For many years, the objective of environmental campaigners was to push climate change on to the agenda of political leaders and to encourage media attention to the issue. By the first decade of the twenty-first century, it appeared that their efforts had been spectacularly successful. Yet just at the moment when the campaigners’ goals were being achieved, it seemed that the idea of getting the issue into mainstream discussion had been mistaken all along; that the consensus-building approach produced little or no meaningful action. That is the problem of climate change as a ‘post-political’ issue, which is the subject of this book. Examining how climate change is communicated in politics, news media and celebrity culture, Climate Change and Post-Political Communication explores how the issue has been taken up by elites as potentially offering a sense of purpose or mission in the absence of political visions of the future, and considers the ways in which it provides a focus for much broader anxieties about a loss of modernist political agency and meaning. Drawing on a wide range of literature and case studies, and taking a critical and contextual approach to the analysis of climate change communication, this book will be a valuable resource for students and scholars of environmental studies, communication studies, and media and film studies.

This book offers the first systematic study of how the ‘Anthropocene’ is reported in mass media globally, drawing parallels between the use (or misuse) of the term and the media’s attitude towards the associated issues of climate change and global warming. Identifying the potential dangers of the Anthropocene provides a useful path into a variety of issues that are often ignored, misrepresented, or sidelined by the media. These dangers are widely discussed in the social sciences, environmental humanities, and creative arts, and this book includes chapters on how the contributions of these disciplines are reported by the media. Our results suggest that the natural science and mass media establishments, and the business and political interests which underpin them, tend to lean towards optimistic reassurance (the ‘good’ Anthropocene), rather than pessimistic alarmist stories, in reporting the Anthropocene. In this volume, contributors explore how dangerous this ‘neutralizing’ of the Anthropocene is in undermining serious global action in the face of the potential existential risks confronting humanity. The book presents results from media in more than 100 countries in all major languages across the globe. It covers the reporting of key environmental issues, such as the impact of climate change and global warming on oceans, forests, soil, biodiversity, and the biosphere. We offer explanations for differences and similarities in how the media report the Anthropocene in different regions of the world. In doing so, the book argues that, though it is still controversial, the idea of the Anthropocene helps to concentrate minds and behaviour in confronting ongoing ecological (and Coronavirus) crises. The Anthropocene in Global Media will be of interest to students and scholars of environmental studies, media and communication studies, and the environmental humanities, and all those who are concerned about the survival of humans on planet Earth.

This book explores tensions surrounding news media coverage of Indigenous environmental justice issues, identifying them as a fruitful lens through which to examine the political economy of journalism, American history, human rights, and contemporary U.S. politics. The book begins by evaluating contemporary American journalism through the lens of "deep media", focusing especially on the relationship between the drive for profit, professional journalism, and coverage of environmental justice issues. It then presents the results of a framing analysis of the Standing Rock movement (#NODAPL) coverage by news outlets in the USA and Canada. These findings are complemented by interviews with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, whose members provided their perspectives on the media and the pipeline. The discussion expands by considering the findings in light of current U.S. politics, including a Trump presidency that employs "law and order" rhetoric regarding people of color and that often subjects environmental issues to an economic "cost-benefit" analysis. The book concludes by considering the role of social media in the era of "Big Oil" and growing Indigenous resistance and power. Examining the complex interplay between social media, traditional journalism, and environmental justice issues, Journalism, Politics, and the Dakota Access Pipeline: Standing Rock and the Framing of Injustice will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental communication, critical political economy, and journalism studies more broadly.

Seeking innovative answers to global sustainability challenges has become an urgent need with the onslaught of environmental and ecological degradation that surrounds us today. More than ever, there is a need to carve new ways for citizens and different industries and institutions to unite – to cooperate, communicate and collaborate to address growing global sustainability concerns. This book examines one such global collaboration called The BGreen Project (BGreen): a transnational participatory action research project that spans the United States and Bangladesh with the aim of addressing environmental issues via academic–community engagement. By analysing and unpacking the architecture of BGreen, Hasan teases out the key factors that are required for the continued momentum of environmentally focused, academic–community partnership projects in order to present a workable model that could be applied elsewhere. This model is based around a unique conceptual framework developed by the author – “transnational participatory networks” – which is drawn from participatory action research and actor network theory, with the specific aim of addressing the common challenge of building evolving, stable and sustainable networks. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental communication, citizen participation, environmental politics, environmental sociology and sustainable development.

