze media coverage of the environment, finding, for example, that the mainstream media increasingly frame environmental activist ecotage (eco-sabotage) as ecoterrorism. In examining cultural manifestations of human-nature relations in face-to-face communication, some researchers have used ethnographic approaches, finding, for example, that members of a particular non-Western culture speak of “listening” to nature, a cultural form of communication that supports a highly reflective and revelatory mode of communication that opens one to the relationships between natural and human forms.

Environmental communication scholars also borrow from and add to transdisciplinary theory that is both environment specific, such as ecofeminist theory and political ecology, and non-environment-specific, such as social constructionist theory, systems theory, and performance theory. In addition, scholars have created theories that emanate specifically from environmental communication issues. These borrowed and generated theories are applied to a variety of sites of human-nature relations. For instance, some theories focus on explaining public dialogue about the environment, including political, media, and advocate discourses, while some focus on explaining cultural views or everyday communication about the environment. Other, more general theories span these and other sites of communication because they deal with fundamental ways humans communicate about nature.

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