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.