Narratives,Rhetorical Genres,and Environmental Conflict: Responses to Schwarze's “Environmental Melodrama”

The appearance of Steven Schwarze's essay, “Environmental Melodrama” (Schwarze, 2006) as the lead article in a recent issue of The Quarterly Journal of Speech marks an important moment of recognition for environmental communication scholarship. Schwarze's essay demonstrates how studies of environmental rhetoric can contribute to rhetorical theory more generally, while addressing practical questions regarding the rhetorical aspects of environmental conflict. The contributors to this forum respond to Schwarze's arguments, drawing in part upon their own case studies of rhetorical action and narrative in environmental conflict.     

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.     

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.     

“A Short Burst of Inconsequential Information:” Networked Rhetorics,Avian Consciousness,and Bioegalitarianism

This essay uses the concept of “avian consciousness” to reconsider assumptions about human communication and theorize networked rhetorics. By adopting an ornithomorphic frame, I critically read Don DeLillo's The Body Artist as an exploration of overlaps between human and avian consciousness. I then argue that avian consciousness provides a richer metaphor for understanding networked rhetorics than autistic consciousness, which is an increasingly dominant trope for explaining interaction with digitally networked media. I explore how Twitter, explicitly modeled on avian communication, can be understood as circulating information in ways analogous to the contact and assembly calls of birds. The essay concludes by noting that seeing avian features in human communication diminishes the perceived gap between human and nonhuman animal, holding out hope for a more bioegalitarian relationship between species.     

The Ecology of Empire: Wal-Mart's Rhetoric of Environmental Stewardship and the Constitutive Power of the Multitude

This essay provides a critical account of Wal-Mart's rhetoric of environmental stewardship. By situating this discourse within a new political economy of production and governance that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have termed empire, I argue that environmental communication scholars should limit the rush to deploy ideological criticism when explaining the corporation's rhetorical motives. Instead, I advocate reading Wal-Mart's rhetoric as a problem of historical conjunctures, a critical move that seeks to highlight, not only the structural interests of capital, but also the centrality of social antagonism. In the case of Wal-Mart, this means accounting for the increased significance of demand to economic production, changes in the composition of sovereignty, and the transgressive function of environmentalism at the beginning of the twenty-first century.     

Rhetorical Landscapes as Epistemic: Revisiting Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac

This essay examines the rhetorical impetus toward environmental human agency in Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac (SCA). In identifying a foundation for this agency, Leopold relies on the epistemological function of rhetoric in an effort to bring to light the epistemic potential in reading the landscape. In this fashion, Leopold offers a way of knowing the environment through natural observations. The author identifies the unfolding epistemological revelations found in the three primary sections of SCA. Leopold describes these epistemological revelations gleaned from reading the landscape as “shifts.” The first shift, in Part I of SCA, offers the audience lessons through Leopold's own example in reading the text of the landscape. The second shift, described in Part II, describes his epistemological revelations acquired through his reading of the landscape. The final section of the book situates these epistemological revelations in one of the most influential concepts found in environmental ethics, the land ethic. Through these three iterations, Leopold not only instructs his readers in the rhetorical possibilities found in reading landscapes but also offers scholars of environmental rhetoric a unique understanding of analyzing landscapes as epistemological rhetoric.     

Capitalistic Agency: The Rhetoric of BP's Helios Power Campaign

In this essay, we use rhetorical analysis to examine how British Petroleum's (BP) Helios Power media campaign both encourages and embodies capitalistic agency as the means to enact pro-environmental behavior. This form of agency limits the scope of environmentalism. Capitalistic agency can be conceptualized as the capacity to enact, or the process of enacting, capitalistic ends as well as the inherent constraining of agency that is not oriented toward the production of capital. Helios Power, launched in 2007, is BP's most recent American television, radio, internet advertising, and branding campaign. We examine the campaign website which heavily incorporates green marketing, including background images of wind turbines, environmental buzzwords throughout the text, green color schemes, and a section dedicated to conservation advocacy. By rhetorically aligning BP with environmentalism, providing customers a means of participation with environmentalism, and constraining profit-hindering conservation behaviors, Helios Power provides a vivid illustration for understanding the impact of capitalistic agency on society's perception of and progress toward environmental sustainability.     

