Race,Coloniality, and Geo-Body Politics: The Garden as Latin@ Vernacular Discourse

This essay focuses critical attention on one way that The Garden (2008) functions as a Latin@ vernacular discourse that serves to articulate the South Central Farmers to a decolonial politics operating through a kind of “border thinking.” Delinking themselves from the modern-colonial imaginary, I argue, the South Central Farmers enact a geo-body politics of knowledge that is consistently subverted, even by supporters, vis-à-vis modern-colonial rationality. Despite their apparent instrumental failure, the South Central Farmers succeeded in enacting a decolonial challenge, which compels us as scholars to rethink our approach to the Farmers’ specific activism and Latin@ vernacular discourse generally.     

The Flood Myth in the Age of Global Climate Change

When released, The Day After Tomorrow was widely described by critics and the movie's creators as a pro-environmentalist film. This essay argues that The Day After Tomorrow articulates a variation of apocalyptic discourse identified as a flood myth. The authors conclude that this version of the flood myth largely undermines contemporary environmental discourse that attempts to generate public activism in addressing ecological problems, by replacing an emphasis on human efficacy with symbolic vindication and exchanging collective effort for individual survivalism. The film thus serves as a cautionary tale about the potential consequences of contemporary mythic discourse presented as supporting environmental activism.     

Renewable energy in Australia: a wider policy discourse

ABSTRACT

This paper assesses the evolution of generation technology-mix in Australia, with specific emphasis on understanding how such evolution has been shaped by wider political and socio-economic influences. This assessment is predicated on the argument that the contemporary, quintessentially techno-economic, policy discourse on renewable energy is deficient, as it ignores climacteric political and socio-economic influences on generation technology-mix. The methodological framework employed in this paper is informed by the core tenets of technological change theory. The assessment suggests that generation technology-mix in Australia has historically been overwhelmingly influenced by the underlying technological paradigm of the electricity industry; and that this technological paradigm essentially draws its imprimatur from the wider political and socio-economic contexts. By implication, it suggests that a rapid uptake of renewables will have widespread ramifications, extending into political, socio-economic and cultural realms of a society. Clearly, existing policy discourse – that tends to focus on technical potentials, cost competitiveness, externalities and risks of various renewable technologies – is deficient. A much broader discourse is needed. This paper also made an attempt to develop a basis for such a discourse by reviewing broader aspects of the Australian society that would be affected by a rapid uptake of renewables.     

Economics-Oriented Discourse Strategies in Environmental Advocacy

Scholars and practitioners are engaging in a fierce debate over the implications of using market-based discourse in communicating environmental problems and solutions. However, there has been less attention to exactly who is using such economic discourse and how it is combined with other discourses. Prior researchers have proposed tripartite frameworks for categorizing discursive strategies around pro-economic, anti-economic, and non-economic metaphors, which are here applied to eight U.S. environmental advocacy organizations’ press releases. An original text-analytic dictionary of pro-economic, anti-economic, and non-economic discourse is used to distinguish between the proposed discourse strategies. This analysis indicates that economics-oriented discourse strategies are more complex and varied than previously suggested. A more nuanced framework is proposed.     

Overcoming Environmental Challenges by Antagonizing Environmental Protesters: The Turkish Government Discourse against Anti-hydroelectric Power Plants Movements

Due to the growing public importance of environmental concerns in the contemporary world, governments that prioritize economic interests over environmental concerns may try to counter environmental challenges not by openly declaring that they do not want to consider environmental demands, but by attempting to antagonize the protesters who voice such demands. This essay explores such a governmental response by analyzing the discourse articulated by the Turkish Government against movements that oppose the construction of hydroelectric power plants (HEPPs) on environmental grounds. In particular, the analysis focuses on how HEPPs, environmental claims and demands of movements, and environmental protesters are represented within the pro-HEPP discourse, and in what ways these representations appeal to popular perceptions. It is demonstrated that the discourse of the government attempts to counter the challenges of protesters by establishing an antagonist relation between the protesters and society by representing HEPPs as crucial for the economic development and, therefore, as compatible with the interests of society as a whole. Moreover, it also attempts to achieve this through portraying the protesters as criminals and terrorists who block the economic development of the country and pose significant threats to the commonwealth, not for legitimate environmental concerns but for some dubious motives and incentives. It is concluded that, with this approach, the government has managed to gain popular consent not only for the construction of HEPPs, but also for the repression of such movements.     

