Environmental Justice – Last Reading

These last two chapters we read for class were by far my favorite in Environmental Communication because I am interested in environmental justice and the idea of sacrifice zones and because the debate about the role of scientists is a meaningful one today, when it seems half of the scientific reports I read are industry-supported.

Robert Cox defines environmental justice as “calls to recognize and halt the disproportionate burdens imposed on poor and minority communities by environmentally harmful conditions,” “more inclusive opportunities for those who are most affected to be heard in the decisions made by public agencies and the wider environmental movement” and “a vision of environmentally healthy, economically sustainable communities” (290).

This definition is at odds with the historical focus of the environmental movement in the U.S., which has mainly been concerned “with wild places and the natural world” (291).

Environmental Communication’s take on public & media a better read

Chapter 5 of Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere…
Media and Environmental Journalism

In chapter 5, Cox explores many of the same topics that Gregory and Miller do in chapter 5 of their book, however Cox is specifically focused on environmental journalism, whereas Gregory and Miller looked at the broader topic of science communication. It was still interesting to see places where their writing converged, and how they took different approaches to their respective topics.

For his part, Cox begins by distinguishing between mainstream media and alternative media in a way that I found troubling.* He then expresses an idea found in Gregory and Miller’s discussion and something that came up when Andrew Revkin spoke to our class: “Competition for shrinking news space increases pressure on journalists to dramatize issues to ensure that a story gets out” (164).

Science in Public insults media

Chapter 5 and 10 of Science in Public…
Media Issues in the Public Understanding of Science

“The media are an amorphous, interconnected, mutually dependent bunch” (104). Thus begins Jane Gregory and Steve Miller’s exploration of media’s role in public understanding of science in Science in Public.

“Popular Science: Friend or Foe?”

In the third chapter of Science in Public, Jane Gregory and Steve Miller examine different battle zones within the ‘science wars.’

First, there’s the anti-science, as exemplified by the growing ‘alternative science market’ (crystal healing, etc). While I can understand how these pursuits can be irritating and harmful to advancing scientific understanding, the authors seem to verge on the paranoid. I think ‘pseudoscience’ really can be harmless at times, of course depending on the context in which it is consumed, and Richard Dawkins critique of television seems too extreme. I should add here that I am biased and like horror movies, though I don’t think my enjoyment of them takes me back to “‘a dark age of superstition and unreason, a world in which every time you lose your keys you suspect poltergeists, demons or alien abduction,’” as Dawkins feels the X-Files threatens to do  (55).

In five years…

During his presentation to our environmental journalism class, Dot Earth blogger Andrew Revkin posed a question: “What is your vision of how the public will track environmental issues and developments in five years?”

It’s clear how the public won’t track environmental issues, or anything for that matter: traditional print newspapers will have very little place in the equation. Especially given that newspapers are “becoming an endangered species,” as Sen. John Kerry so eloquently put it during a Senate Commerce subcommittee on May 6 that met to discuss a bill that would allow newspapers to operate as nonprofits.

So what tools will the public use to keep up with environmental issues?

Citizen Voices, Public Forums, Collaboration. Cox starts to make sense.

Robert Cox starts off his discussion of public participation with a powerful description of a citizen bringing a crowd to raucous applause after three minutes of “electrifying silence” during a public hearing (83). Public participation, of which Cindy King’s “statement” is an example, has grown over the last 35 years, Cox explains.

Robert Cox, your lists don’t fool me. “Environmental Communication” is hard to read.

Compared to Elise Hancock’s structured how-to, Robert Cox’s book reads like a grab bag. Even though he loves lists, and breaks almost every topic into three subtopics, the subject matter is all over the place, as long as it falls under the umbrella of environmental communication. Perhaps this is just because here is so much to cover, as he even admits in the introduction.

The most resonant line I found in the introduction concerns the meaning of environmental communication, which links strongly to the reason Cox wrote the book. He believes that communication about the environment is important because it affects our choices and interactions with the natural world: “The way we communicate with one another about the environment powerfully affects how we perceive both it and ourselves and, therefore, how we define our relationship with the natural world” (Cox xiv). Perhaps it is also unfair to compare the two books, as Cox is writing for a much more general audience and attempting to cover a much broader topic.

Structuring, ‘Nitty Gritty’-ing, Refining and Getting Unstuck

“Getting Started and the Structure”
In the last four chapters, Hancock emphasizes the writer-reader relationship. She harps upon the importance of keeping a reader in mind, adding that it is best to think of a main reader, and, beyond that, other groups of readers who will encounter the material, all with different knowledge and needs (73).

When writers are attentive to readers’ needs, writers gain reader’s trust (123). For example, including details “not only takes me there but helps me relax as a reader,” Hancock writes, “I feel, Oh, it’s okay. I’m in the hands of someone whose eyes are wide, wide open. I can trust this writer” (79).

She returns to this notion of relaxation on page 120. Competent writers leave nothing unexplained and tie up loose ends within the article.

Science in Public

The first chapter of Jane Gregory and Steve Miller’s Science in Public addresses the recent movement for public understanding of science and the efforts of organizations such as the National Science Foundation, the Committee on Public Understanding of Science (COPUS), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Some of the advocate’s rhetoric is familiar. The John Dewey goal of a “scientific attitude” is an idea I was exposed to as a child, especially when students questioned math teachers on the necessity of their class (3).

Yet some of the obstacles the movement faced/faces are not.