Places and People: Rhetorical Constructions of “Community” in a Canadian Environmental Risk Assessment

This paper addresses the issue of public engagement in environmental risk contexts through a rhetorical analysis of the key term “community” in a risk assessment of mining-caused soil contamination. Drawing on Burke's concept of terministic screens and method of cluster criticism, the analysis shows the divergent constitutions of “community” in the Sudbury Soils Study's official discourse and the citizen-activist rhetoric of the Community Committee on the Sudbury Soils Study. Tracing the verbal and visual clusters within each organization's articulation of “community” as place and people reveals how the official Study's technical-regulatory ideology of environmental risk and citizen participation is countered by the Community Committee's contestatory environmental justice ideology. These competing views of “community” are mutually constitutive in that the official Study's mainstream risk discourse establishes the terms for the Community Committee's reactive counter-discourse, thus limiting citizen participation mainly to questions of “downstream” impacts. Our rhetorical analysis of “community” suggests a generative method for understanding the complex power relations animating specific risk communication contexts as well as for potentially reinventing “community” in terms more conducive to meaningful citizen engagement.     

Personae and Natural Capitalism: Negotiating Politics and Constituencies in a Rhetoric of Sustainability

This essay critiques natural capitalism, a concept developed as a strategic response to the antagonism of capitalist production and the ideology of sustainability. I trace and critique the second and third personae of the book Natural Capitalism. The second persona of natural capitalism constitutes already dominant capitalists and technocrats as the constituency best prepared to meet the exigencies of sustainability. Simultaneously, civil society and non-propertied classes constitute a marginalized third persona whose interests can be satisfied only if aligned with those of the second persona. This precarious arrangement is possible due to the non-ideological representation of natural capitalism. I argue that such a representation is misleading. Criticism of the tensions between natural capitalism's personae suggests radical potential for environmental rhetoric.     

Neoliberal Style,the American Re-Generation,and Ecological Jeremiad in Thomas Friedman's “Code Green”

Emerging popular literature trumpeting the prospects for Manifest Destiny through a greener capitalism illustrates the re-emergence of American myth to explain chaotic times and uphold America's exceptional character. Today, this character is dominated ideologically by the rhetorical repertoire of neoliberal economics. In this essay, the author dissects neoliberal rhetorical style as articulated through national myth and ecological jeremiad in bestselling author Thomas Friedman's (2008) “Code Green” thesis. In Code Green, an American strategy for confronting the convergence of global warming, new economic competition abroad, and population growth, the author traces a mythic “evolution” in ecological jeremiad toward a sustainable free market frontier. Crafting a muscular yet ostensibly non-political rhetoric of individualist sacrifice and reward, Friedman refigures the dark side of Western-led globalization's past.     

Ecological Rhetoric through Vicarious Narrative: The Enduring Significance of Garrett Hardin's The Tragedy of the Commons

“The Tragedy of the Commons,” a 1968 article on overpopulation by Garrett Hardin, achieved rapid and widespread popularity, and still remains influential. Hardin uses an extended hypothetical example that functions as a vicarious narrative to postulate a syllogistic proof he then applies enthymematically and by analogy to social and environmental issues. Although Hardin's inconsistent application of his analogy reveals that adopting his rhetorical strategy in environmental communication necessitates acceptance of neither Hardin's overpopulation thesis nor his political and social views, his article remains a landmark in environmental as well as ecological rhetoric.     

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.     

A Complicated Reef: The Relationship Between a Representation and the Represented Phenomenon

In this study, I describe the relationship between the Florida Aquarium's representation of a coral reef and the live reef that served as the model for the representation. I specifically illustrate how naming practices complicate the aquarium's stated purpose of environmental education. I conclude by suggesting ways the aquarium and other pro-environmental facilities can better manage environmental representation.     

Mounting Tensions: Materializing Strategies and Tactics on National Park “Social Trails”

This essay builds from Samantha Senda-Cook's 2013 article, “Materializing Tensions,” to explore the material rhetorics of the so-called “social trails” of the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore. These improvised, foot-worn pathways, diverging from and running alongside official Park Service trails, materialize a tension between what Michel de Certeau termed “strategies” and “tactics,” revealing how both are always at play in park and preserve trailspace and how the movements of the individual trail walker actualize and perpetuate a common concept of place. The study demonstrates and advocates close rhetorical attention to material aspects of the biophysical environment and the way that physical traces of many individuals over time can influence the subsequent actions and interpretations of others. The final discussion argues that as further tensions in trailspace rhetorics are identified rhetorical analysis must not fail to account for them.     

