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.     

From Narrative of Promise to Rhetoric of Sustainability: A Genealogy of Oil Sands

Since its conception, “oil sands” has been the name of a pro-development narrative seeking to convince skeptics that bitumen saturating the sandstone of Alberta’s Athabasca region ought to be extracted and chemically altered into Synthetic Crude Oil (SCO). Over the decades, the nature of skepticism has changed, and thus oil sands (along with its meanings and claims) has been continually reproduced so as to placate new criticisms. This paper offers a discursive genealogy of the oil sands narrative, demonstrating how it has been transformed from what was throughout the twentieth century a materially situated “narrative of promise” aiming to prove that SCO production was physically possible and that it could be commercially profitable, into what by 2015 was at its core a largely reactive “rhetoric of sustainability” aiming to convince a new class of critics that, contrary to their claims, SCO was in fact being produced in an environmentally responsible manner.     

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.     

Food for Thought: Audience Engagement with Sustainability Messages in Branded Content

Branded platforms are a growing “gray-zone” of marketing and media messages, in which corporations and news journalists partner to create content that supports strategic corporate goals while aligning with a publication’s scope of editorial coverage. As corporations are key influencers of and contributors to environmental communication, this trend has the potential to change environmental dialogue. In this article, we closely examine messages about food and sustainability, created in partnership by Chipotle Mexican Grill and the Huffington Post news site. We illustrate how use of a branded platform expanded the scope of environmental topics, issues, and frames that Chipotle addresses, how frames identified here connect to frames in coverage of science-related issues, as identified by other scholars, and discuss how branded platforms allow corporations to draw attention to polarizing environmental issues while protecting stakeholder relationships and brand reputation.     

Rearticulating Nuclear Power: Energy Activism and Contested Common Sense

This essay utilizes the perspective of articulation theory to examine how environmental advocates, public interest organizations, and citizen-consumers have challenged the nuclear industry's expansion efforts, linking strategies at local and global levels. The industry has articulated a material and discursive formation including reactor construction projects, financial and political arrangements, and an overarching narrative of nuclear necessity and inevitability. Opponents have responded by linking organizations, individuals, histories, geographies, and expertise, re-articulating the place of nuclear power in the field of energy choices. This essay examines those opposing articulations in the context of efforts to construct new nuclear power plants in the southeastern USA. There, opponents have challenged state-level regulatory approval of a corporate merger that would facilitate new nuclear construction and financing arrangements that would shift economic risks from the corporation to consumers. These local engagements have broader consequences: in challenging one corporation's nuclear ambitions, opponents also challenge the global industry narrative of nuclear necessity and inevitability.     

“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.     

It's Not Easy Being Green … Or Is It? A Content Analysis of Environmental Claims in Magazine Advertisements from the United States and United Kingdom

As corporations seek to appeal to environmentally conscious stakeholders, advertisements containing environmental claims have become increasingly prominent. A corporation's desire for an enhanced corporate reputation, combined with lenient environmental advertising regulation, has created the perfect environment for corporations to use—and misuse—environmental claims, resulting in “greenwashing.” Defined as the act of disseminating disinformation to consumers regarding the environmental practices of a company or the environmental benefits of a product or service, greenwashing occurs around the world. This study is a cross-national content analysis of 247 print ads from 84 issues of mainstream magazines from the United States and United Kingdom. Three-fourths (75%) of the ads analyzed contained one or more aspects of greenwashing. Firms advertising in US magazines were significantly more likely to employ misleading/deceptive environmental claims than UK firms and magazines. These findings suggest that without increased environmental advertisement regulation, greenwashing will persist as a disingenuous means for corporate reputation enhancement.     

