Unearthing the marvelous: environmental imprints on rhetorical criticism

ABSTRACT

Environmental themes and thought have transformed the paths rhetorical criticism travels; nevertheless, environmental matters remain marginalized in most maps of the field. This essay establishes this tension between the growing institutionalization and popularity of environmental criticism and the ongoing undervaluing of these contributions in most accounts of the state of rhetorical criticism. Then, the author illustrates how this work has enabled rich extensions of ongoing conversations about canonical tropes of the field, including: metacritical; close textual analysis; dramatistic criticism; narrative; metaphoric; social movement; genre; mythic; critical rhetoric; and publics. Finally, the author invites readers to consider how environmental matters have contributed to the ways we navigate rhetorical criticism, as well as how this dimension of the field provides vital and diverse paths worth traveling for years to come.

KEYWORDS:

• Environment
• environmental justice
• rhetoric
• praxis
• methodology
• bodies

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Robert Cox, as well as CU Rhetoric & Culture colleagues and students at for astute feedback on an earlier draft, particularly Peter Simonson. In addition, much gratitude to Jeffrey A. Bennett and Charles E. Morris III for their friendship and editorial insight. Sarah Beck provided citational copy-editing, and Lisa Flores a welcomed refuge in which to write.

Notes

1. Rhetoricians in ancient times considered environmental matters a great deal, as scientific areas of inquiry, discursive resources for invention, and more. It is notable that, for example, Plato's Phaedrus takes place in the country outside of the city walls and that Aristotle studied nonhuman life. Although ancient work may be located in the palimpsest of this map, this essay focuses on the contemporary field of rhetorical criticism.

2. “Environment” (a capacious, intersectional, and dynamic word) is the privileged term within the discipline of communication to talk about such matters; see, for example: Robert Cox and Phaedra C. Pezzullo. Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere, 4th ed. (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 2015). Creating distinctions among various environmental approaches to rhetorical criticism moves beyond the purview of this essay.

3. For more information on the institutionalization of environmental communication as a field in Europe and Southeast Asia, see the introduction to: Robert Cox, ed. Environmental Communication, 4 vols. (London: Sage, 2015). I would add that, as is the case with all subfields, institutionalization both has nurtured a deep network and literature, as well as risked further ghettoizing this scholarship from more mainstream journals and conversations.

4. Cox and Pezzullo, Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere.

5. Supersessions at the Rhetoric Society of America Conference in 2016, for example, include rhetorical scholars from Communication and English that are engaging environmental matters in relation to: the archive as rhetoric, materializing memory, and field methods.

6. Lloyd F. Bitzer, “Rhetoric’s Prospects: Past and Future,” in Making and Unmaking the Prospects of Rhetoric, ed. Theresa Enos (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1997), 15, 19–20.

7. Charles E. Morris III, “Introduction: Portrait of a Queer Rhetorical/Historical Critic,” in Queering Public Address: Sexualities in American Historical Discourse, ed. Charles E. Morris III (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007), 4. See also Charles E. Morris III, “Archival Queer,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 9 (2006): 145–51. For more on intersections between queer worldmaking and ecological thought, see, for example, Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson, ed. Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010).

8. I include 6 essays from 2006 to 2013, leaving out three worthwhile essays that are not written from a rhetorical perspective: Donal Carbaugh and Tovar Cerulli, “Cultural Discourses of Dwelling: Investigating Environmental Communication as a Place-Based Practice,” Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture 7 (2013): 1–20; Tema Milstein “When Whales ‘Speak for Themselves’: Communication as a Mediating Force in Wildlife Tourism,” Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture 2 (2008): 173–92; Chris Russill, “Tipping Point Forewarning of Climate Change: Some Implications of an Emerging Trend,” Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture 2 (2008): 133–53. For more information on all the NCA ECD awards given, see the website: http://www.envirocomm.org/resources/awards/

9. Thomas B. Farrell, and Thomas G. Goodnight, “Accidental Rhetoric: The Root Metaphors of Three Mile Island,” Communication Monographs 48 (1981): 271–300; Christine L. Oravec, “Conservationism vs. Preservationism: The ‘Public Interest’ in the Hetch Hetchy Controversy,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70 (1984): 444–58; Christine L. Oravec, “John Muir, Yosemite, and the Sublime Response,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 67 (1981): 245–58; J. Robert Cox, “The Die is Cast: Topical and Ontological Dimensions of the Locus of the Irreparable, Quarterly Journal of Speech 68 (1982): 227–39; Tarla Rai Peterson, “The Will to Conservation: A Burkean Analaysis of Dust Bowl Rhetoric and American Farming Motives,” Southern Speech Communication Journal 52 (1986): 1–21. I focus on essays here as that is the main source for anthologies in rhetorical criticism. For a more elaborate account of the growth of the field, including canonical books, see Robert Cox, and Stephen Depoe, “Emergence and Growth of the Field of Environmental Communication,” in The Routledge Handbook of Environment and Communication, ed. Anders Hansen and Robert Cox (London: Routledge, 2015), 13–25.