“You Can't Run Your SUV on Cute. Let's Go!”: Internet Memes as Delegitimizing Discourse

In an effort to explore the role of new media technologies in environmental protest rhetoric, this paper examines Greenpeace's Let's Go! Arctic campaign, which opposed Shell's Arctic oil-drilling plans. The campaign produced a body of Internet memes designed to look like Shell's own corporate advertising. Moreover, the viral campaign used various rhetorical techniques that challenged Shell's goals and identity. Greenpeace-generated and user-generated memes cleverly use irony, corporate voice and humor to delegitimize Shell's Arctic efforts. The memes offered messages that mocked corporate practices and corporate messaging while also providing direct protest messages and accessible humor that invited identification against Shell. Thus, the memes collectively encouraged identification with Greenpeace's antidrilling, pro-environment discourse.     

Environmental Communication: Why This Crisis Discipline Should Facilitate Environmental Democracy

The authors concur with Cox's claim that environmental communication (EC), like conservation biology, is a crisis discipline. Cox's proposed tenets for EC challenge the scientific norm of objectivity that has guided science for centuries, suggesting that today's environmental crisis requires us to travel a different path. The authors take Cox's essay as provocation to radically challenge magical notions of scientific objectivity. They briefly review Platonic contributions to the myth of scientific objectivity and then advocate a nondualistic perspective toward the relationship between humans and nature. They then suggest how this perspective both expands upon and diverges from Cox's vision of political and ethical engagement among EC scholars.     

Prolepsis and the Environmental Rhetoric of Congressional Politics: Defeating the Climate Stewardship Act of 2003

As a device of argumentative anticipation, prolepsis use generally is considered a positive rhetorical strategy. Turning to the Climate Stewardship Act (CSA) of 2003, this article contributes to our understanding of environmental communication, political argumentation, and rhetorical theory by examining how proleptic miscalculation can actually produce devastating consequences against one's cause when used as a source of invention. Proponents of the CSA relied on creating proleptic arguments grounded in a scientific understanding of climate change to such an extent that they mistakenly downplayed the economic arguments against the Act. This orchestrated miscalculation was encouraged and strengthened by key US senators. This article concludes by discussing contributions to scholarly understanding of prolepsis use in public policymaking and offers practical suggestions for improving communication in future considerations of environmental legislation.     

Land Community Participation: A New “Public” Participation Model

This essay presents a new “public” participation model that responds to contemporary participation problems. The author extends criticism of a false nature/culture dualism and responds to calls for pragmatic ways to expand participation to an expressive land community. The essay draws on existing scholarship that treats a range of direct to indirect forms of participation in environmental decision-making to argue for and explicate the land community participation model (LCP). The model features participation, power, and chronemics along three distinct and intersecting continua that bind and constitute participatory communication in environmental decision-making. Combining professional field experiences with rhetorical criticism, the author pilots the LCP model in a wilderness dispute resolution case study and suggests additional ways for using LCP as an interpretive guide and design tool in pursuit of environmental democracy.     

Heidegger and Being at the Hanford Reservation: Standing Reserve,Enframing, and Environmental Communication Theory

This essay examines the potential of Heidegger's phenomenology as a foundation for environmental communication theory, emphasizing his critiques of modern science, technology, humanism, and metaphysics. A phenomenological approach to environmental communication provides resources for recognizing metaphysical assumptions that endanger both humans and nature. The Hanford nuclear reservation serves as an illustrative text, exemplifying Heidegger's reading of nuclear energy as a culmination of both Western metaphysics and the instrumental stance that he calls “enframing.” In Heidegger's view, the ordering and control accomplished through enframing obscures the mutually constitutive relationship between humans and nature, and in doing so, diminishes the possibilities for authentic human existence. The chapter examines how both representational and constitutive models of communication contribute to those conditions, and adopts a set of concepts from Heidegger's phenomenology as a foundation for an alternative, “bounded constitutive” model.     

Environmental Comedy: No Impact Man and the Performance of Green Identity

“No Impact Man” (NIM) Colin Beavan attracted international media attention and a good deal of criticism for his year-long experiment attempting to live making zero net impact on the environment. Whereas Beavan's critics dismissed the project as a mere publicity stunt, this essay reads the NIM blog, book, and documentary film as a compelling performance of green identity in the comic frame. This performance—which links private consumption to ecology and community, and emphasizes flaws, foibles, humor and humility—offers an appealing invitation to engage in both individual and collective action. I argue that comedy is a useful rhetorical tool for addressing global warming, as it enables us to see ourselves not as helpless victims in a tragic doomsday scenario, but as imperfect actors who are both guilty contributors to the problem and agents responsible for its amelioration.