Baudrillard and Our Destiny with the Natural World: Fatal Strategies for Environmental Communication

Drawing on the writings of Jean Baudrillard, the purpose of this essay is to suggest a set of communication practices that promote a different way of thinking about the earth–human relationship. Baudrillard's “fatal strategies” are developed into concepts of intersubjectivity, seduction, and sorcery, which when used in conjunction with more traditional, logical rhetorical appeals, can produce powerful appeals for environmental change. To illustrate, we explore how these strategies are used in two exemplars of environmental discourse: Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and Al Gore's documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.     

The Country,the City,and the Corporation: Rio Tinto Kennecott and the Materiality of Corporate Rhetoric

Contributing to extant discourses about corporate environmental advocacy, this paper argues that corporations can embed discursive rhetorical strategies in material places and spaces. This argument contributes to environmental communication by bridging divisions between discursive and materialist approaches to corporate rhetoric. Corporate materiality is realized in the study of Rio Tinto Kennecott (RTK) at places of corporate community where RTK enunciates a dominant environmental discourse about the necessity of the Bingham Canyon Mine through strategies such as the technological shell game, the hypocrite's trap, and corporate heterotopia, which are made manifest materially alongside cultural values such as epistemic trust, technological progress, community, and home. Using participatory critical rhetoric as a methodology, I analyse RTK's material rhetoric at the Natural History Museum of Utah, the Rio Tinto Soccer Stadium, and the Daybreak suburban community. This case study reveals that corporations are assemblages that assert many different, and sometimes competing, arguments that can deflect environmental criticism, materially.     

Culture,Progress and the Media: The Shad as Synecdoche in Environmental News Coverage

This essay examined the use of synecdoche in newspaper coverage of a dispute over water rights between the Mattaponi Indians and the city of Newport News, Virginia. The Mattaponi used the shad as a rhetorical trope to explain the tribe's relationship to the river and their fears about the reservoir's impact. The reservoir proponents, however, treated the shad as a representation of the conflict surrounding the reservoir, and this construction was reflected in articles that appeared in The Daily Press, a local daily newspaper. This essay argued that, ultimately, the treatment of a single species as a synecdoche in environmental disputes undermined the Mattaponi's position. The media which are instrumental in defining environmental issues for the public, misinterpreted a rhetorical trope that was proffered as a representation for a complex set of values and instead focused attention on the species itself rather than the values that it represented.     

From Frames to Resonance Machines: The Neuropolitics of Environmental Communication

George Lakoff 's work in cognitive linguistics has prompted a surge in social scientists’ interest in the cognitive and neuropsychological dimensions of political discourse. Bringing cognitive neuroscience into the study of social movements and of environmental communication, however, is not as straightforward as Lakoff 's followers suggest. Examining and comparing Lakoff's “neuropolitics” with those of political theorist William E. Connolly, this article argues that Connolly's writings on evangelical-capitalist and eco-egalitarian “resonance machines” provide a broader model for thinking about the relations between body, brain, and culture. Environmentalists, it concludes, should pluralize their “frames” and pay greater attention to the micropolitical and affective effects of their language and practices on the communities within which they act, communicate, and dwell.     

The Many Modalities of Social Networking: The Role of Twitter in Greens Politics

The popular microblogging service, Twitter, contains a variety of potential orientations—interpersonal, broadcast, news, advertising, public service, political, and so on—in its operation and applications. As an evolving social media platform, specificity and context are essential in understanding its significance and use-value. This paper investigates the multiple modalities of Twitter in the context of formal politics and, in particular, the Greens party in Australia. Presenting original evidence drawn from the Greens Members of Parliament and their advisers, it is shown how Twitter is mobilized in response to particular news agendas and stories, unfolding political events and processes, and an ongoing need for the Greens to speak simultaneously to committed environmentalists and the broader electorate. These uses reveal that Twitter is an important addition to the “media ecology mix” in the conduct of environmental politics, playing a direct role in political communication, strategies, and actions.     

