User:Sofiajulbe/final article

These are my recommendations for revising the article: Environmental communication,


 * I added three citations in the section "Symbolic action".
 * I added a new citation that will easily define how environmental communication serves as a pragmatic and constitutive function.
 * I added two transition words in the first paragraph to make it sound more fluent and less cluttered. Additionally, I erased a couple words in the bolded sentence in the first paragraph.
 * In the second paragraph I provided a link to the environmental philosopher, Shane Ralston's book, Pragmatic Environmentalism: Towards a Rhetoric of Eco-Justice; I also added two commas.
 * For the last paragraph I provided a more recent link that defines "Systems Theory" and simply reworded the first sentence. Admittedly, I added a short sentence following the citation where it explains how social theory is connected within every human.

Copied content from: Environmental communication; see that page's history for attribution.

Symbolic action

Environmental communication is also a type of symbolic action that serves two functions: pragmatic and constitutive. Environmental human communication is pragmatic because it helps individuals and organizations to accomplish goals and do things through communication; for example, educating, alerting, persuading, and collaborating. Admittedly, environmental communication is constitutive because it helps shape human understanding of environmental issues. Examples include values, attitudes, and ideologies regarding nature and environmental issues.

In the book Pragmatic Environmentalism: Towards a Rhetoric of Eco-Justice, environmental philosopher, Shane Ralston, criticizes Cox's pragmatic function of environmental communication for being too shallow and instrumental, recommending instead a deeper account borrowed from Pragmatism: "[A]n even better way to move beyond a conception of pragmatic rhetoric as shallow instrumentalism and deepen the meaning of pragmatic[...] is to look instead to philosophical pragmatism’s other rich resources, for instance, to its fallibilism, experimentalism, and meliorism."

Environmental nature communication occurs when plants actually communicate within ecosystems : "A plant injured on one leaf by a nibbling insect can alert its other leaves to begin anticipatory defense responses." Furthermore, "plant biologists have discovered that when a leaf gets eaten, it warns other leaves by using some of the same signals as animals". The biologists are "starting to unravel a long-standing mystery about how different parts of a plant communicate with one another."

All beings are connected by the systems theory which submits being the exchange of materials and the exchange of energy. Every individual is connected through nature so it is crucial to have environmental sustainability where is it possible to have positive developments.