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.     

Bridging the legitimacy gap—translating theory into practical signposts for legitimate flood risk governance

Legitimacy is widely regarded as a founding principle of ‘good’ and effective governance, yet despite intense academic debate and policy discourse, the concept remains conceptually confusing and poorly articulated in practice. To bridge this gap, this research performed an interpretive thematic analysis of academic scholarship across public administration, public policy, law, political science, and geography. Four core themes were identified in relation to representative deliberation, procedural and distributive equity and justice, and socio-political acceptability, with numerous sub-themes therein. In an attempt to clarify conceptual confusion, this paper grounds these theoretical debates in the context of flood risk governance where numerous legitimacy dilemmas exist. A number of questions are presented as conceptual ‘signposts’ to encourage reflexive governance in the future. Thus, more broadly, we assert the importance of bringing legitimacy to the forefront of contemporary flood risk governance discourse and practice, moving beyond the realm of academic reflection.

     

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.     

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.     

Scapegoat Ecology: Blame,Exoneration, and an Emergent Genre in Environmentalist Discourse

This essay identifies and examines scapegoat ecology, an emergent genre in online environmental discourse. In scapegoat ecology, a public of environmentally minded individuals focuses attention and vitriol on a single person for being particularly harmful to the environment. This essay argues that such discourse deflects attention from more complex and systemic environmental factors and implicitly exonerates the broader community, assuring it of its own environmental commitments while excusing it from further ecological action. The essay describes the form and appeal of scapegoat ecology, then provides a series of illustrative case examples before highlighting the implications of such discourse for both environmental communication and broader social/political conversations.     

Visualizing Agrarian Myth and Place-Based Resistance in South Central Los Angeles

The Garden, a drama documentary, visualizes a cultural trend toward the resistive re-articulation of mythic assumptions about the morality of farming within a nation of predominantly urban citizens. The tale unfolds as the virtuous main character (the South Central Farmers) struggles against villains threatening the mythology of agrarianism. By invoking the myth of a new agrarianism, the film is able to expose the ethnic, raced, classed, and gendered basis of land-use rhetoric, and how it perpetuates unequal access to dominant myths as empowerment resources.     

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.     

Translocal anti-fracking activism: an exploration of network structure and tie content

ABSTRACT

In order to develop conceptual models that reflect the realities of networked communicative processes scholars must examine both the underlying network structure and the content of these ties. Using mixed methods, I apply a relational perspective to the role of digital technologies in transnational organizing, using activism against high-volume hydraulic fracturing as a case study. In-depth interviews are combined with social network analysis of hyper-linkages between organizations supporting a day of action calling for a ban on fracking, Global Frackdown. Analysis shows that activism against unconventional fossil fuels brings together very localized concerns about environmental risks associated with extractive industries with more abstract global concerns. I apply the concept of translocal to examine environmental organizations and movements. This conceptual shift focuses on the brokerage role of global-minded local groups in mediating global issues back to the hyper-local scale. While international NGOs play a coordinating role, local groups with a global worldview can connect transnational movements to the hyper-local scale by networking with groups that are too small to appear in a transnational network.     

Salvaging Wilderness from the Tomb of History: A Response to The National Parks: America's Best Idea

In the age of industrialism, wilderness is the counterbalance to human excesses and the inspiration for environmental activists. Today, wilderness is even more important and contested as people face multiple environmental crises on a planet with an exploding human population and voracious consumer appetite. Too often obscured by the technosphere that engulfs us, wilderness awaits its ecoteur filmmakers to give it greater presence on the public screens of the technoscape. After The National Parks: America's Best Idea, wilderness still waits. By treating wilderness as an historical relic and vacation spot, the film saps it of its vital relevance and political power. Audiences must understand the foundational role of wilderness in their lives, instead of being pacified with an history drained of color that disconnects them from wilderness. As people wonder if there is a future for industrial civilization, wilderness provides the last best hope for rethinking our place on earth.     

