Context: from conference theme to book
In September 2012, we embarked on the process of coordinating conference submissions for the first international Conference on Communication and the Environment (COCE) at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) in Uppsala, Sweden, in June 2013. The first COCE, organized by James G. Cantrill and Christine Oravec, was held in Alta, Utah, USA in 1991. What started as a small North American conference of communication scholars, who believed that the study of environmental communication (EC) was more than a passing fad, had grown into an international group of individuals interested in how scholars and other citizens of Earth constituted the phenomenon of EC. Stephen Depoe, who was the founding editor of Environmental Communication, campaigned tirelessly for the establishment of an organization that would provide institutional support to stabilize these efforts. The 2013 conference in Uppsala followed formalization of the loosely associated group into the International Environmental Communication Association in 2011 and an internationalized roster of participants at the 2011 COCE. Attendees at the 2011 conference, organized and hosted by Stacey Sowards in El Paso, Texas, USA, discussed broadening the geographic scope of the conference, starting with the 2013 conference in Uppsala, Sweden.
The 2013 conference was organized and hosted by the Environmental Communication Programme at SLU, with leadership from Professor N. Sriskandarajah, who personifies the “pracademic” (as coined by Susan Senecah and embraced by many EC scholars) identity more holistically than any other individual. The conference theme of Participation Revisited: Openings and Closures for Deliberations on the Commons grew out of Sriskandarajah’s commitment to bring EC fully into the theory-to-practice realm, particularly in the service of people who are adrift, alienated, or estranged from their environments, whether because of destitution, genocide, or sea-level rise. The idea for this book emerged from this conference theme and the papers presented there.
This book critically examines a suite of international cases that demonstrate how EC contributes to both the construction and destruction of community. We recognize that the term community can have multiple geographic, political and cultural definitions, and this book incorporates all of these conceptions as they relate to the environment and environmental issues. Beyond describing and cataloguing, we use these cases as touchstones for understanding and delineating how the communicative dimensions of being in a community contribute to social transformation.
As such, the chapters in this book are grounded in an assumption that communication presents a central political challenge (perhaps the central political challenge) to the formation and maintenance of democratic communities throughout the world. The chapters were selected from conference presentations that reflected critically on ways that EC research may contribute to citizen participation in both the development and implementation of more inclusive institutional frameworks for environmental governance. This does not mean we have limited the book to institutional analyses. Rather, as noted in several of the chapters, communication provides its grounding. The chapters collected in this book offer a demonstration of the thought provoking papers that focused specifically on how communicative practices in a variety of communities enable and constrain social transformation.
Theoretical perspective
As society has become increasingly aware of environmental issues, the challenge of structuring appropriate decision-making processes and public participation opportunities has become crucial for many natural resource agencies, industries, interest groups and publics. The processes of negotiating between the often disparate values held by diverse groups, and formulating and implementing policies that enable people to fulfil goals associated with these values, can strengthen communities as well as tear them apart. We use the selected cases to examine the communicative practices put in play when people who would not otherwise meet interact with each other, often in situations where they are competing for the same resources such as land use, energy sources, or wildlife to name a few.
We follow the German sociologist, Nikolas Luhmann’s (1989) claim that, as with any system, human society does not directly communicate with its environment, but that people still observe, interpret and incorporate their experiences with the environment into their thought and action. The study of EC examines this space between individual experiences with the extrahuman world (Peterson et al. 2007) and society-level action or inaction on environmental issues (Latour 2004). We concur with Cox and Pezzullo’s (2016) claim that EC includes both constitutive and instrumental dimensions, examining how humanity perceives the extrahuman world and how people can be mobilized through communication to take action toward or on behalf of that world. In addition to these constitutive and instrumental dimensions, we agree with scholars who argue that one characteristic differentiating EC research from more traditional communication studies is that EC includes an explicitly normative dimension (Cox 2007). Although there is considerable debate over what that normativity should encompass, part of it is a commitment to question and analytically explore the various representations whereby humans experience the world beyond themselves. Research coming from this perspective includes critical reflection on how social and biophysical systems interact in the communities where humans live. That reflection opens possibilities for rhetorical (both its material and symbolic dimensions) struggle over the connotations of community. Beyond this generic approach to EC, our theoretical foundation consists of three threads – symbolic construction, modes of organizing and agonistic politics – that, together, are fundamental to community building, its maintenance and potentially or its destruction. Each chapter draws from one or more of these threads, and some integrates all three. We conceptualize these threads as follows.
A theoretical perspective based on symbolic construction enables us to explore how words, images and other symbols constitute meanings and communities, as well as how the tactical use of these symbols functions as a constructive and destructive instrument for existing communities. For example, words and non-linguistic images constitute ways of thinking, acting, and simply being in relation to one’s environment. They also may be instruments that draw people together or tear them apart.
Chapters in the section on modes of organizing highlight how society’s attempts to construct institutional frameworks to enhance political legitimacy enable various types of actions at the same time they disable others. This perspective directs our attention to the variety of spatial and temporal scales where environmental communication operates. They range from individual members of local groups to international organizations, and from immediate livelihood pressures to multi-generational concerns. The chapters in this section also highlight how social networks form, and then build on each other to influence possibilities for community action.
