Setting the Stage

Abstract

This chapter sets the stage for the book by tracing media and environmental communication and by proposing a diagram where meanings are created and transmitted, moving through various junctures, over and over, in a recursive flow. The definition of environmental communication by J. Robert Cox, as a “pragmatic and constitutive vehicle for our understanding of the environment,” allows us to think of communication as both functional (pragmatic) as well as meaning-making (constitutive).