Enviromental Communication From a Systemic Perspective

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To start the conversation, I would like to propose a perspective on environmental communication that may be a little different from what people see around. I am talking about the systemic view of the environment. In the same way we approach our understanding of the world from specific perspectives (political, economic, social, cultural etc.), we can see them through an inclusive and holistic environmental lens.

Instead of talking about environmental problems as one beat (journalism) or one dimension of an issue, we can also refer to environmental dimensions of different topics we cover as communicators. For example, if research shows that more and more diseases related to toxic exposure are affecting children, what angles can we work in this story? We could follow the obvious health angle and analyze how toxic exposure is damaging children's health. We could follow an economic angle showing that we could save more applying preventive measures than trying to deal with the issue case by case. We could also approach it from a socio-political issue, trying to find out if the exposure is affecting determined children more than others based on political influence or economic affluence. We could even apply a narrow environmental angle, trying to understand the damages to children’s health as a consequence of environmental degradation.

It seems to me that all angles-and you can add a lot more to the list-are useful and sound. However, they are also limited. A systemic environmental approach looks into any given problem from a relational perspective. The objective is to expose the relation between each of those instances to each other. Very rarely-and I would dare to say almost never-an issue is a clear-cut case of one single problem. As communicators, our job is to make sure people get the information they need. For engaged communicators, like journalists-more about engaged communicators will be discussed in my next post-, we also have to make sure the information is relevant, accurate, meaningful and useful. When we choose to approach a story from any given angle, we are also choosing to omit the other possible angles. Consequently, usually due to limited space or time, we follow one lead and go with it.

Nevertheless, when we choose to focus on the relationships that link causes and consequences from different points of view, we are able to provide more information to our audiences in a very efficient way. We can “follow the money,” but what matters is the trail that the money leaves linking different stops in the way.

Next: engaged communication and advocacy; two different animals
Coming soon: B.H. Motta's Environment (www.bhmotta.com). In this website you can find more about me, my work and many different issues related to this blog. Keep your browsers open!