10. Bernard L. Brock, Robert L. Scott, andJames W. Cheseboro, ed. Methods of Rhetorical Criticism: A Twentieth-century Perspective, 3rd ed. (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1990); Carl R. Burgchardt, ed. Readings in Rhetorical Criticism (State College, PA: Strata Publishing, 1995); and John Louis Lucaites, Celeste Michelle Condit, and Sally Caudill, ed. Contemporary Rhetorical Theory: A Reader (New York: Guilford Press, 1999). There was an edited collection that highlighted environmental rhetorical criticism, but my point is that the edited texts canonizing the overall field of rhetorical studies also have marginalized this scholarship. Despite—and perhaps at times because of—this marginalization, rhetoricians shaped by environmental themes and thought have established their/our own divisions, edited collections, and a journal. The notable edited collection published during this decade is: Craig Waddell, ed. Landmarks Essays on Rhetoric and the Environment (London: Routledge, 1998).

11. In the 4th edition, Burgchardt's reader included this essay by Deluca and Demo in a last section titled “Critical Rhetoric,” alongside an essay about whiteness and another on Oprah Winfrey as a racial token; this arguably underscores the essay's racial arguments, though then, as now, race and environment are intertwined. Phaedra C. Pezzullo, Toxic Tourism: Rhetorics of Travel, Pollution, and Environmental Justice (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007); Carl R. Burghardt, ed. Readings in Rhetorical Criticism, 4th ed. (State College, PA: Strata Publishing, Inc., 2010).

12. There are some notable mentions. For example, Robert Asen's essay, “Critical Engagement through Public Sphere Scholarship,” focuses on the work of Jürgen Habermas, John Dewey, and G. Thomas Goodnight. Asen does include Goodnight's and my own work on environmental publics and counterpublics. Celeste Condit's essay also engages bio-symbolic work; though the field and the author tend to categorize that work as Rhetoric of Science and Technology rather than environmental matters, I believe all would agree that they are interrelated. The book reviews notably signal that environmental matters may be receiving more attention beyond essay-length scholarship than in essay form, though the value of essays to canonization, awards, and promotion in the field remains an undeniably privileged space to signify value over book reviews.

13. Barbara A. Biesecker and Jeremy R. Grossman,“Introduction,” Centennial Issue, Quarterly Journal of Speech 101 (February 2015), 1. This absence of taking environmental contributions seriously in the 2015 centennial collection is particularly disappointing as the editor, Biesecker, colaunched a book series the same year soliciting work “to explore how rhetorical theories attuned to the everyday, material, lived conditions of human, nonhuman, and extrahuman life are brought to bear upon a wide range of investigative foci, including . . . environments. . . .” CFP: New Directions in Rhetoric and Materialities. (2015). Available at: http://www.scribd.com/doc/276710055/CFP-New-Directions-in-Rhetoric-and-Materiality

14. Stephen J. Hartnett, “Communication, Social Justice, and Joyful Commitment,” Western Journal of Communication 74 (2010): 86.

15. Cox himself describes “environmental communication” as a crisis discipline with a twofold obligation to identify problematic relations and to provide ways to improve pragmatic and constitutive sociosymbolic relations between humans and our habitats, including other species. This ethical imperative defines his approach to his scholarship, teaching, and advocacy. Robert J. Cox, “Nature’s ‘Crisis Disciplines’: Does Environmental Communication Have an Ethical Duty?” Keynote Address at the Conference on Communication and the Environment (COCE). Jekyll Island, Georgia, 2005. Revised and published under the same title in: Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture 1 (2007): 5–20.

16. Brian L. Ott, and Greg Dickinson, eds. The Routledge Reader in Rhetorical Criticism (London: Routledge, 2012). The Reader helpfully provides two Tables of Content, the first and one titled “Alternative,” to emphasize how the essays reprinted might be imagined as organized in more than one way. In this essay, I focus on the primary system of organization for purposes of affirming and noting the inclusion of rhetorical criticism that engages environmental matters.