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.     

Teaching Amid Despair: Global Warming and Israeli Wars on Lebanon

Editor's Note: For the past two years, Rania Masri has been an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Science and a researcher at the Institute of the Environment at the University of Balamand in Lebanon. Prior to that, she was the Director for the Southern Peace Research and Education Center at the Institute for Southern Studies in North Carolina. As a human rights advocate and environmental scientist, she has served as the coordinator of the Iraq Action Coalition (1995–2005), an elected national board member of Peace Action (1997–2005), an elected member of the United for Peace and Justice steering committee (2003–2005), and a state board member of the American Civil Liberties Union (2002–2004). Her research and activism has centered on US domestic and foreign policy on issues ranging from environmental justice and civil rights to anti-war (Iraq) and anti-occupation (Palestine). She has been a regular contributor to a wide range of print, radio, and television media, including Alternative Radio, “Democracy Now!,” International Socialist Review, and Znet.     

Reframing Ecotage as Ecoterrorism: News and the Discourse of Fear

This study examines how certain Western institutional discourses reproduce particular human relationships with nature. The analysis focuses upon the institutional setting of the zoo, examining long-standing multi-voiced debates about zoos and exploring the contemporary zoo's conservation discourses and cultural, lexical, and spatial elements of gaze and power. The author contextualizes zoo discourses within Western ideological environmental dialectics, including those of Mastery–Harmony, Othering–Connection, and Exploitation–Idealism. The author relates these discussions to her empirical observations of how certain discursive themes are reproduced and complicated within a leading American zoo. In the tradition of critical research that advocates for social change, the essay concludes with analysis-driven discussion about possibilities for zoos to transform their core configurations to more progressively work as agents for systemic cultural and environmental change.     

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.     

Shifting Baselines: Conveying Climate Change in Popular Music

Popular music is a generation-specific zeitgeist, while music affords otherwise unobtainable engagement with environmental themes. Despite being the most widespread form of music there is a paucity of scholarship on climate change vis-à-vis popular music. In turn, this article explores how popular music may provide a soundtrack that narrates the rapidity of contemporary biophysical change. Approaches of conveying versus communicating climate change in music are considered across a spectrum of musical forms, from contemporary and historical popular music to contemporary classical music and sound art. The article applies the framework of shifting baselines to music engaged with environmental change in order to formulate a closer relationship between objective and quantitative intergenerational biophysical change and subjective and qualitative socio-cultural change. To cease losing track of such inexorable degradation, the article speculates on future musical forms that may obviate such intergenerational myopia by conveying and/or communicating the unprecedented rapidity of biophysical change.     

Anthropomorphic Anthropocentrism and the Rhetoric of Blackfish

The documentary film Blackfish has made a splash at the box office, impacting millions of viewers and prompting calls to legislatively prohibit orcas from being held in captive environments. This essay analyzes Blackfish in terms of its anthropomorphic communication techniques that attribute human qualities to orcas. We introduce the term “anthropomorphic anthropocentrism” to argue that the anthropomorphic construction of orcas in Blackfish may well be a story that is more about what it means to be human than a story about what it means to be orca. Furthermore, we explain the importance of anthropomorphic anthropocentrism as an analytical tool that navigates environmental and ecological frameworks. We conclude that anthropomorphic anthropocentrism’s analysis of anthropomorphic rhetoric and the human epistemological assumptions it reflects, when taken together, offer significant insights into the ways environmental communication creates and/or disrupts human–nature relationships.     

The Nature of Time: How the Covers of the World's Most Widely Read Weekly News Magazine Visualize Environmental Affairs

Scholars of environmental communication acknowledge the importance of visual representations in shaping perceptions and actions in relation to environmental affairs. Unlike with other media, including newspapers, television and film, research on the visualization of nature and environmental issues in magazines is rare. This study focuses on the covers of Time magazine, one of the world's most influential news weeklies. A dataset that includes all relevant covers from 1923 to 2011 is examined using a combination of quantitative and qualitative content analysis to analyze the visual representation of nature and environmental issues. The results show that the presence of environmental issues and nature on the covers has increased over the decades. Furthermore, Time takes an advocacy position on some environmental issues, but it is a shallow one that is weakly argued through less-than-engaging imagery and fails to offer much in the way of solutions or agency to the reader.     

