ICA's Environmental Communication Interest Group and Task Force
Over 100 ICA members recently expressed their support for creating a new Interest Group in Environmental Communication, which will hold its first business meeting at the upcoming ICA annual meeting, on Sunday, May 29, 4:30pm - 5:45pm in the Quincy Room at the Westin Waterfront in Boston. All ICA members are invited to help envision the future of this growing area of the field.
The new Interest Group, organized by Richard Doherty (University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana), will foster dialogue among ICA members whose research, teaching, and professional work focus on how our discipline can address the theory and practice of environmental communication. The group will provide a new home for supporting environmental communication scholarship, teaching, and service.
The Interest Group follows on the heels of a separate task force, currently chaired by Chad Raphael (Santa Clara University) which was appointed in 2008 to examine how ICA could move the field toward sustainability through its efforts to promote scholarship, teaching, service, and outreach, as well as in the association's own operations. The task force made a series of short-term and long-term recommendations to ICA at last year's conference.
Why a new Interest Group?
While interest in environmental communication has grown steadily over the past 3 decades, the field of communication has not yet devoted comparable attention to questions of sustainability seen in fields such as political science, education, and sociology. Yet communication processes are central to environmental problems and their solutions. If the natural environment exists independently of how we think and talk about it, we can only know it in human terms through our discourse about it. Through scientific studies, media coverage, government hearings, popular culture and other forums, we define the environment and our relation to nature through speech, writing, and images. And the ways in which we communicate about the environment have profound consequences for what we do to it, through individual acts of consumption or conservation and social acts of policy making, pollution, and protest.
Given the power of our symbol making for the fate of life on the earth, communication theories and methods are indispensable for addressing the crises of sustainability we face.
Several recent developments create new opportunities for ICA to help its members expand environmental communication research and education. Governments around the world are committing significant grant budgets to environmental education and outreach, creating new funding opportunities for communication scholars. Outlets for publishing work at the crossroads of sustainability and communication studies are proliferating.
For example, the journal Environmental Communication has moved from a yearbook to a quarterly journal. The Environmental Communication Network has emerged as a valuable source of ongoing information about scholarship, education, funding, and publishing in this area of the field. In the US, the National Communication Association has a vibrant Environmental Communication Division. The newly formed International Environmental Communication Association is now forging global ties among academics and practitioners of environmental communication. ICA should link with each of these organizations.
At present, the environment is not well-integrated into existing ICA scholarly Divisions, despite its import for many of them. Media history, economics, and effects have not taken full stock of advertising's contribution to overconsumption and the direct toll of media hardware (electronics, paper, and the like) on nature and humans who produce and dispose of it. Communication law and policy might help to envision how governments can address these problems through regulation and subsidies for more sustainable media tools. Scholars of feminism, ethnicity and race could help shed light on the communication of environmental justice. Studies of communication and technology and information systems could do more to further our understanding of how to design the interfaces and systems that can effectively replace travel to face-to-face gatherings with lower-impact online communication. Global communication scholars could help to illuminate the path to sustainable development; journalism studies could guide more responsible reporting on the environment; public relations might identify the hallmarks of successful environmental campaigns; and political communication might inform us about how these issues fare in public discourse and public opinion for good or ill. Intercultural, interpersonal, and organizational scholars can help identify the dynamics of our environmental attitudes and behaviors. Philosophy of communication awaits the field's first significant environmental thinkers.
Task force recommendations
In the area of operations, the task force noted that ICA's greatest environmental impacts come from travel and lodging associated with the association's annual conference, yet the conference is also the main means by which ICA pursues its mission and one of the most important reasons why members join the association. The task force recognized the many steps ICA has already taken to incorporate environmental criteria into its purchasing and conference site selection policies. Further recommendations included educating members about the environmental and professional benefits of increasing online interaction, providing more opportunities for online scholarly and professional exchange throughout the year, and consulting members regularly on how ICA can meet their needs as it reduces its environmental footprint.
This will need to be a gradual shift. The task force commended ICA staff for creating the virtual conference that allowed members to participate in the 2010 annual meeting from afar and is advising staff on how to expand these efforts.
In regard to service and outreach, the task force concluded that ICA can serve as a key source of information about environmental communication, a professional network, and a voice for needed changes in institutional and public policy. ICA's Environmental Communication interest group can especially help communication scholars use their expertise to improve the environmental performance of the media industries, their own universities, and other organizations. For example, ICA can help educate members how to review and improve their home institutions' sustainability policies, help train members to engage in public discourse on these issues, commission white papers on how the media industries can improve their environmental performance, and support members to engage in joint research and consulting projects on sustainability.
The new Environmental Communication interest group is also the best vehicle for advancing the task force's recommendations in the areas of scholarship and education. ICA can support members to integrate sustainability issues into their teaching and promote research in this area by building the infrastructure necessary for environmental communication to achieve the kind of success seen in areas of the field such as health communication. It can integrate sustainability as a theme in future pre-conferences, conferences, journal issues, and white papers, as well as creating awards for scholarship in this area. ICA can also link with other scholarly organizations in environmental communication to increase research, education, funding, and publication opportunities.
ICA members who are interested in helping to build this important area of the field are encouraged to join the new Environmental Communication Interest Group and to share their thoughts on greening ICA's operations with Richard Doherty (rdoherty@illinois.edu) and Chad Raphael (craphael@scu.edu).