In response to global environmental challenges the environmental movement extensively spreads information on the most urgent environmental issues aiming to change the relationship paradigm between people and nature. With the advent of the Internet a dramatic increase in environmental awareness has been observed throughout the world. Recent years have seen a virtual explosion of people's engagement in Internet communication on environmental issues. The thesis focuses on the study of axiological and communicative-pragmatic potential of modern English environmental Internet discourse in the addresser-addressee communicative interaction model "non-governmental environmental organizations - Internet users." The research provides a classification of environmental Internet discourse genres based on such criteria as communicative function and theme focus. The paper outlines peculiarities of offline environmental discourse genres adaptation to electronic medium and gives an overview of structural features of non-governmental environmental organizations' official websites. Environmental Internet discourse is understood as a totality of written and semi-written texts on environmental issues, linked by hypertext, available via computer or any other multimedia device connected to the Internet. This discourse is pragmatically oriented toward the reflection of human-nature relationship and its consequences to keep the society informed of environmental situation and therefore promoting environmental awareness. Communicative interaction between non-governmental environmental organizations and Internet users is realized through a number of communicative formats, the most important of which is a website. Websites as a hypergenre include such genres as environmental Internet news, blogs on environmental issues, social Internet advertising, a commentary, and a "social network" hypergenre, access to which is provided through hyperlinks. The boundaries between these genres are neither stable nor clear-cut. The genres constantly interact and interpenetrate with each other. Navigation between different genres of the analyzed discourse is sustained through hypertext which serves as an ideological marker that advertises, informs, and directs the user. The paper lends support to the idea that environmental Internet discourse has a specific axiological markedness, which is rendered through verbal and non-verbal means. Verbal evaluative meaning is represented through explicit and implicit evaluation which is verbalized through linguistic means of various language levels. Non-verbal evaluation is communicated through font variation, colour schemes, emoticons, photo illustrations, animation blocks, and by the unconventional use of spelling and punctuation. The author offers the classification of typical communicative strategies and tactics employed by international non-governmental organizations on their official web-sites and in the genres that function within them, aiming at raising the environmental awareness within the society. The main communicative strategies realized within the studied addresser-addressee communicative interaction model are thus the following: self-presentation strategy, manipulative strategy, discredit strategy, strategy of group identification, argumentation strategy, strategy of addresser's behaviour, strategy of convergence, strategy of confrontation, strategy of moral support, strategy of reaction to negative evaluation, strategy of problem intensification, and strategy of problem levelling. The findings of the paper provide ground for further research, particularly given that the study is limited to the analysis of only one type of addresser-addressee communicative interaction model. For further research, it seems reasonable to carry out a comparative analysis of communicative strategies in other types of addresser-addressee communicative interaction models of environmental Internet discourse. Yet another perspective is a more profound study of structural peculiarities of websites that highlight environmental issues and the peculiarities of verbal, visual and audiovisual elements placement within websites as well as their pragmatic potential.