Framing the flood: a media analysis of themes of resilience in the 2011 Brisbane flood

In the wake of the flood that affected Brisbane, Australia, in January 2011, public attention turned to the causes of the event and lessons for minimizing the impacts of future floods. The news media was an important vehicle for understanding and internalizing the 2011 Brisbane flood. Examining how the flood was framed in the media is, therefore, useful to understand broad public perception of floods. We undertook a systematic newspaper analysis during a one-year period to explore media framings of the flood, focused on learning as an aspect of resilience in relation to two themes: (1) perceived links between the flood and climate change and (2) perceived roles of government in managing the flood. We show that media coverage of the flood reinforces aspects of resilience by acknowledging community spirit, self-reliance and the importance of sharing experiences for learning; articulating the risk of extreme events in a changing climate; and highlighting regional management trade-offs. Much of the discourse is likely to inhibit resilience, however, by casting the flood in terms of blame and political opportunity and paying inadequate attention to longer-term aspects of regional resilience. The limited learning observed to date may highlight a need for other mechanisms and actors to lead learning processes. As policy related to the 2011 Brisbane flood, and extreme events more generally, is influenced by the public discourse, it is important to understand the nuances of communication around these events and the media’s role in reinforcing or changing perceptions.     

The Impact of “No Impact Man”: Alternative Hedonism as Environmental Appeal

As “No Impact Man,” writer Colin Beavan conducted a one-year experiment to determine whether he and his family could reduce their environmental impact to zero while living and working in Manhattan. This article examines the No Impact Man (NIM) experiment both as “alternative hedonism,” a reconceptualization of the “good life” that avoids unduly damaging the natural world, and also as a kind of “eco-stunt,” an attempt to garner significant media coverage about positive environmental behaviors. We use DeLuca's theorization of the “image event” to analyze the No Impact Man franchise—blog, book, and documentary film—though we modify that theory in order to explore how No Impact Man functions as multi-media and new-media spectacle. In particular, we explore the risky double-bind Beavan finds himself in when, through his choice to publicize the NIM eco-stunt, he is critiqued for opportunism, foolishness, and insincerity. We suggest that efforts to publicize eco-stunts, however well conceived, invariably invite backlash. As a result, we find that alternative hedonism theory and practice open a space of invitation to environmentally beneficial behaviors and attitudes that could have potential with some audiences, but their mass appeal is compromised by the limitations of the stunts that publicize them.     

Belligerent broadcasting,male anti-authoritarianism and anti-environmentalism: the case of Top Gear (BBC, 2002–2015)

ABSTRACT

This article considers the format and cultural politics of the hugely successful UK television program Top Gear (BBC 2002–2015). It analyzes how—through its presenting team—it constructed an informal address predicated around anti-authoritarian or contrarian banter and protest masculinity. Regular targets for Top Gear presenter’s protest—curtailed by broadcast guidelines in terms of gender and ethnicity—are deflected onto the “soft” targets of government legislation on environmental issues or various forms of regulation “red tape. Repeated references to speed cameras, central London congestion charges and “excessive” signage are all anti-authoritarian, libertarian discourses delivered through a comedic form of performance address. Thus, the BBC’s primary response to complaints made about this program was to defend the program’s political views as being part of the humor. The article draws on critical discourse analysis and conversation analysis to consider how the program licensed a particular form of engagement that helped it to deflect criticisms, and considers the limits to such discursive positioning. We conclude by examining the controversies that finally led, in 2015, to the removal of the main presenter, Jeremy Clarkson, and the ending of this version of the program through the departure of the team to an on-demand online television service.