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.

(2010). Can Documentary Food Films Like Food Inc. Achieve their Promise? Environmental Communication: Vol. 4, Food, Culture and the Environment: Communicating About What We Eat, pp. 378-386.

This essay argues that the film Tortilla Soup constructs a mediated culinary touristic experience for mainstream spectators who are invited to vicariously visit a Mexican American family. Analysis of the film's neocolonialist discourse demonstrates how the commercialization and appropriation of food culture mirror hegemonic tendencies to market and consume ethnicity. Tortilla Soup attempts to deconstruct homogenizing notions of Latinidad. Yet it straddles and ultimately collapses these divergent discourses through its treatment of food, sound, gender, and space. Ultimately, Tortilla Soup reaffirms hegemonic ideologies about Latinos/as that privilege whiteness and contain ethnic “otherness.”

Building successful, enduring research partnerships is essential for improving links between knowledge and action to address sustainability challenges. Communication research can play a critical role in fostering more effective research partnerships, especially those concerned with knowledge co-production processes. This article focuses on community-university research partnerships and factors that influence participation in the co-production process. We identify specific pathways for improving partnership development through a prospective analytical approach that examines community officials’ interest in partnering with university researchers. Using survey responses from a statewide sample of Maine municipal officials, we conduct a statistical analysis of community-university partnership potential to test a conceptual model of partnership interest grounded in natural resource management theory and environmental communication. Our findings both support and advance prior research on collaborations. Results reveal that belief in the helpfulness of the collaborator to solve problems, institutional proximity, familiarity, perceived problem severity and problem type and trust influence interest in developing community-university partnerships. These findings underscore the benefits of proactively assessing partnership potential prior to forming partnerships and the important roles for communication research within sustainability science, especially with regard to strengthening partnership formation and knowledge co-production processes.

Pedagogy informed by environmental communication can enhance collaboration within and outside the classroom. Through our collaborative, sustainability-focused work within the United States and internationally, we identified core capacities that prepare people to work together to form inclusive organizations and identify and respond to pressing socioecological problems. We describe six activities we have used in adult learner classrooms, on interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research teams, and with organizational, governmental, and business partners to improve collaborations for sustainability-related problem solving. We conclude with a reflection on opportunities for situated assessment practices.