Ecospeak
Rhetoric and Environmental Politics in America
Publication Year: 2012
Published by: Southern Illinois University Press
Cover
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Illustrations
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pp. ix-
Acknowledgments
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pp. xi-xii
The dilemma over the human relation to the natural world potentially involves every field of academie and practical endeavor. In our effort to understand the relationships among language, thought, and action in environmental politics, we have benefited by the published and unpublished writings of many...
Introduction: Rhetoric and the Environmental Dilemma
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pp. 1-21
Since the middle of the last century, human beings have become increasingly aware of the earth's vulnerability. Examining the results of humankind's technological power has opened a new vein of consciousness, the knowledge that large-scale human action may place the further existence of nature...
1. Varieties of Environmentalism: A Genealogy
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pp. 23-48
Kenneth Burke's chief contribution to rhetorical theory was the concept of identification as the means by which a speaker or writer puts forth an image or character-what the ancient rhetoricians called ethos-and invites the audience to participate in a consubstantial relationship with that image. The analytical...
2. The Rhetoric of Scientific Activism
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pp. 51-100
To enhance the attractiveness of the environmentalist ethos and the wilderness ethic, the Sierra Club and other political action groups have always sought to demonstrate a scientific basis for their perspective. Writers in the Sierra Club Bulletin frequently appeal to science. "Management of our land must...
3. Scientific Ecology and the Rhetoric of Distance
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pp. 103-131
It was once common to think of scientific discourse as somehow above rhetoric-the practice of the courtroom, the political arena, the pulpit and revival meeting-or at the very least, different from rhetoric. In recent years, however, the view has emerged that science definitely has a rhetoric but that...
4. Transformations of Scientific Discourse in the News Media
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pp. 133-160
News reporters and the purveyors of mass media have an ostensible commitment to a realist, even a positivist, epistemology. They are supposedly devoted to the facts. In principle, their brand of objectivity resembles that of applied science, a hardheaded insistence on maintaining their own perspective against...
5. The Environmental Impact Statement and the Rhetoric of Democracy
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pp. 163-191
The historian Samuel Hays argues that a division has evolved in American environmental politics between, on the one hand, experts who have institutionalized access to authoritative information and influence, and on the other hand, the general public, whose sources of information and whose power to influence...
6. Rhetoric and Action in Ecotopian Discourse
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pp. 193-236
During the 1970s, it began to be clear that, with the spread of environmental consciousness among the general public-perhaps indeed because of it-reform environmentalist groups like the Sierra Club came to seem less radical than they once had seemed. Part of the rhetorical strategy of James Watt and...
7. Ecological Economics and the Rhetoric of Sustainability
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pp. 239-266
In a recent column in Utne Reader, Walter Truett Anderson writes, "Practically everybody today is some kind of environmentalist. The original movement has diversified into a vast range of organizations, political positions, life-styles, cults, sects, strategies, faiths and fanaticism." Anderson goes on to identify...
Epilogue: The Scientific Activist and the Problem of Openness
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pp. 269-280
May 1990, as part of the twentieth anniversary of Earth Day, we attended a meeting on global warming sponsored by a local environmental action group in Memphis, Tennessee. A panel of three internationally known scientists addressed an audience of over two hundred interested citizens. The information...
Notes
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pp. 283-292
Works Cited
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pp. 293-304
Index
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pp. 305-312
Author Biographies
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pp. 313-
Back Cover
E-ISBN-13: 9780809380978
Print-ISBN-13: 9780809331451
Page Count: 328
Publication Year: 2012