Viewing community construction and/or destruction as agonistic politics enables us to explicitly explore how participatory democracy can facilitate social transformation by disturbing political boundaries, and why people may want to do so. The chapters in this section investigate communicative practices that instantiate Mouffe’s (2000) definition of agonism as a productive form of antagonism for engaging in decision-making in pluralistic, heterogeneous societies, or argumentation between “adversaries”, adversaries being defined in a paradoxical way as “friendly enemies”, that is, persons who are friends because they share a common symbolic space but also enemies because they want to organize this common symbolic space in a different way (13). The chapters in this and the following section explore the ways in which people marshal their communication resources by creatively engaging with traditional political structures and by politicizing activities that had not previously been thought of as political. These practices expand possibilities for citizen involvement in governance through revising the margins of public life.
Preview
This book is divided into three parts: an introduction, a suite of case studies, and a conclusion. In addition to this introductory chapter, the Part I includes a chapter that examines the criticality of conflict communication to the dynamics of social transformation. Part II, which contains the case studies presented here, is subdivided into sections focused on symbolic construction, modes of organizing, and agonistic politics. A fourth section of Part II includes two chapters that integrate symbolic, institutional and agonistic analyses. All of the case studies highlight the creation, maintenance and/or fracturing of community as they interact with other communities, including the extrahuman world. The following provides a brief glimpse of the content found in each chapter.
Conceptual framing for community constructivity and deconstructivity
In Chapter 2, “Reframing Conflict in Natural Resource Management”, Hallgren explores constructive and destructive aspects of natural resource management (NRM) conflict and attempts to clarify distinctions between them. The point of departure in this chapter is that NRM conflict is neither solely constructive nor destructive, but involves elements of both. In order to illuminate the distinction between constructive and destructive conflict, the chapter offers a critical analysis of what natural resource managers generally assume is being constructed in a constructive process and destroyed in a destructive process. Hallgren puts Mouffe’s (2013) agonistic pluralism into conversation with Habermas’s (2001) theory of communicative rationality to form the basis of his argument that what is destroyed/constructed in destructive/constructive conflict processes is the actor’s intersubjective ability to understand meaning for the conflict and the differences between agonistic perspectives. To further analyse this process, he introduces the concepts of commonality, mutuality and reciprocity. He concludes by arguing that when social interaction generates intersubjective experiences of equivocal reciprocity, opportunities for pluralistic agonism to emerge are reduced, resulting in destructivity. On the other hand, when social interaction generates increased certainty about reciprocity, those opportunities are expanded, resulting in constructivity. Both scenarios are fundamental to social transformation.
Symbolic construction – instantiating community through language and other symbols
Chapters 3, 4, and 5 address the role of symbols in the construction or deconstruction of community, exploring social attempts to address environmental issues within varying democratic systems. In Chapter 3, “Process literacy”, Callister lays out an alternative to traditional forms of stakeholder engagement that could be used in multi-cultural contexts. She notes that, because, democracy suffers multiple encumbrances within these contexts (e.g. Benhabib 1996; Habermas 1984, 1989), making it work requires models of discourse that accommodate and encourage participants to develop their own forms of engagement to create conditions for deliberation within communities and at interfaces with decision-makers (Dryzek 2004). Callister defines process literacy as a “discursive lubricant” that facilitates the construction of community. The chapter explores how it builds an awareness of and the capacity to make choices that encourage productive communication during conflict situations. Process literacy functions to keep communication productive as multi-cultural participants negotiate internal conflict while striving to reach mutual decisions. Most importantly, it pivots conflict communication toward collaboration and deliberative decision-making, while holding open space for dissent. Finally, this chapter frames conflict communication in relationship to these complex processes within a telos of consensus.
Chapter 4, “Performances of an international professional community”, shifts from considering spatially defined community to interest-based community of energy professionals. The use of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies is a significant topic of international deliberation about energy policy, particularly in the face of climate change. In 2005, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recommended the use of CCS as a strategy for climate change mitigation by reducing CO2 emissions from the coal-dependent energy sector and other stationary industrial sources (IPCC 2005). This chapter examines the rhetorical dynamics of shifting the name of the community from CCS to CCUS (Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage). Drawing largely from participant observation, the chapter describes and evaluates the moments of rupture caused by putting the “U” in CCUS. Drawing from social constructivist theories of linguistic meaning-making (Burke 1966), rhetorical boundary-work (Gieryn 1999) and the cultural performance of social drama, the authors argue that the framing shift ruptured the boundaries of the community, calling forth cultural performances of confusion, acquiescence and resistance to the framing shift. They suggest this theoretical perspective has the potential to serve as a powerful heuristic for examining other community ruptures, particularly communities based on shared interests, rather than shared space.
Chapter 5, “How reductive scientific narratives limit possibilities for community participation in biodiversity conservation” focuses on a community of place, exploring discourse surrounding the conservation of whooping cranes (Grus Americana) in Texas USA. This chapter identifies and explores the narratives used to describe the endangered whooping crane and its habitat needs along the central coastal bend of Texas (Aransas National Wildlife Refuge 2010). The authors began with a series of semi-structured interviews with people directly involved in crane conservation, most of whom live near or in whooping crane winter habitat. To ensure that the discursive frame that emerged from their study could demonstrate how community members integrated traditional scientific knowledge with local experiential knowledge (Collins and Evans 2002), they augmented interview transcripts with testimony from a related trial, planning documents developed by government agencies, and scientific studies of whooping cranes and the ecosystem. Both humans and extrahumans played leading roles in the community narrative. Human relations with cranes varied widely, including experiencing the birds as close personal friends, neighbours, objects of study, management responsibility, economic stimulus, local icon and symbol of the natural world. The narrative that e...
