Ecospeak: Rhetoric and Environmental Politics in America

6. Rhetoric and Action in Ecotopian Discourse

6 Rhetoric and Action in Ecotopian Discourse Extending Environmental Radicalism 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 the Reagan administration in the early 1980s was to divert public sympathy away from the activist groups by cultivating the image of environmentalism as a "protest movement," a "special interest," a radical fringe of American life. As Samuel Hays has shown in his history of environmental politics, however, this rhetoric missed the mark; Reagan and Watt wildly underestimated the American public's growing acceptance ofenvironmentalist values. As the public developed points of identity with activist groups, the groups themselves shifted to the center of the American political spectrum in an effort to form stronger political links and to develop an environmentalist hegemony, the chances for which, to this day, have increased with every new environmental disaster, thus raising the possibility of a culture infused with such environmentalist principles as limited gro\Vth, ecological holism, sustainability in technological planning and practice, stewardship of resources (including materials recyeling and protection of air, soil, and water), biodiversity, and in some form, wilderness protection. NatalI environmentalists, however, were pleascd with the direction the movement had taken. Many thought it had been compromised and rendered ineffectual by having been absorbed into the mainstream 193 194 f) ECOSPEAK of American life. In particular, the fear that the general public's adoption of environmentalist values applied only to protection of personal property and individual interests-very likely a correct assessment -radicalized a number of writers and other figures connected with reform environmentalism. Wilderness protectionists were especially prone to become radical because their goals would not have been advaneed very strongly by the middle-class publie's appropriation of environmentalism and the eorresponding shift of focus in the environmentalist movement toward urban interests in clean air and water and other necessities and amenities threatened by environmental degradation. To keep alive the spirit ofthe outsider in the environmentalist movement, the radicals began to press the movement toward more sweeping changes and stronger political commitments. Emerging from reform environmentalism to challenge the public toward new heights of awareness, many of the utopian radicals of the mid-1970s banded together in experimental political action groups. The first such spin-off group, the Greenpeace Foundation, came to the public's attention early in the decade with its "save the whales" campaign, which employed methods of protest derived from Quaker social action philosophy and from the Civil Rights and peaee movements . This approach to social change emphasized "bearing witness" against the wrongs of social practiee, arguing and standing for the elimination of social acts deemed immoral or unjust, a clearing away of the weeds and deadwood to make way for new forms of social and political growth. Others followed Greenpeaee in preserving the status of environmentalism as a protest movement, an effort to "negate the negative" in American social history. Nowhere was this outlook more evident than in Edward Abbey's provocative and mildly prophetic satire, The Monkey Wrench Gang, published in 1975. Much to Abbey 's surprise (and barely eoncealed delight), his story of four friends who confront the developmentalist establishment with an intensive program of sabotage inspired a group of disaffected wilderness protection advocates to form Earth First! in 1980, a loose eonfederacy of radicals devoted to undermining ecologically damaging practices through methods ranging from theatrical displays that model acts of sabotage to the aets themselves. The work of the new utopians was not totally dominated by the Rhetoric and Action in Ecotopian Discourse () 195 negative strategy of resistance politics, however. Acting on the architechtonic , or constructive, impulse ofutopianism, Ernest Callenbach brought out Ecotopia in 1975, the same year Abbey's novel appeared. The novel projects a vision of environmentalist history as it might have developed if a region of the United States had seceded from the Union to form a society based on ecological values. In contrast to the rhetoric ofother radicals, Callenbach's book makes a smoother, more subtle appeal to the general public, offering its eccentric views in the popular genre of science fiction where such views, if not expected, are at least tolerated by readers whose censoring mechanisms are relaxed in the presence of this...