The Structuration of Public Participation: Organizing Environmental Control

A growing body of participation literature muses over why current mechanisms of public participation persist when they so often fail; calls for expanding the conceptual boundaries of participation beyond institutional mechanisms, and highlights the role communication, and allied concepts such as discourse and rhetoric, play in participatory processes. Given these diverse calls, environmental public participation can benefit from building a mid-level theoretical terrain. In this essay, I draw upon the sociological tradition of Anthony Giddens’ structuration theory and parallel systems thinking which foreground a structure-action mode of analysis. Through this lens I articulate the basic premises of a structuration model for environmental public participation, pointing especially to issues of agency, which involves ontological security and ontological competence, social systems, and various elements within duality of structure, with an eye toward communication-centered research. This theoretical space further indicates the possibilities of connecting the material realm of action/practice with the symbolic domain of environmental self.     

Reform,Justice, and Sovereignty: A Food Systems Agenda for Environmental Communication

Food ecologies and economies are vital to the survival of communities, non-human species, and our planet. While environmental communication scholars have legitimated food as a topic of inquiry, the entangled ecological, cultural, economic, racial, colonial, and alimentary relations that sustain food systems demand greater attention. In this essay, we review literature within and beyond environmental communication, charting the landscape of critical food work in our field. We then illustrate how environmental justice commitments can invigorate interdisciplinary food systems-focused communication scholarship articulating issues of, and critical responses to, injustice and inequity across the food chain. We stake an agenda for food systems communication by mapping three orientations—food system reform, justice, and sovereignty—that can assist in our critical engagements with and interventions into the food system. Ultimately, we entreat environmental communication scholars to attend to the bends, textures, and confluences of these orientations so that we may deepen our future food-related inquiries.     

Toxic Sublime: Imaging Contaminated Landscapes

This essay attempts to address the lack of critical analyses of images of toxins by examining the photography of landscape artists whose goal is to create a presence for contaminated sites. Imaging toxicity is no simple task as many pollutants are invisible and sites of contamination are concealed, especially for those of privilege. Contemporary artists who attempt this challenge are often criticized that the beauty of their images obfuscates the health and environmental risk of the polluted sites they photograph. In response, this essay introduces the concept of the toxic sublime as a means of analyzing the tensions arising from visual representations of environmental contamination: beauty and ugliness, magnitude and insignificance, the known and the unknown, inhabitation and desolation, security and risk. The essay charts the evolution of the sublime in the US, describing how it has evolved from sites of nature to sites of technology to human damaged landscapes, some of which produce a toxic sublime. Through a close examination of Manufactured Landscapes, a twenty-five year retrospective of the images of noted environmental photographer Edward Burtynsky, this essay extends our understanding of the invention of the sublime in images, reconceptualizes the sublime response to contaminated places, as well as adding to our knowledge of how visual texts function to encourage contemplation of the viewers’ position within a polluted world.     

Crisis,Coherence, and the Promise of Critical Rhetoric

This essay responds to the keynote address by Cox by discussing the ways in which critical rhetoric is implicated in environmental communication (EC) as a crisis discipline, as well as the ways in which EC, so positioned, is implicated within a broader coherentist epistemology. Issues of exigency, representation, and sustainability are considered, along with an examination of the concepts of nominalism and doxa as they relate to the enterprise of EC research. The critical cultural politics embedded in much EC scholarship are also addressed in terms of their intersections with the increasingly unscrupulous abuse of language within antienvironmental administrative rhetorics.     

Revisiting the “Ozone Hole” Metaphor: From Observational Window to Global Environmental Threat

In 1985, just over 30 years ago, the “ozone hole” made its appearance in the press as a truly global environmental threat. As one of the most important environmental issues of the twentieth century, the “ozone hole” is also a remarkable metaphorical, visual, and imaginary construction. This essay examines the historical trajectory of the famous “ozone hole” from its birth within the astronomical community at the beginning of the twentieth century to its contemporary framing as a global environmental threat. The article provides evidence why metaphors constitute a valuable object of historically informed studies of scientific practice, and shows in particular how metaphorical landscapes shift over time, mapping at the same time larger social and political developments. The essay ends by showing how scientific images and metaphorical framings interact and how they shape scientific and popular discourse on nature, as well as our understanding of the global environment.     

