Impetus, Mission, and Future of the Environmental Communication Commission/Division: Are We Still on Track? Were We Ever?

Abstract

Robert Cox's essay “Nature's ‘Crisis Disciplines’: Does Environmental Communication Have an Ethical Duty?” invites and challenges the environmental communication community to reflect on the mission of the field of environmental communication (EC) and urges an assessment of past, present, and future assumptions and duties. In response to this, and in the interest of provoking more deliberation on the future of EC, this essay recounts the momentum and some of the benchmarks that led to the 1996 establishment of the Environmental Communication Commission/Division, generally considered the flagship of the environmental communication community, within the Speech Communication Association (now the National Communication Association). It challenges Cox's depiction of EC as a crisis discipline, and his assertion that ECers commit to an ethical duty to speak publicly when our scholarship points to distortions, inaccuracies and communication process dysfunctions, what he calls “danger.” The essay ends with a challenge to the EC community to inventory its strengths and reach outward to other disciplines and organizations.