17. I imagine a robust understanding of “environmental rhetoric,” even when the authors do not claim that language, as an act of resisting hegemonic white environmental marginalization of these communities. Among many examples, my own advocacy and research on environmental justice belies how communities of color often mobilize around or value the environment even if they do not always identify with the environmental movement or use that language. Phaedra C. Pezzullo and Ronald Sandler, “Environmental Justice and Environmentalism: Revisiting the Divide,” in Environmental Justice and Environmentalism: The Social Justice Challenge to the Environmental Movement, eds. Ronald Sandler and Phaedra C. Pezzullo (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 1–24.

18. Ott and Dickinson, The Routledge Reader in Rhetorical Criticism, 16. In their alternative table of contents, Ott and Dickinson also mark Hartnett's essay as an exemplar of metacritical scholarship.

19. Ott and Dickson, The Routledge Reader in Rhetorical Criticism, 17. In their alternative table of contents, Ott and Dickinson also mark my essay as an exemplar of social criticism.

20. Eric King Watts, “‘Voice’ and ‘voicelessness’ in rhetorical studies,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 87 (2001): 179–96.

21. Subsequent to this compelling essay, Watts was invited to write an afterword to an edited collection on the intersection of environmental matters and voice, where he does reflect more directly on the implications of his work for environmental matters; see: Eric King Watts, “CODA: Food, Future, Zombies,” in Voice and Environmental Communication, ed. Jennifer Peeples and Stephen P. Depoe(Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 257–63.

22. Ott and Dickinson, The Routledge Reader in Rhetorical Criticism, 194. In their alternative table of contents, Ott and Dickinson also mark Farrell and Goodnight's essay as an exemplar of social criticism.

23. While this review is focusing on edited collections that primarily reprint essays, Sonja K. Foss's (2009) Rhetorical Criticism: Exploration and Practice does include reprints. Of those, environmental communication scholarship is not included other than Dickinson, Ott, and Aoki's essay, “Memory & Myth at the Buffalo Bill Museum.” She includes it under “Ideological Criticism” to show how they “discover what vision of the West it constructs for visitors” (p. 221); as noted, that essay is about the myth of the American West and engages the frontier myth, as well as other significant environmental tropes. In their alternative table of contents, Ott and Dickinson also mark Rushing's essay as an exemplar of analysis of the frontier myth.

24. Ott and Dickinson, The Routledge Reader in Rhetorical Criticism, 194. In their alternative table of contents, Ott and Dickinson also mark DeLuca and Peeples's essay as an exemplar of critical/cultural criticism about citizenship.

25. Ott and Dickinson, The Routledge Reader in Rhetorical Criticism, 195.

26. In their alternative table of contents, Ott and Dickinson also mark Lake's and Flores's essays as exemplars of critical/cultural criticism about identity politics.

27. Ronald Walter Greene, Malthusian Worlds: U.S. Leadership and the Governing of the Population Crisis (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999). Greene has made this book available for free download here: http://works.bepress.com/ronaldwaltergreene/14/.

28. Ott and Dickinson, The Routledge Reader in Rhetorical Criticism, 403.

29. Ott and Dickinson, The Routledge Reader in Rhetorical Criticism, 593.

30. Ott and Dickinson, The Routledge Reader in Rhetorical Criticism, 593.

31. Readers tend to reprint only essays and not chapters due not only to the deference paid to 20th-century rhetorical scholars that never published books, but also to exorbitant expenses that book presses place on reprints; this makes increased profits for copyright holders but decreases the circulation of that work. Further, multinational journal presses like Taylor & Francis provide bulk discounts for article reprints for readers they understand to be primarily published for pedagogical audiences. For another account of the development of environmental communication, including canonical books, see: Cox and Depoe, “Emergence and Growth of the Field of Environmental Communication.”

32. This essay is focused on essays; however, Greene's argument about the value of articulation theory would be worth placing in dialogue with two books in environmental rhetoric engaging articulation theory, Kevin Michael DeLuca's (2005) Image Politics: The New Rhetoric of Environmental Activism and Phaedra C. Pezzullo (2007) Toxic Politics: Rhetorics of Pollution, Travel, and Environmental Justice.

33. Ronald W. Greene, “More Materialist Rhetoric,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies (2015), 417.

34. Voice, for example, matters to questions about who speaks for and/or has standing to stand up for nature, whether or not nature may speak for itself, voices constituting environmental affairs in the public sphere, which voices may speak on scientific and technical matters (such as risk), and which voices too often are relegated as indecorous.

35. Ross Singer,“Neoliberal Style, the American Re-Generation, and Ecological Jeremiad in Thomas Friedman’s ‘Code Green,’” Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture 4 (2010): 135–51; T. L. Friedman, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution*and How It Can Renew America (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux), 2008.

36. Singer, “Neoliberal Style, the American Re-Generation, and Ecological Jeremiad in Thomas Friedman’s ‘Code Green,’” 148.

