By Allie Nelson I went to the woods

By Allie Nelson

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. ” ― Henry David Thoreau, Walden

§ The Romantics – viewed nature as a return to godliness § Transcendentalism – first nature writers § Early Conservationists – John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt created national parks § Scientific Revolution – Aldo Leopold and E. O. Wilson § Environmental Crisis Communication – Silent Spring by Rachel Carson § The Gaia Hypothesis and Intersectional Communication – James E Lovelock § Climate Change Communication – Edward Maibach § Environmental Health Communication – Kathy Rowan

§ Scholar John Depoe first suggested the idea of environmental communication in his essay “John Muir, Yosemite, and the Sublime Response, ” encouraging his peers to ‘‘assesses the current health and future prospects of environmental communication within the broader communication discipline, as well as its significance across other academic disciplines and contexts. ’’

§ Robert Cox then takes Depoe a step further and proposes that environmental communication has an ethical duty to the people it communicates about and the environment scholars assess. This meshes well with conservation biology, a field that emerged in 1985 as a crisis discipline to protect what remained of the world’s biodiversity, mirroring the nascent environmental movement in America. Cox goes on to ask if environmental communication, following these lines of thought, is also a crisis discipline?

§ Cox argues that the field of environmental communication arises at a time of conjunctural crisis stemming from human threats to our health and the planet coupled with the failure of society to address these problems. § Effective environmental and scientific communication is a way to bridge the gap between the public, government, private sectors, and scientific communities regarding the risk and crisis associated with environmental degradation. § Cox therefore proposes several normative tenets about environmental communication, such as the discipline arming society with tools to respond to environmental crises, that representations of the environment on governmental levels should be transparent and available to the public, people must be engaged with nature, and so on. In conclusion, Cox suggests that environmental communication well and should be defined as a crisis discipline, ready to respond to environmental threats with effective communication strategies that serve the public to respond to risks.

§ Environmental rhetoric and discourse § Media and environmental journalism § Public participation in environmental decision making § Social marketing and advocacy campaigns § Environmental collaboration and conflict resolution § Risk communication § Representations of Nature in popular culture and green marketing

§ There are two major controversies regarding environmental crisis communication: public acceptance of the dangers of environmental crises like climate change as fact, and the role of the scientific community in disseminating crucial information. § Should science be impartial and a fount of research, unbiased and unswayed by environmentalists, or should they take an active role in spreading information about the dangers of public health and environmental crises, as the two are inextricably linked? § Science is often political, though researchers are hesitant to admit it – it is so political that climate change deniers can be called “scientists” even though they disagree with 98% of scientific literature and head the DOE and EPA without repercussions or being held accountable.