New York Times Environmental Rhetoric: Constituting Artists of Living

Abstract

New York Times articles on environmental issues attempt to constitute an audience transcending gender, race, politics, and religion in its pursuit of environmentally sound behavior. While some articles' use of a rhetoric of sacrifice is undercut by fear appeals and an exclusionary narrative strategy, other NYT articles come closer to transforming the rhetoric of sacrifice into a widely inclusive, aesthetically grounded, and celebratory narrative strategy. Taken together, the articles seek to transform readers not so much into environmentalists as into what Foucault described late in his life as “artists of living.”

Notes

¹I am grateful to Rhetoric Review reviewers Stuart Brown and M. Jimmie Killingsworth who offered invaluable revision suggestions.

²See Schudson.

³My choice of newspapers as important sites of political discourse aligns me with “vernacular public sphere” rhetoricians. For instance, Eldred and Mortensen study nineteenth-century women's commencement addresses, and Olsen examines Ben Franklin's woodcuts. See also Warner on counterpublics and Holcomb on the The Daily Show.

⁴As Chaïm Perelman notes, epideictic rhetoric easily morphs into legislative rhetoric, as in his example of mourners at a funeral moving from commemorative oration to revolutionary acts. Also see Walker.

⁵The claim to transcend place may be more problematic. In the Midwest, NYT is often aligned with coastal elitism and liberalism. Given liberal calls to boycott Wal-mart, Friedman's laudatory description of Wal-mart's environmentalism confuses the associations between NYT and supposedly elitist liberalism. See Dubos on the perceived associations between class and environmentalism.

⁶See also Greene and Black, whose accounts elaborate Kenneth Burke's identification.

⁷Warner offers a fuller accounting of the appeal to transcendence.

⁸Garrard explains the social ecology movement surrounding Bookchin (see 27–30) and the ecofeminism referenced later in this article (23–27; 132).

⁹For rhetorical analysis of presidential rhetoric, see Peterson's Green Talk.

¹⁰Ells's approach is more critical than mine; he warns against the seductive logic behind the vicarious narrative.

¹¹My view of environmental behavior as a potential “art of living” echoes Herndl and Brown's “ecocentric rhetoric,” which emphasizes the “beauty, the value, the emotional power of nature” (12). Similarly, Johnson's “aesthetic mode” sees “nature as spiritual resource … in the tradition of Henry Thoreau and John Muir, who went to the woods in search … of renewal” (34). See also Clark, Halloran, and Woodford's “Thomas Cole's Vision of ‘Nature.’” Cole believed that “Americans would be spiritually improved [by] appreciat[ing] the uniquely wild beauties of their native landscape.” In NYT, however, the object of our aesthetic study is no longer images of the natural world, but ourselves; our instrumentalist approach to nature, even when employing the aesthetic mode, always renders us, rather than nature, the object of our study.

¹²The growing awareness of and dissatisfaction with consumerist subject positions masquerading as citizen subject positions demonstrated here echoes texts like Robert Reich's recent Supercapitalism. Toby Miller traces this conflation of the two roles in Adam Smith's moral and economic theories. Miller explains, “[E]ven the writing hand behind the invisible hand acknowledged the need for an ethical subject to underpin … the potentially disabling nature of [the egotistical] calculation” required by the “operation of [capitalism's] immanent competitive laws” (171).