Foreword

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The Environment in the Age of the Internet is the result of interdisciplinary cooperation involving research from media and communication studies, social sciences, modern history, and folklore studies. Its focus is on different groups’ communicative approaches to ecological issues, with the intent of shedding light on how these groups tell their own stories of ‘the’ environment.

This book is the culmination of our joint research project ‘Communication, and the Social Performance of Environmentalism’, funded between 2010–2012 by the Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies at Södertörn University in Sweden. At the start of the project, we were three humanists who analysed the environmental communication of activists, ‘ordinary’ people, and eco-nationalists. This approach worked towards an understanding of how humans conceptualise and communicate about nature; how they can be motivated, collectively, to act; and what contexts might influence their communication. In this project, we were mostly focused on two culturally related Baltic Sea countries: Sweden and Germany.

However, in this final version of our work, we have gone beyond the Baltic Sea region, broadening the scope of our investigation to include a scholar whose research is on environmental activists in South America. We also include scholars who contribute the perspectives of indigenous people of North America and Northern Europe, further widening our focus to different communication fora and responses to ecological issues.

I would like to thank the Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies (http://ostersjostiftelsen.se/in-english) for the funding that has made the project and this book possible. I would also like to thank Pamela Marston, Madeleine Hurd, and Steen Christensen for copy-editing the text. Last but not least, I wish to express my gratitude to the anonymous referees for their useful comments on the manuscript, and to the publisher, Open Book Publishers, and its Managing Director Dr. Alessandra Tosi, for their invaluable support of our manuscript.

Heike Graf
Stockholm, April 2016