Media and the Environment

Most of what we understand about ‘the environment’, we know through the media, broadly defined, and related communication processes. Indeed, such processes have played a vital role in defining ‘the environment’ as a crucial concept, and in bringing environmental issues and problems to public and political attention. Thus, at least since the emergence and rise of the modern environmental movement in the 1960s, the mass media have been a central public arena for publicizing environmental issues and for contesting claims, arguments, and opinions about our use and abuse of the environment. (Moreover, the learned editor of this new Routledge collection avers, this applies not only to our beliefs and knowledge about those aspects of the environment which are regarded as problems or issues for public and political concern, but extends much deeper to the very ways in which we—as individuals, cultures, and societies—view, perceive, value, and relate to our environment and nature generally.)

A rapidly expanding body of research and scholarship from a diverse range of disciplines across the humanities, sciences, and social sciences has sought to address key questions about all aspects of media, mediation, and communication roles in social, political, and cultural definitions of ‘the environment’. Such questions have focused in particular on how the media and related communication processes are centrally implicated in the social and political definition, contestation, and resolution of major global environmental issues and problems—notably, most recently, climate change. But media and communication roles in relation to local and national environmental issues also continue to be an important focus for scholarly research on what is increasingly recognized as the emerging and consolidating domain of ‘environmental communication’.

Addressing the need for an authoritative and comprehensive reference work to enable users to navigate this increasingly complex area of research and study, and to answer key questions about the central role of media and communication in relation to the environment and environmental issues, Media and the Environment is a new title from Routledge’s acclaimed Critical Concepts in the Environment series. Edited by Anders Hansen, it is a four-volume collection of foundational and the very best cutting-edge scholarship. The collection brings together core texts charting the history and development of environmental communication, along with research examining the three major strands of the communication process: the sources and production of communication about the environment; the study of representations of the environment in news, entertainment media, advertising, film, and popular culture; and the study of how communication about the environment impacts on and interacts with public and political beliefs about the environment, as well as political action regarding the environment. The collection’s final part provides a series of case studies from the field of environmental communication praxis, examining how activists, NGOs, local government, and large corporations have sought to use communication as a key tool in the political processes of environmental change.

Supplemented with a full index, and including an introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the assembled texts in their historical and intellectual context, Media and the Environment is destined to be valued by scholars and students as a vital research resource.