Environmental Communication at a Time of Planetary Crisis: Five Theoretical and Analytical Resources for Academic Research and Practice

Abstract

This article draws on transdisciplinary perspectives to contend that attention needs to be paid to contemporary contexts of environmental communication, especially in light of the latest assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Amid stark warnings around planetary crisis, this article provides environmental communication scholars, academics, and practitioners who are concerned with communicating aspects of deepening environmental crisis, a set of theoretical and analytical resources for the analysis and communication of environmental issues. Communicating environmental issues requires an expanded set of transdisciplinary approaches to move beyond a focus on representation of issues. To this end, the article draws on interdisciplinary bodies of knowledge from geography and communications to provide a set of reinforcing and complementary theoretical and analytical insights that are generally absent in the field of environmental communication. The article contends that attention needs to be paid to transdisciplinary perspectives, ontological, structural, and material challenges, and to the salience of other media, including digital and emerging media. The article thus provides five transdisciplinary theoretical and conceptual resources that expand the dimensions of environmental communication.