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Abstract
Environmental communication scholarship is critical to the success of sustainability science. This essay outlines three pressing areas of intersection between the two fields. First, environmental communication scholarship on public participation processes is essential for sustainability science's efforts to link knowledge with action. Second, sustainability science requires collaborations across diverse institutional and disciplinary boundaries. Environmental communication can play a vital role in reorganizing the production and application of disciplinary knowledge. Third, science communication bridges environmental communication and sustainability science and can move communication processes away from one-way transmission models toward engaged approaches. The essay draws on Maine's Sustainability Solutions Initiative to illustrate key outcomes of a large project that has integrated environmental communication into sustainability science.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers for insightful comments and feedback on previous versions of this article. This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation award EPS-0904155 to Maine EPSCoR at the University of Maine.
Notes
1. We use the term K ↔ A with some reservations. We believe that knowledge is only part of what motivates action. Colleagues in the field of social psychology remind us that we should focus on linking changes in behavior with action rather than concentrating on knowledge. We use the concept of K ↔ A in this essay because it is the concept that circulates in sustainability science, but it is important to create a more refined understanding of how action transpires.