Ecolinguistics,GIS, and Corpus Linguistics for the Analysis of the Rosemont Copper Mine Debate

This article details an integration of geographical information system (GIS) and corpus linguistics (CL) techniques for an ecolinguistic analysis of a contentious, environmental debate in Arizona, USA. The application of GIS and CL procedures enabled the mapping of place name mentions present within two interest group corpora as well as the mapping of particular meanings and representations of specific places prominent in the debate, that is, maps representing both places and the discursive representations of those places were produced. The corpus-aided analysis and the GIS visualizations exhibit how different interest groups refer to and represent geographical places within their texts and how these references to and representations of places index ideological positions towards the mine and the environment. This integrated CL–GIS approach to the study of environmental discourse provides insights into the discursive representation of place and the importance that references to places serve within environmental discourse. The article briefly discusses the ecolinguistics framework underpinning the work, explains the GIS–CL approach, displays and interprets corpus findings and GIS visualizations, and details implications for additional GIS–CL research for environmental discourse.     

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.     

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.     

Sustainable Everyday Life and Celebrity Environmental Advocacy in Hugh’s War on Waste

ABSTRACT

This study employs Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s television program, Hugh’s War on Waste, to explore representations of sustainable everyday life and the functions of celebrity environmental advocacy. The analysis is located within broader understandings of the discursive and contested nature of sustainability and the representative functions of environmental celebrities who act as figures of both distinction and equivalence. It discusses Fearnley-Whittingstall within the context of the stable of celebrity chefs, and it demonstrates how Hugh’s War on Waste is an example of the burgeoning televisual genre based on forms of campaigning about food issues. The analysis specifically explores how Hugh’s War on Waste is informed by: narratives of self-transformation where individuals are marshaled into appropriate practices of waste management and sustainability, presentations of the pleasures associated with such practices, and revelations of the networks of food production, distribution and consumption across the contexts of domestic everyday life, farms, supermarkets, and other corporations.     

Eliding Extraction,Embracing Novelty: The Spatio-Temporal Configuration of Natural History

Natural history museums present fertile ground for considering material configurations of “nature” and “history.” This essay analyzes the Natural History Museum of Utah at Rio Tinto Center (NHMU) to explore how spatio-temporal configurations of nature and history may paradoxically elide the deep time of natural history. Primarily considering its naming and its spatial placement rather than the impressive collections it houses, I identify spatio-temporal distortions related to three elements of the NHMU: its naming after a multinational mining company, its architectural attempt to represent iconic landforms, and its imposition on a heretofore-undeveloped parcel of land. Taking these distortions in sum, I argue that the museum, which is meant by its architects to be in harmony with the land, elides rather than harmonizes with the land that produced its collections by replacing ancientness with novelty and by conjoining extraction and education. This elision, performed by a building purported to embody the full depth of time, may flatten the deep time of the geologic past, thereby abetting the concealment of the ever-expanding extraction.     

Audience Response to Values-based Marketplace Advocacy by the Fossil Fuel Industries

A form of issue advocacy, marketplace advocacy campaigns often arise in response to burgeoning societal concerns, especially those faced by energy industries. Although these campaigns may include brief and selective references to corporate activities, most campaigns place a much stronger emphasis on commonly shared societal values. This study examines audience response to values-based environmental marketplace advocacy messages by the fossil fuel industries through a series of focus groups. Four instrumental values were identified in campaign videos (innovation, community, resilience, and patriotism), and the terminal value of pragmatism, especially as it relates to environmental issues, was identified as a result of identification with one or more of the instrumental values. The findings are discussed through the lens of extant research on marketplace advocacy and organizational values as well as Habermas's theory of refuedalization, shedding light on the ways corporations appeal to commonly held societal values in an effort to generate support for a given industry.     

The Circulation of Climate Change Denial Online: Rhetorical and Networking Strategies on Facebook

This study uses a topical, rhetorical approach to analyze how climate change denial circulates online through the 25 most popular posts on the Watts Up With That and the Global Warming Policy Forum Facebook pages. These groups adopt the appearance of credibility through reposting and hyperlinking, thus establishing a supportive, networked space among other skeptical sites, while distancing readers from original sources of scientific information. Visitors use a variety of rhetorical strategies to echo posts’ main themes and to discredit alternative viewpoints. Differences between the topoi and rhetorical strategies of WUWT and the GWPF show that the climate change denial community is multifaceted and makes use of social media affordances to craft the appearance of legitimacy. This project contributes to our knowledge of how scientific information is co-opted, manipulated, and circulated in online spaces and how online features shape environmental discourse practices.     

