Chair: Samantha Senda-Cook This panel offers a variety of theoretical perspectives, along with specific illustrations and examples, that extend the conversation about the ability and power of more-than-human communication to change the world as inhabited by all life forms.

Chair: Elja Roy This panel continues the mighty lineage of research linking environmental communication with social movement studies. Papers explore a range of cases, from a global Greenpeace International campaign to a national push to raise the minimum wage in the U. S. to more local contexts such as the Ohio River valley, the shale gas and fracking fields of New York state, and the rain forest of Indonesia.

Chair: Phaedra Pezzullo How are environmental issues covered by news media outlets based in Pakistan? Nigeria and other countries in Africa? Vietnam? And what does that coverage reveal about both media institutions and cultural values in these locales? About broader concepts and theories pertaining to mediated environmental communication? This panel explores these and other questions.

Chair: Andrea Martinez Gonzalez How are environmental issues covered by news media outlets in the Global North--the U. K., Spain, the U. S., the Netherlands? And what does that coverage reveal about both media institutions and cultural values in these locales? About broader concepts and theories pertaining to mediated environmental communication? Much like the earlier panel on Friday, this session explores these and other questions.

The medical community has undertaken various activities central to the questions and contexts of the Conference on Communication and Environment’s praxis-orientation, yet such work has been largely absent from environmental communication scholarship. This practitioner roundtable discussion engages the health-environment nexus by compiling different narrative experiences of medical professionals, who will discuss their environmental and climate action work in pedagogical, community, and organizational contexts. Practicing physicians will each briefly offer their experiences with curricular practices, community issues, patient interactions, and/or environment-health organizational initiatives, followed by a facilitated Q&A session. In sharing the many voices of the panel with the lived experiences, scholarship, and insights of COCE participants, the primary aim of the panel is to initiate narrational zones of contact. Medical professionals, working at the intersection of technical knowledge and embodied experiences of bodies in pain, can function as nodal points for responding to environment-health issues and, as such, have much to offer the field of environmental communication, rhetorics of toxins, and praxis-oriented work. Further, an audience of communication scholars and practitioners can offer back to medical professionals engaged in this work. In particular, beyond deficit models of public interactions, communication scholarship can offer the medical field a richer understanding of communicative action.

This roundtable discussion will explore intersections of communication, economic growth and climate change. There are few stories as vitally important and rarely told as the stories, such as economic degrowth, that offer alternatives to the endless growth economy. Instead, we have been, in the words of Naomi Klein, in This Changes Everything, “feeding the god of economic growth (via the alter of hyper-consumption) in every country in the world.” And it is this hyper-consumption that fuels the rapidly changing climate. Consumerism is one of the defining features of our current landscape, displacing other narratives, values, worldviews and ways of being. Because consumerism is so prevalent, it is often construed as “what people want,” beyond reproach. Mass media is funded by advertising, with which editorial content must align and promote, most evident in new trends such as “sponsored editorial content” (Hardy, 2021). Such brand-controlled storytelling blurs what few lines are left between commercial interests and communicative “content.” The roundtable discussion will start with four Pecha Kucha presentations (20 slides x 20 seconds per slide) that will offer four very different reflections on communication, economic growth and climate change. Upon completion of the four Pecha Kuchas, all in attendance will be invited to discuss the issues raised.

Chair: Steve Depoe Indigenous ways of life and attendant value systems have long been in conflict with Western and capitalist logics of property ownership, resource extraction, and political domination. Panelists explore dimensions of this conflict in sites ranging from burial mounds in Illinois to spaces of ongoing economic activity in the Wabanaki lands in Maine and in Nigeria.