In recent years, ‘environmental collapse’ has become an important way of framing and imagining environmental change and destruction, referencing issues such as climate change, species extinction and deteriorating ecosystems. Given its pervasiveness across disciplines and spheres, this edited volume articulates environmental collapse as a discursive phenomenon worthy of sustained critical attention. Building upon contemporary conversations in the fields of archaeology and the natural sciences, this volume coalesces, explores and critically evaluates the diverse array of literatures and imaginaries that constitute environmental collapse. The volume is divided into three sections— Doc- Collapse, Pop Collapse and Craft Collapse —that independently explore distinct modes of representing, and implicit attitudes toward, environmental collapse from the lenses of diverse fields of study including climate science and policy, cinema and photo journalism. Bringing together a broad range of topics and authors, this volume will be of great interest to scholars of environmental communication and environmental humanities.

Participatory Media in Environmental Communication brings together stories of communities in the Pacific islands – a region that is severely affected by the impacts of climate change. Despite living on the margins of the digital revolution, these island communities have used media and communication to create awareness of and find solutions to environmental challenges. By telling their stories in their own way, ordinary people are able to communicate compelling accounts of how different, but interrelated, environmental, political, and economic issues converge and impact at a local level. This book fills a significant gap in our understanding of how participatory media is used as a dialogic tool to raise awareness and facilitate discussion of environmental issues that are now critical. It includes a section on pedagogy and practice – the undergirding principles, the tools, the methods. The book offers a framework for Participatory Environmental Communication that weaves three widely used concepts, diversity, network and agency, into a cohesive underlying system to bring scholars, practitioners and diverse communities together in a dialogue about pressing environmental issues. This book is a valuable resource for researchers and students in communication and media studies, environmental communication, cultural studies, and environmental sciences, as well as practitioners, policy makers and environmental activists.

The Textbook seeks for an innovative approach to Sustainability Communication as transdisciplinary area of research. Following the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, which are intended to transform the world as it is known, we seek for a multidisciplinary discussion of the role communication plays in realizing these goals. With complementing theoretical approaches and concepts, the book offers various perspectives on communication practices and strategies on an individual, organizational, institutional, as well as public level that contribute, enable (or hinder) sustainable development. Presented case studies show methodological as well as issue specific challenges in sustainability communication. Therefore, the book introduces and promotes innovative methods for this specific area of research.

This book navigates the neglected territory where far-right populism intersects with climate change, presenting a nuanced examination that transcends traditional research boundaries. In recent decades, Europe has grappled with the surge of far-right and populist movements, fueling robust academic debates. Simultaneously, the global discourse on climate change has become increasingly pervasive in societal and political spheres. This book provides a comprehensive exploration of how populist far-right parties discuss climate change within their national contexts, focusing on Germany, Spain, and Austria. Using a meticulous methodology rooted in critical discourse studies, Mirjam Gruber examines the perspectives on climate change held by mainstream parties thereby defining the national policy field. Gruber then delves into the discourse about climate change of populist far-right parties, revealing a complex web of obstructionist arguments intricately tied to the national policy context. By analyzing a diverse array of documents spanning five years, including social media posts, press releases, parliamentary debates, and policy documents, Gruber uncovers a stark contrast between the willingness of mainstream parties to address climate concerns and the obstructionist rhetoric employed by their far-right counterparts. This illuminating exploration underscores the importance of context in understanding political communication and provides profound insights into how different nations frame the climate change narrative. Climate Politics in Populist Times will be of great interest to students and scholars of climate change, environmental politics, climate change communication and populist far-right ideologies.

This book maps Twitter discourses on marginalised environmental concerns during the UK’s 2016 EU referendum campaign. Focusing on EU institutional influence in British environmental protection policy and charting the roles played by ENGOs and British political parties, it reveals how British environmental politics extended onto Twitter.

Environmental literacy and education is not simply a top-down process of disseminating correct attitudes, values and beliefs. Rather, it is one that incorporates and facilitates a dialogue with audiences of different persuasions and at all levels of engagement, to help highlight and co-produce consensual solutions to the major eco-challenges of our time. Exploring the growing power and influence of media formats and outlets like YouTube and gaming, alongside fictional and documentary film, this book considers new modes of environmental literacy to ascertain the effectiveness of digital and filmic stimuli on an audience’s perception of environmental issues, and its specific impact on environmental action. Drawing on extensive research across a broad range of media formats, Brereton establishes how environmental narratives and meanings are created and being received by contemporary audiences. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental communication and media, eco-criticism and environmental humanities more broadly.