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.     

Politics of Edibility: Reconceptualizing Ecological Relationality

Taking the Infinity Burial Project (IBP) as its inspiration, this essay theorizes a politics of edibility by way of decomposing the discursive boundaries erected between human bodies and environments. In particular, this essay reads the IBP as a deconstruction of another dualism—eater/eaten—that permeates and informs cultural practices from birth to burial. Mobilizing a rhetoric of carnality, the IBP decomposes the human body's relation to its environments, merging its statuses as eater and eaten. At the same time, this rhetoric of carnality also emphasizes the irreducibly productive nature of consumption as an articulatory practice in its own right. As this essay argues, a politics of edibility not only recognizes the superficiality of the body/environment and eater/eaten dichotomies but it also respects the relations generated in the wake of their deconstruction.     

“Organic is More of an American Term … We Are Traditional Farmers”: Discourses of Place-based Organic Farming,Community, Heritage,and Sustainability

The following study looks at how traditional, organic, cooperative farmers starting a new farming cooperative in the US Southwest communicate about their farming as a set of (sustainable) cultural practices. The study draws on environmental communication theory, the theory of the coordinated management of meaning, and Vandana Shiva’s three-tiered economic model to construct a communication-based framework through which to view farmers’ stories about sustainability. This framework is productive, showing how some Nuevo Mexicano farmers (and others) orient toward farming, sustenance, and human-nature relationships through community, family, heritage, and education. Moreover, in addition to a conceptualization of sustainability as specific practices for nurturing and enduring in environments, communities, and organizations/institutions, sustainability can be understood as embedded ecocultural and historical experience with cross-cultural parallels in land-based communities. This study advances the ethical duty of environmental communication to better understand the ways in which environmental discourse and ecocultural and material realities are imbricated, as well as the call for such discursive study to be grounded in phenomenological experience of the natural world.     

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.     

What Is the Environment Doing in My Report? Analyzing the Environment-as-Stakeholder Thesis through Corpus Linguistics

This paper seeks to explore whether business organizations' claims to regard the natural environment as a stakeholder are consistent with the way in which the environment is represented in their corporate social responsibility reporting. It applies corpus linguistic methods to analyze statistical regularities and differences in the discursive construction of core stakeholders, such as customers and employees, and that of the natural environment. Results show that the representation of the environment is not characterized by the agency and capacity for engagement that characterizes other stakeholders. While organizations overtly acknowledge a duty toward the environment, the dominant lexical and grammatical patterns in which it is represented tend to obscure the organization's responsibilities and emphasize its mitigating actions instead. Although the argument for regarding the environment as a stakeholder is based on the fact that it places objective and compelling demands on our actions, we look in vain for recognition of such demands in organizational reporting.     

Phony Facts and Eco-media: Fake Nature and the Call for Widespread Media Literacy

ABSTRACT

Mermaids: The Body Found privileges mythologized creatures in a fictional narrative disguised as a documentary film in order to blur the boundaries between fact and fiction. This franchise’s decisions to value factors of entertainment over educational material are not uncommon in our consumer-driven society, but the film's engagement with fake fact media potentially repositions how audiences think about important conservation issues by overshadowing critical oceanic environmental topics with fake facts. Although today’s viewers are adept in interpreting media, the mermaid franchise’s use of screen genres, corporate websites, and social media saturates viewers with fake facts making it difficult to delineate between authentic science and fictional narrative. Not a quantitative reception study of audiences, this critical analysis of multiple genres of eco-media examines the difference between fake nature documentary and other types of animal programming and mockumentaries emphasizing that the issue is not strictly a question of entertainment factors or even of the subversion of fact and fiction, alone, but that the real issue lies in the franchise’s willingness to participate in an ever-growing media moment in which programming based on fake and alternative facts has the potential to impact how the public thinks about key issues in politics and science.