CFP: Environment, Science and Risk Communication

Here is the call for papers for the Environment, Science and Risk Communication Working Group of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) Conference next year. It is quoted here verbatim.

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The Environment, Science and Risk Communication Working Group invites proposals for papers to be presented at the 2010 International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) Conference in Braga, Portugal, July 18-22, 2010.

 

Papers from the full range of environment-science-risk-communication topics and perspectives will be considered, and those relating to the conference theme ‘Communication and Citizenship: Rethinking Crisis and Change’ will be particularly welcome.

Key themes for the Braga sessions of the Working Group will include:

• Communication, environmental justice and human rights
• Media and global environmental change and controversy
• Media and public understanding of science/environment issues
• Science and health-related media panics
• Science/environmental journalism
• Media-communication roles in environmental disasters
• Political uses/constructions of nature
• Media and environmental pressure groups
• New media and activism on science/environment issues

Abstracts of no more than 500 words should be submitted via the conference website at http://www.iamcr2010portugal.com/
by January 31st 2010.

Notification of the results of the abstract selection process will be issued by 15th March 2010.

Full papers are due by 30th April 2010 and should be submitted via the conference website.

Working Group Chair:
Anders Hansen
Department of Media and Communication
University of Leicester
University Road
Leicester LE1 7RH
UK
Email: ash@le.ac.uk

Latin America in the climate negotiations

I’ve been meaning to write about this topic for a while but never had a chance to do it. But since we are only a couple of weeks away from the climate negotiations, I think it becomes even more relevant.  The Knight Science Journalism Tracker posted a story earlier this month about the Barcelona negotiations from a Latin American perspective, and summed it up this way:

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) Latin American journalists at the Climate Change meeting in Barcelona are making one thing clear: “we are already suffering the consequences of the global warming that you – rich countries — have caused. You should mitigate – not us – and also give us quite a lot of money for adaptation”. But as El Comercio (Peru) complains in a fabulously persuasive story, nobody paid attention to L.America in Barcelona. Spanish newspapers say that US is the key player and the country with most cumulative emissions. EU won’t start reducing if US doesn’t have a clear commitment first.

Full story in spanish here

The Way We Walk

While I listened to farmer and writer Joel Salatin talk about food production ethics and conflict at a presentation at Bridgewater College, I couldn’t avoid the echoing of one of his sentences in my head: “’I am just doing my job’ is what keeps people from thinking and doing the right thing,” Salatin said about the bureaucrats who favor destructive, unhealthful food production systems. Salatin said that, instead of actually doing their jobs and analyzing what is best for the population, bureaucrats usually lazily hide behind dubious standards created by the industries that benefit from the standards.

Kids vs. Business as Usual

I have been pretty busy lately, so no time for more in-depth blogging, unfortunately. However, I wanted to share this video, titled “Demonstration,” from the Canadian campaign Moms Against Climate Change. The campaign is a joint venture between Forest Ethics and Environmental Defence.

As a parent of young kids, I find this spot quite moving, even though I don’t much care for the implied doom and gloom.

climate change supermodeling?

Also published at Immanence.

Having just written a piece for Environmental Communication about the promises and pitfalls of cognitive science-based approaches to communicating about issues like climate change, I can’t help commenting on this video and blog post that arrived this morning on my blog reader from identity campaigning, re-posted from Cognitive Policy Works. The piece both captures and fails to capture salient issues in this debate…

International Conference on Communication and Environment

Adnan Hussein left a comment about this, but it certainly deserves a post.

Coming up in December, the School of Communication of the Universiti Sains Malaysia will host the International Conference on Communication and Environment 2009 (ICCE09) in Penang.

The objectives of the conference are:

• To address the relationship between communication theories and practices pertaining to environmental issues.
• To act as a forum to chart future directions for policy, research, advocacy and other forms of collaboration.
• To provide a platform for networking among scholars, media practitioners, environmental and community activists, and other stakeholders.

When Effective Communication is Not Always Enough

This past spring and summer I researched the dismal recycling rate of compact fluorescent lights (CFLs) by Maine households. In Maine, it is illegal to dispose of used CFLs, mercury has been a dominant environmental issue in Maine for the past few decades, and there is a free collection system. According to Efficiency Maine, the agency responsible for subsidizing the sale of CFLs, and offers the free collection system, statewide they collect about 335 per month compared to selling 30,000 to 40,000. So, my research question was simple, why such a low recycling rate? Based on 520 responses to an online survey, only 23.5% households claimed they recycled, given social desirability bias the number is probably too high. And, because of response bias, the reported recycling rate is much lower if it was truly representative of the state. Regardless, 76.8% of the respondents stated that they knew CFLs contained mercury including many of those who disposed of CFLs. Moreover, historically, Maine has one of the most aggressive and comprehensive mercury control programs and has been a pioneer in e-waste recycling, thermostat bounties, mercury button cell bans, and now CFL recycling (Maine is the first state to pass an extended producer responsibility law for household CFLs). What does this all mean? Maine mass media, public officials, and NGOs have been very successful in communicating the environmental dangers of mercury, the state has had broad public support in aggressively limiting environmental mercury, and the public has supported taxpayer spending on mercury control. Yet, in spite of broad public support and knowledge, individuals have acted contrarily by throwing  mercury in the trash. It is especially significant because Maine has the highest incineration rate in the country and mercury’s primary route of concern is via the atmosphere. Is this a free rider problem?  Has communication focused too much on producer responsibility and has been ineffective with individual responsibility? Or, because of the perceived cleanliness and effectiveness of our recycling system, such as the single sort approach, do people mistakenly believe or want to believe that throwing CFLs in the trash is not bad. I do not know what the answers are, and they are, as often is the case, probably multi-factorial. But if anyone has any thoughts, please share. It does, however, suggest that communication must be more than merely educational but targeted toward a specific desirable action, a components of social marketing.

 

Intolerable Consumerism: Images of Death at Midway

I haven’t written about photographer Chris Jordan here yet, but I do talk about him in my Nature and Popular Culture class when we discuss consumption. Well, I mostly just show some of his amazing photographs that document the scale of our impacts on the planet. His “Running the Numbers” series, for example, beautifully and playfully documents the scale and impacts of our consumption, deploying everyday objects in super-sized and super-detailed images.

Along with Edward Burtynksy, Jordan is creating the most compelling photographic work I have seen that illustrates the scale and extent of the harm that the consumer lifestyle does to the planet and to ourselves. I really have no patience anymore for the ecoporn of unrealistically pristine landscapes that so many Nature photographers offer up. Yeah, sometimes we should celebrate those Sierra Club moments, but a steady diet of pretty pictures does not fairly represent what we are doing to the planet and our fellow creatures.

So, what prompted me to write this post were Jordan’s latest photos from a trip he recently made to the Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge. There, he and several other artists explored the islands and documented the epidemic of dead albatross chicks, starved by bellies full of plastic flotsam instead of seafood.

One of Chris Jordan's Pictures of Dead Albatros chicks, killed by a diet of plastic

Call for Participants: Environmental Communication Association Task Force

This is an invitation to interested individuals and organizations to join an ad hoc task force that will develop a proposal to form a new international professional association in Environmental Communication. We are asking for volunteers to serve on this Task Force, with a one-year commitment requested, starting on November 1, 2009.

Global Warming? Yeah, we can get over that!

Is everyone talking about global warming today? OK, no worries. We can change. Let’s just do it. I’m inspired by my favorite campaign ad. What about you?

Why don’t we just leave that issue behind? I’m with Jen, let’s just not talk about the weather and instead get on with what needs to be done. Really! I mean it. It’s not fun anymore.