37. Peeples, Jennifer. “Toxic Sublime: Imaging Contaminated Landscapes,” Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture 5(2011): 373–92.

38. Steven Schwarze, “Environmental Melodrama,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 92 (August 2006): 239–61. A third exemplar that I and many others I know teach on dramatism is the well-loved “Hunting and Heritage on Trial” by Mary Boor Tonn et al., which one often can find on syllabi if not in edited collections commemorating the field. The public controversy over the death of a woman in her own backyard in Maine by a hunter remains a timeless exemplar to open up discussions about hunting, guns, private property, risk, local culture, prejudice against geographic infidelity, and much more. Although the authors might not claim “environmental communication” as a primary affiliation, this essay undoubtedly illustrates how dilemmas of environmental management remain some of our most provocative to debate and to deliberate. Mari Boor Tonn, Valerie A. Endress, and John N. Diamond, “Hunting and Heritage on Trial: A Dramatistic Debate Over Tragedy, Tradition, and Territory,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 79 (1993): 165–81.

39. Beyond citing her work regularly, the ECD of the NCA has named their top scholarship awards in Oravec's honor to recognize her work's value.

40. Oravec, “Conservationism vs. Preservationism: The ‘Public Interest’ in the Hetch Hetchy Controversy,”246.

41. Cox, “The Die is Cast,” 231.

42. Indeed, when teaching the film to my own undergraduate students, I find An Inconvenient Truth serves as an exemplar of appeals to ethos, which tends to surprise and intrigue even my more conservative students that disagree with the logos of the text. For the sake of teaching our students of the longer career of former U.S. President Al Gore's attempts to address climate change, as well as engaging the concept of rhetorical presence, I also would recommend coupling this essay with: John M. Murphy, “Presence, Analogy, and ‘Earth in Balance,’” Argumentation and Advocacy 31 (1994): 1–19:. Thomas Rosteck, and Thomas S. Frentz, “Myth and Multiple Readings in Environmental Rhetoric: The Case of ‘An Inconvenient Truth,’” Quarterly Journal of Speech 95 (2009): 1–19.

43. Michael Salvador and Traceylee Clarke, “The Weyekin Principle: Toward an Embodied Critical Rhetoric,” Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture 5 (2011): 243–60.

44. Salvador and Clarke, “The Weyekin Principle,” 245.

45. The essay also included foci on organizational communication and history/memory studies. Bryan C. Taylor, William J. Kinsella, Stephen P. Depoe, and Maribeth S. Metzler, “Nuclear Legacies: Communication, Controversy, and the U.S. Nuclear Weapons Production Complex,” Communication Yearbook 29 , ed. P. Kalbfleisch (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2005), 363–409. .

46. Lisa A. Flores, “Creating Discursive Space Through a Rhetoric of Difference.” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 82 (1996): 142–56. Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 109–42.

47. Public sphere theory is a significant area of research for those invested in environmental communication. The inaugural textbook of environmental communication, Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere, introduces students to both pragmatic and constitutive functions of communication, in addition to emphasizing the significance of public life. Robert. J. Cox, Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere, 1st ed. (London: Sage, 2005).

48. Evidence of the possibility of this eclipse may be found in institutional structures (ex., Indiana University Bloomington becoming the first Big Ten school to eliminate a Department of Communication in favor of providing attention and resources for a new School of Media) and other venues canonizing the field (ex., the 2015 Routledge Handbook of Environment and Communication edited by Anders Hansen and Robert Cox that—despite its broader title—foregrounds media repeatedly above and beyond the value of rhetoric and the wider range of communicative disciplines that the field long has included, such as conflict management, organizational communication, intercultural communication, performance studies, etc.). My argument is not that media is irreconcilable with rhetoric; rather, in my own professional experience, rhetoric seems to be more inclusive and willing to give credence to the value of media and media studies than vice versa.

49. I have addressed my own choices as an environmental activist scholar elsewhere, including: Cox and Pezzullo. Environmental Communication; Phaedra C. Pezzullo, “Tripping over Boundary Stones: Reflections on Engaged Scholarship,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 96 (2010): 450–54; Phaedra C. Pezzullo, Toxic Tourism.

50. Although not falling into the limited archive I have assembled for this essay, two wonderfully provocative essays worth reading on transcorporeality include: Stacy Alaimo, “The Naked Word: The Trans-Corporeal Ethics of the Protesting Body,” Women & Performance: a Journal of Feminist Theory, 20 (2010): 15–36; Tema Milstein and Charlotte Kroløkke, “Transcorporeal Tourism: Whales, Fetuses, and the Rupturing and Reinscribing of Cultural Constraints,” Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture, 6 (2012): 82–100.