Wild Ones #9: 'Green corporate image repair'
A weekly digest of ideas, news, and research in environmental communication
Photo credit: U.S. Coast Guard
Before I share some environmental communication ideas with you, a couple of quick updates:
For the next few months, I’ve decided to focus on a single, weekly digest of environmental communication news, research, and updates (every Thursday!) instead of the usual bi-weekly digest.
This is because I’m excited to say. I’m currently developing a free mini-course in environmental communication that I’m hoping to share with you in the coming weeks. As always, thanks for following, and stay tuned!
A few ideas, research, and tools for communicating environmental issues that struck a chord with me this week:
Concept: ‘Green corporate image repair’
“One form of corporate communication that is pivotal to a company’s success in difficult times is the repair or recovery of its credibility. This practice of image repair (also called crisis management) is the use of PR to restore a company’s credibility after an environmental harm or accident…Image repair is vital to a company’s continued operations, but the practice can be controversial, especially when a corporation’s communication is viewed as insincere.” – Phaedra Pezzullo and Robert Cox
Case in point: BP Oil Spill
Research article: The Nature of Time: How the Covers of the World's Most Widely Read Weekly News Magazine Visualize Environmental Affairs, in the journal of Environmental Communication). Here’s a summary of what the authors found:
“…Unlike with other media, including newspapers, television and film, research on the visualization of nature and environmental issues in magazines is rare. This study focuses on the covers of Time magazine, one of the world's most influential news weeklies. A dataset that includes all relevant covers from 1923 to 2011 is examined using a combination of quantitative and qualitative content analysis to analyze the visual representation of nature and environmental issues. The results show that the presence of environmental issues and nature on the covers has increased over the decades. Furthermore, Time takes an advocacy position on some environmental issues, but it is a shallow one that is weakly argued through less-than-engaging imagery and fails to offer much in the way of solutions or agency to the reader.”
Tool: Indigenous land acknowledgment toolkit. In his new book, The Power of Ritual, Harvard Divinity Scholar Casper ter Kuile recommends a wonderful toolkit for opening events with Indigenous land acknowledgments, “a common practice, even policy in countries such as New Zealand, Australia, Canada and among tribal nations in the U.S. to open events and gatherings by acknowledging the traditional Indigenous inhabitants of that land.” The toolkit is created by the grassroots action network, the US Department of Arts and Culture. As Casper says in his book, “Taking a moment to witness the place and the people who have lived in [the landscape you inhabit] infuses an event with deeper significance and a larger context.”
From my Desk
What is ‘Sustainable’ Development?: Growth Versus Environment on a Finite Planet: A quick guide to the history of a malleable concept, and what it can teach us about creating a sustainable future.
See you next Thursday!