Correlates of women’s environmental behaviors: a study in Pawe Woreda,Northwest Ethiopia

Available cross-country, macro-level evidence regarding gender differences in environmental behaviors shows women are more environmentally concerned and responsive than men. However, while such macro-level evidence helps understand patterns of women’s environmental behaviors at a much broader level, it does not allow deeper insights into particular patterns at a single location or in much smaller areas. Tailor-made interventions needed to address livelihood and environmental strategies of poor rural women become meaningful if studies aim at revealing context specific, local variations in women’s environmental behaviors. In this context, there is only little research for Ethiopia regarding what influences women’s response to environmental problems. The objective of this research was to describe women’s response to environmental problems in Pawe Woreda and examine the demographic, socioeconomic, and institutional correlates of this response, with particular emphasis to forest resources. Data were primarily obtained from a sample of 363 households in a multi-stage sample survey and were analyzed mainly using a multivariate logistic regression model. We found that all except one of the demographic and socioeconomic variables included in the model were found to be statistically significant correlates of woman’s environmental response, but the institutional variable was not significantly associated with a woman’s environmental response. However, the qualitative result for additional institutional issues revealed the importance of land tenure. Many of the results are in line with the existing literature.     

The Ecological Jeremiad,the American Myth,and the Vivid Force of Color in Dr. Seuss's The Lorax

This essay explores Dr. Seuss's The Lorax through a combination of contextual, visual and narrative-based criticism. Specifically, rhetorical forms of the jeremiad and myth are examined as adaptations to the medium of children's literature. In addition, the force of illustrated images is discussed, including the rhetorical force of color. The essay begins with a discussion of both Dr. Seuss and The Lorax within the contexts of the early environmental movement's rhetoric of alarm and political activism. It then outlines Seuss's attempt at “propaganda with a plot” arguing that a collision of the American myth and ecological jeremiad parallel and divert from the environmentalist norm. A detailed analysis of illustrated imagery and the function of color demonstrate the rhetorical force toward narration and ideology possible in the visual form.     

FORUM Communicative Action in Response to a Nuclear Crisis: Representations of Fukushima across Communication Contexts

The 2011 disaster at Japan's Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant poses important questions for environmental communication scholarship and practice. This forum examines questions that were emerging one month into the Fukushima crisis, when a panel examined its implications as part of North Carolina State University's second annual research symposium on Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media (details available at http://crdm.chass.ncsu.edu/symposium2011/). Expanding those initial analyses, we identify implications across the contexts of environmental communication, expert-public engagement, public discourses of nuclear energy, uses of new media, risk and crisis communication, and organizational and institutional communication. The first essay (Kinsella) addresses some implications of Fukushima from the perspectives of constitutive communication theory, risk analysis, and risk communication. The second essay (Ionescu) examines an effort to foster dialog between technical experts and a concerned public audience, made by a nuclear energy institute in Germany. The third essay (Binder) explores uses of Twitter by people in the USA as a tool for following the rapidly evolving events at Fukushima. The final essay (Kittle Autry and Kelly) analyzes public discourse surrounding a proposed merger of two US energy companies with substantial nuclear operations, before and after the onset of the Fukushima disaster.     

From Environmental Campaigns to Advancing the Public Dialog: Environmental Communication for Civic Engagement

This essay examines the claims of environmental identity campaigns regarding the issue of climate change. Identity campaigns are based on the idea that more effective environmental messages developed through the application of cognitive science by professional communications experts can favorably influence public opinion, and thus support legislative action to remedy this issue. Based on a review of the sociological and psychological literature regarding social change and mobilization, I argue that while this approach may offer short term advantages, it is most likely incapable of developing the large scale mobilization necessary to enact the massive social and economic changes necessary to address global warming. Specifically, theoretical and empirical research on the role of the public sphere, civil society and social movements shows that democratic civic engagement is core to successful social change efforts. However, identity campaigns focus on a communications process that centers on elite led one way communications, which falls to allow for any form of civic engagement and public dialogue. This undermines the creation of a democratic process of change and reinforces the professionalization of political discourse, leading to a weakening of the mobilization capacity over this issue of global warming. The essay concludes with the outlines of an environmental communication process that aims at enhancing civic engagement and democratic decision making.