Scapegoat Ecology: Blame, Exoneration, and an Emergent Genre in Environmentalist Discourse

ABSTRACT

This essay identifies and examines scapegoat ecology, an emergent genre in online environmental discourse. In scapegoat ecology, a public of environmentally minded individuals focuses attention and vitriol on a single person for being particularly harmful to the environment. This essay argues that such discourse deflects attention from more complex and systemic environmental factors and implicitly exonerates the broader community, assuring it of its own environmental commitments while excusing it from further ecological action. The essay describes the form and appeal of scapegoat ecology, then provides a series of illustrative case examples before highlighting the implications of such discourse for both environmental communication and broader social/political conversations.

KEYWORDS:

• Scapegoating
• rhetoric
• discourse
• digital media
• Yosemite

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 What I describe in this essay as “scapegoat ecology” might indeed be more precisely if not concisely described as “scapegoating tactics in environmental and ecologically-motivated discourse,” but I have shortened the term for three reasons. First, it provides a succinct and less cumbersome way of referencing the recurrent phenomena. This succinct term could just as likely, I suppose, be “S.T.E.E.D.” or some other abbreviation, but explicit reference to scapegoat ecology highlights a central paradox of the recurrent phenomenon – that is, if “ecology” is an approach to, conceptualization of, or study of living and non-living elements interconnected with and within habitats (Keeling & Prairie, 2018, p. 47), the scapegoating becomes impossible. Contemporary approaches to ecology suggest that no one part can be removed from a whole just as no whole can fully be removed from its part without systemic repercussions. Thus, second, I highlight scapegoat ecology as an explicitly oxymoronic discursive phenomenon. Vernacular reference to “ecological” can make the term more or less interchangeable with “environmental” or “environmentalist,” but the choice of the term “ecology” here calls out the inherently misdirected attention of a discourse that would advocate for ecological action by suggesting the challenges and threats to a habitat or ecosystem could simply be resolved by removing isolated elements, as if they were not more deeply connected to the whole. Third, I use the term scapegoat ecology here for consistency. As my research on the scapegoating phenomenon at play develops, I recognize that the term may invite conflict or criticism from others writing on conceptions of other “ecologies,” but the term has now been published and circulated under peer review in other venues (Schmitt, 2018a, 2018b) and I seek to keep the discussion of the phenomenon coherent and searchable as it develops from its early stages.