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Children, Nature, and the ‘Unliveable’ Future

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Environmental Communication for Children

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Abstract

This chapter provides context for the analyses in this book by investigating the relationship between ‘children’ and ‘nature’. It is essential that we consider how this relationship has been culturally perceived, negotiated, and constructed because an investigation of cultural conceptions of childhood and the child/nature relationship helps us better understand how young audiences are addressed, constructed, and positioned by environmental texts. This chapter also proposes that the child/nature connection has become written into the stories we tell about our present-time planetary crisis. Noting that little scholarly attention has yet been paid to children’s media or to mediatised depictions of childhood in the context of environmental communication, the chapter paves the way for an investigation of the production of children’s environmental media and the construction of children as ‘green’ audiences.

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  1. Deakin University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Erin Hawley

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Hawley, E. (2022). Children, Nature, and the ‘Unliveable’ Future. In: Environmental Communication for Children. Palgrave Studies in Media and Environmental Communication. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04691-9_1

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