Communicating the Future

We are facing an unprecedented environmental crisis. How can we communicate and act more effectively to make the political and economic changes required to survive and even thrive within the life-support capacities of our planet?

This is the question at the heart of W. Lance Bennett’s much-anticipated book. Bennett challenges readers to consider how best to approach the environmental crisis by changing how we think about the relationships between environment, economy, and democracy. He introduces a framework that citizens, practitioners, and scholars can use to evaluate common but unproductive communication that blocks thinking about change; develop more effective ways to define and approach problems; and design communication processes to engage diverse publics and organizations in developing understandings, goals, and political strategies. Until advocates develop economic programs with built-in environmental solutions, they will continue to lose policy fights. Putting “intersectional” communication into action requires acknowledging that communication is not only an exchange of messages, but an organizational process.

Communicating the Future is important reading for students and scholars of media and communication, as well as general readers concerned about the environmental crisis.

Review

“Communicating the Future asks big questions and offers big ideas alongside a synthesis of insights from digital media research, political communication, and social movement studies to fight fragmentation in how we respond to and analyze the existential threat posed by the global climate emergency.”Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, University of Oxford“Lance Bennett provides a compelling, provocative vision for constructing a new social reality. This important book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of communication, networks, organization, and social change and provides a thought-provoking, hopeful, and practical guide for creating a more viable future.”Cynthia Stohl, University of California, Santa Barbara"With Communicating the Future: Solutions for Environment, Economy, and Democracy, W. Lance Bennett has written a compact, accessible, and useful book that compliments—in both substance and tone—influential works such as Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything, Bill Mc

Kibbon’s The End of Nature, and Naomi Oreskes’s Merchants of Doubt."The International Journal of Communication"'Communicating the Future' is an original work of simply outstanding scholarship—making it critically important reading for students, scholars, and practitioners of media and communication, as well as political activists and non-specialist readers concerned about dealing with the environmental crisis."Midwest Book Review