Ecospeak: Rhetoric and Environmental Politics in America

Epilogue: The Scientific Activist and the Problem of Openness

Epilogue The Scientific Activist and the Problem of Openness 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 provided was certainly sufficient to arouse the crowd to an awareness of the risks that human technology takes with the earth's atmosphere. We heard that the average overall temperature of our planet has increased by at least one degree Celsius in the last century. This change, we learned, may have come from the normal patterns of climate fluctuation, but there is also the chance that human beings have begun to influence the weather in unprecedented ways; that industrial age technology has overloaded the atmosphere with such a volume of carbon gases that natural processes-the absorption of carbon by the oceans and by green plants-can no longer maintain an efficient state ofequilibrium; that the atmosphere, in reaction, may have already become a greenhouse accepting the heat of the sun without releasing it in proper proportions back into space. The destruction of forests by acid rain and advancing industry may have furthered the imbalance, while yet more heat is admitted because the ozone layer ofthe upper atmosphere has thinned in what is likely a chemical response to yet another industrial product, chloroflourocarbons. Ifglobal warming continues at the current rate, the scientists told us, we could face such disasters as rising seas and desertification ofprime farm land in the first half of the twenty-first century. 269 270 () ECOSPEAK In the estimation of Herman Daly and John Cobb, "wild facts" such as these should have a strong impact on public consciousness even ifthey are not expressed in the "wild rhetoric" that John Maynard Keynes thought was necessary to stimulate interest in scientifically verified risks (Daly and Cobb 1). Indeed, the sudden newsworthiness ofthe greenhouse effect in the hot summer of 1988 seemed to bespeak a general awakening to the wildness of climatological data. Citizens eagerly read reports in newspapers and the weekly press, while the United States Senate entertained predictions from scientists on the reality of global warming. Despite the lift in public interest, however, no global warming policy was created to match the Montreal accord on ozone emissions, which had been formulated by the summer of 1988. The immediate impression ofthe hottest summer on record faded into adjustments of attitude and expanded efforts in community recycling. The response ofthe listeners at the meeting in Memphis reproduced this atmosphere of fading interest. As we glanced around the lecture hall about an hour into the talks, we found that, despite the impressive display of charts and data and the relatively strong warnings about carbon emissions, the eager anticipation of the audience had yielded to widespread yawning and some outright snoozing. Within another half hour, some of the audience-like Whitman, when he heard the learned astonomer-had slipped out to commune with the mystical moist night air. During the question-and-answer session, a local journalist turned unceremoniously to the crowd and announced pointedly that Jonathan Weiner's book The Next One Hundred Years had taught her all she needed to know about global warming in an engaging and readable narrative. Where, then, was the impact of the wild facts? At the time of the meeting, we were completing our research on rhetoric and environmental politics. We should have been able to predict the audience's lagging interest, for what we saw was yet another indication of the gap between science and general human experience. Even though ordinary folks have become a part of what scientists like to call an inadvertent global experiment to determine how much carbon the atmosphere can manage, the nation as a whole lacks enough scientific Epilogue () 271 insight into the early results to do what our scientific mentors seem to be telling us to do-call the whole thing off. As rhetorical analysts, we have considered the forms that such a warning should take in order to move people to action. We can describe the appropriate genres and strategies. Against such a profound inertia in the public, however, we would be wrong to overstate our optimism about the emergence of an environmentalist culture, implying that the step from altered consciousness to corrective action and reformed institutions is anything but...