This chapter outlines the evolution, scope and transformative potential of environmental communication, framing it as a praxis-oriented field rooted in crisis response and care-driven action. It traces the emergence of environmental communication from its activist origins in the 1970s to its present interdisciplinary form. The chapter highlights the sociopolitical and cultural dimensions of environmental struggles, particularly in the Global South. It introduces environmental communication as both a ‘crisis discipline’, committed to documenting unsustainable practices, and a ‘care discipline’, fostering relational ethics and biodiversity awareness. The dual functions of environmental messages – pragmatic (informative and persuasive) and constitutive (identity and meaning-shaping) – are explained through examples ranging from mass media portrayals to grassroots interventions. Emphasising intercultural mediation, the chapter advocates for inclusive dialogues that account for power hierarchies, postcolonial legacies and cultural frames. Ultimately, the text proposes environmental communication as a transformative tool for bridging divides and catalysing collective environmental responsibility, with a particular focus on justice, empathy and critical engagement across global contexts.

In a seminal article from the early 1990s, Gamson and Wolfsfeld (1993) characterize the relationship between mass media and social movements as one of "asymmetrical dependency," whereby the former rely on the latter for three purposes: to mobilize their constituencies; to validate their existence as politically important collective actors; and to enlarge the scope of conflict, drawing in third parties. In this chapter, I review scholarly research on the media and the environmental movement over the last half century. As helpful as this has been, it focuses almost entirely on traditional media, ignoring the tumultuous changes that have occurred in political communication associated with the Internet, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram and other new media platforms and technologies. Analysis of several case studies of new media and environmental campaigns suggests that the most effective movement strategy is to embrace a "hybrid media" system which blends older media logics, notably those associated with broadcast television, with new digital media logics.