The environment is perhaps most misunderstood as a static place, somewhere "out there," separated from the practices of our everyday lives. Given this assumption, environmental movements and concerns have remained mostly marginalized or denigrated in cultural studies publications, conferences, and presentations. Recent global developments have made changing this oversight and, at times, direct resistance to engaging environmental concerns a new priority. This edited collection illustrates an appreciation of the dynamic, palpable, and significant ways the environment permeates culture (and vice versa), as well as a collective commitment to the ways that cultural studies has more to offer—and to learn from—taking environmental matters to heart. Like foundational categories of identity, economics, and historical context, this collection reminds us why the environment is and should be considered relevant to any work done in the name of "cultural studies." Including research from four continents and across media, the authors offer insights on timely topics such as food, tourism, human/animal relations, forests, queer theory, indigenous rights, and water. This book was published as a special issue of Cultural Studies.

How does China speak for nature? How are the pollution and climate change crises being addressed? What are the possibilities and limitations of mobilizing publics to care about the environment through new media, tourism, and government policy? Green Communication and China is the first volume to identify the importance of studying environmental communication in, about, and with China, a rising global environmental leader whose ecological and political controversies often make international headlines. Organized into three sections on communicating crisis, communicating care, and environmental futurity, these essays span multimodal communication practices and methods in green public culture and address topics ranging from The North Face advertisements to NGO advocacy to global governmental policy. The volume showcases the work of leading scholars, all of them deeply intimate with China, in disciplines ranging from cultural studies and rhetoric to public opinion polling, discourse analysis, ethnic studies, and sociology. These complex projects engage transnational and national politics, ecological and economic challenges, media saturation, and government control. Holding these tensions together without glossing over differences, Green Communication and China will inform new agendas for environmental communication in China, the United States, and beyond.

The Fourth Edition of Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere remains the only comprehensive introduction to the growing field of environmental communication, ranging from an historical overview of key terms to important legal and technological developments. This innovative book focuses on how human communication influences the way we perceive and act in the environment. It also examines how we interpret environmental “problems” and decide what actions to take with regard to the natural world. Three-time president of the Sierra Club, the largest environmental group in the United States, lead author Robert Cox leverages his vast experience to offer insights into the news media, Congress, environmental conflict, advocacy campaigns, and other real-world applications of environmental communication. New coauthor Phaedra Pezzullo brings two decades of applied experience working with grassroots environmental justice and health organizations, citizen advisory boards, and student-led campaigns, as well as her internationally recognized research on toxic pollution, social injustices, public advocacy, and more. The authors introduce the reader to the major areas, terms, and debates of this evolving field. The Fourth Edition incorporates major revisions that include four new chapters on visual and popular culture, digital media and activism, the sustainability of college and corporation campuses, and the legal “standing” of citizens and nature. Updates throughout the text draw on timely topics including visual communication used in climate science campaigns, fracking and challenges to the right to know, plastic bag bans, consumer apps, digital activism for environmental justice, green marketing, and arguments on giving legal rights to nonhuman entities from dolphins to rivers.

An examination of how garbage reveals the relationships between the global and the local, the economic and the ecological, and the historical and the contemporary. Garbage, considered both materially and culturally, elicits mixed responses. Our responsibility toward the objects we love and then discard is entangled with our responsibility toward the systems that make those objects. Histories of the Dustheap uses garbage, waste, and refuse to investigate the relationships between various systems—the local and the global, the economic and the ecological, the historical and the contemporary—and shows how this most democratic reality produces identities, social relations, and policies. The contributors first consider garbage in subjective terms, examining “toxic autobiography” by residents of Love Canal, the intersection of public health and women's rights, and enviroblogging. They explore the importance of place, with studies of post-Katrina soil contamination in New Orleans, e-waste disposal in Bloomington, Indiana, and garbage on Mount Everest. And finally, they look at cultural contradictions as objects hover between waste and desirability, examining Milwaukee's efforts to sell its sludge as fertilizer, the plastics industry's attempt to wrap plastic bottles and bags in the mantle of freedom of choice, and the idea of obsolescence in the animated film The Brave Little Toaster. Histories of the Dustheap offers a range of perspectives on a variety of incarnations of garbage, inviting the reader to consider garbage in a way that goes beyond the common “buy green” discourse that empowers individuals while limiting environmental activism to consumerist practices.

This handbook provides a comprehensive review of communication around rising global environmental challenges and public action to manage them now and into the future. Bringing together theoretical, methodological, and practical chapters, this book presents a unique opportunity for environmental communication scholars to critically reflect on the past, examine present trends, and start envisioning exciting new methodologies, theories, and areas of research. Chapters feature authors from a wide range of countries to critically review the genesis and evolution of environmental communication research and thus analyze current issues in the field from a truly international perspective, incorporating diverse epistemological perspectives, exciting new methodologies, and interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks. The handbook seeks to challenge existing dominant perspectives of environmental communication from and about populations in the Global South and disenfranchised populations in the Global North. The Handbook of International Trends in Environmental Communication is ideal for scholars and advanced students of communication, sustainability, strategic communication, media, environmental studies, and politics.

The Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity brings the ecological turn to sociocultural understandings of self. The editors introduce a broad, insightful assembly of original theory and research on planetary positionalities in flux in the Anthropocene – or what in this Handbook cultural ecologist David Abram presciently renames the Humilocene, a new “epoch of humility.” Forty international authors craft a kaleidoscopic lens, focusing on the following key interdisciplinary inquiries: Part I illuminates identity as always ecocultural, expanding dominant understandings of who we are and how our ways of identifying engender earthly outcomes. Part II examines ways ecocultural identities are fostered and how difference and spaces of interaction can be sources of environmental conviviality. Part III illustrates consequential ways the media sphere informs, challenges, and amplifies particular ecocultural identities. Part IV delves into the constitutive power of ecocultural identities and illuminates ways ecological forces shape the political sphere. Part V demonstrates multiple and unspooling ways in which ecocultural identities can evolve and transform to recall ways forward to reciprocal surviving and thriving. The Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity provides an essential resource for scholars, teachers, students, protectors, and practitioners interested in ecological and sociocultural regeneration. The Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity has been awarded the 2020 Book Award from the National Communication Association's (USA) Environmental Communication Division.

The Routledge Handbook of Environmental Justice presents an extensive and cutting-edge introduction to the diverse, rapidly growing body of research on pressing issues of environmental justice and injustice. With wide-ranging discussion of current debates, controversies, and questions in the history, theory, and methods of environmental justice research, contributed by over 90 leading social scientists, natural scientists, humanists, and scholars from professional disciplines from six continents, it is an essential resource both for newcomers to this research and for experienced scholars and practitioners. The chapters of this volume examine the roots of environmental justice activism, lay out and assess key theories and approaches, and consider the many different substantive issues that have been the subject of activism, empirical research, and policy development throughout the world. The Handbook features critical reviews of quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methodological approaches and explicitly addresses interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity, and engaged research. Instead of adopting a narrow regional focus, it tackles substantive issues and presents perspectives from political and cultural systems across the world, as well as addressing activism for environmental justice at the global scale. Its chapters do not simply review the state of the art, but also propose new conceptual frameworks and directions for research, policy, and practice. Providing detailed but accessible overviews of the complex, varied dimensions of environmental justice and injustice, the Handbook is an essential guide and reference not only for researchers engaged with environmental justice, but also for undergraduate and graduate teaching and for policymakers and activists.

The fifth edition of this award-winning text remains the most comprehensive introduction in the growing field of environmental communication, offering insights into real-world applications of the topic and exploring recent events such as the Trump Administration, the People’s Climate March and international legal precedents.

This book opens up a unique intellectual space where eleven female scholar-activists explore alternative forms of theorising social reality. These‘Women on the Verge’ demonstrate that a new radical subject– one that is plural, prefigurative, decolonial, ethical, ecological, communal and democratic- is in the making, but is unrecognisable with old analytical tools. Of central concern to the book is the resistance of some social scientists, many of them critical theorists, to learning about this radical subject and to interrogating the concepts, methodologies and epistemologies used to grasp it. Echoing the experiential critique of capitalist-colonial society that is taking place at the grassroots, the authors examine how to create hope, decolonise critique and denaturalise society. They also address the various dimensions of the social (re)production of life, including women in development, the commons, and nature. Finally, they discuss the dynamics of prefiguration by social movements, critiquing social movement theory in the process. This thought-provoking edited collection will appeal to students and scholars of gender studies, social, Marxist and Feminist theory, postcolonial studies and politics.

This innovative book provides a dynamic—and often surprising—view of the range of environmental issues facing the United States today. A distinguished group of scholars examines the growing temporal, spatial, and thematic breadth of topics historical geographers are now exploring. Seventeen original chapters examine topics such as forest conservation, mining landscapes, urban environment justice, solid waste, exotic species, environmental photography, national and state park management, recreation and tourism, and pest control. Commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of the seminal work The American Environment: Interpretations of Past Geographies, the book clearly shows much has changed since 1992. Indeed, not only has the range of issues expanded, but an increasing number of geographers are forging links with environmental historians, promoting a level of intellectual cross-fertilization that benefits both disciplines. As a result, environmental historical geographies today are richer and more diverse than ever. The American Environment Revisited offers a comprehensive overview that gives both specialist and general readers a fascinating look at our changing relationships with nature over time.