Books in the Environmental Communication and Nature: Conflict and Ecoculture in the Anthropocene series

How do contemporary critical thinkers find a way to work between the doubt that grounds their thinking and the knowing needed to ground emancipatory political struggles? In this overview of four contemporary thinkers'Timothy Morton, Peter Sloterdijk, Slavoj Zizek, and Bruno Latourapproaches to critique and climate change, communication scholar Murdoch Stephens discusses and analyses the fissures, elisions, and paradoxes that inform critical theory. This book delves into how critical theory offers important insights for those interested in climate change, but also how critical theory faces challenges to its constitution when faced with issues that are both urgent and yet require a scientific rigour that is not the specialty of critique. Written from the perspective of the interdisciplinary field of environmental communication, Critical Environmental Communication: How Does Critique Respond to the Urgency of Climate Change? argues for re-orienting the field towards the tensions and possibilities drawn from these four authors.

This book examines the impending Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake and tsunami from a communications perspective, using similar experiences of natural disaster preparedness and outcomes as case studies. It is an interdisciplinary consideration of how communities communicate and make sense of natural disasters.

This collection applies critical communication methods and perspectives to examine how individuals and communities have responded on a global scale to present day water crises as matters of social justice. Case examples consider oratory, mass demonstration, deliberation, testimony, and other rhetorical appeals.

In Communicating in the Anthropocene: Intimate Relations, the contributors analyze how to live in connection with other beings in the face of crisis and to engage the concept of the Anthropocene from within.

Communicating the Climate Crisis lays out fresh directions and strategies for creating a new story of hope through action-not as isolated and "guilty" consumers, but as social actors who use emotional resilience, climate conversations, justice, and faith to break the current social inertia and create a desired future.

Communities and the Clean Energy Revolution: Public Health, Economics, Design, and Transformation is an engaging and interdisciplinary investigation into clean energy systems such as solar and wind power and the need to transform our energy system. Looking at the intersection of clean energy with community engagement, diversity, and economic development, it is a remarkably accessible account from the front lines of the clean energy revolution. Organized as a series of case studies set in eight locations, the author profiles people leading varied renewable energy projects from using solar to survive hurricanes to passing a Green New Deal bill for America's largest city, the beginnings of the offshore wind industry, modular solar power systems, and changing the culture of an entire utility. Each case study is set into context of broader research, addressing how cities and states meet clean energy goals, howsolar or wind power address blackouts, and how individuals can accelerate clean energy for their home, business, or community. This book goes beyond merely explaining clean energy transition by providing unique insight into the calls for a complete transformation of America's energy system.

Fracking and the Rhetoric of Place investigates the rhetorical strategies of speakers at public hearings on hydraulic fracturing (';fracking') in order to understand how places shape and are shaped by citizens as they engage in their democracy. As an important argumentative resource in environmental controversy, the rhetoric of place helps citizens situate themselves within local contexts and raise their voices in times of social conflict. Justin Mando uses rhetorical analysis, discourse analysis, and corpus analysis to offer scholars of place-based rhetoric and environmental communication a heuristic approach to studying their own sites. This approach reveals that place-based arguments are a ubiquitous rhetorical resource in the dispute over hydraulic fracturing that shapes how the issue is perceived. Pro-frackers and anti-frackers use rhetoric of place in striking ways that reveal their values, motivations, strengths, and weaknesses. Place functions as an interface of potential common ground that connects the local to the global, what is here to what is there. Scholars and students of rhetoric, communication, and environmental studies will find this book particularly interesting.