Journalism and Environmental Futures

Power, emotion, authority, credibility, ownership, publics, conflict, geographical scale and historical resonances are only some of the elements that demand analytical attention. This chapter considers the relationship between journalism and environmental futures, asking about the role journalism plays and might play in shaping decisions that are made – individually or collectively – to protect landscapes, species or ways of life embedded within local environments, to adjust and manage human behaviours to minimise impact, or to take courses of action that privilege other outcomes over environmental ones. Environmental journalism as a category of news media is a relatively recent invention, existing for less than six decades. Research into journalism’s relationship to environmental issues emerged in the 1970s and 1980s with ground-breaking studies that helped shape the fields of journalism and communications studies more broadly.