Central to the study of communication and cultural studies is the relationship between nature and culture, not as a rigid dichotomy, but as elements that are coconstituted by each other materially and symbolically. With the rise of ecological awareness, the past three decades has fostered an increase in scholarship addressing environmental matters explicitly, as well as professional organizations mobilizing around the ways this perspective has shaped research, teaching, and praxis. Communication scholars from a range of perspectives have contributed to ongoing conversations about “environment” as a keyword, including at least these seven general approaches: (1) environmental personal identity and interpersonal relationships; (2) environmental organizational communication studies; (3) science, technology, and health communication; (4) public participation in environmental decision-making; (5) green applied media and arts; (6) environmental mass media studies; and (7) environmental rhetoric and cultural studies. Given this rich and expanding disciplinary terrain, identifying the heart of this research is a complicated task.

Environmental communication is the study and practice of pragmatic and constitutive modes of expression that define and trouble our ecological relationships within the world. It has been founded as a crisis discipline, one dedicated to addressing some of the greatest challenges of our times and to foregrounding the ethical implications of this orientation. In this article, environmental communication also is characterized fundamentally as a care discipline, one devoted to unearthing human and nonhuman interconnections, interdependence, biodiversity, and system limits. In the United States, environmental discourse has articulated dominant, residual, and emergent attitudes, values, and practices related to—though not limited to—wilderness, preservation, conservation, public health, environmental justice, sustainability, climate science, and resilience. Despite historical reluctance, future possibilities for scholarship on the environment are exigent and expanding, including communication-based research on climate justice, as well as digital environmental communication and archives.