Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere

Robert Cox is Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His principal research areas are environmental and climate change communication and strategic studies of social movements. A internationally-recognized leading scholar who helped found the field of environmental communication, Cox is coeditor of The Routledge Handbook of Environment and Communication (2015; second edition forthcoming), editor of the four-volume reference series Environmental Communication (Sage, 2016), and the author of numerous studies of environmental and climate change campaigns. He has served three times (1994-1996; 2000-2001; 2007-2008) as president of the Sierra Club, the largest grassroots U.S. environmental organization, and was also on the board of directors for Earth Echo International, whose mission is “to empower youth to take action that restores and protects our water planet.” Cox also continues to advise environmental groups on their communication programs. He regularly participates in environmental and climate change initiatives and has campaigned with former vice president Al Gore, singer Melissa Etheridge, and other public figures. He also enjoys hiking and trekking in the Himalayas, Europe, and the southern Appalachian Mountains in the United States.

Phaedra C. Pezzullo is Associate Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, and a dual citizen with the US and Italia. Her interdisciplinary background informs her research on environmental justice, climate justice, just transition, public advocacy, and tourist studies. Her book, Toxic Tourism (University of Alabama Press, 2007), won four awards, including the Jane Jacobs Urban Communication Book Award and the National Communication Association’s Environmental Communication Division Book Award. Among other publications, she coedited Green Communication and China (Michigan State University Press, 2020) and Environmental Justice and Environmentalism (MIT Press, 2007). She was a founding editor of the journal Environmental Communication and serves on its editorial board. She has volunteered on the Sierra Club’s national Environmental Justice Committee and Affinity Group Working Group, consulted with cities and counties on a just transition, and was a delegate at COP21 in Paris. Pezzullo is a founding co-director of the Center for Creative Climate Communication and Behavior Change (C3BC) on her campus. She also enjoys outdoor recreation and cooking a plant-based diet.