A Counterhistory of Rhetorical Ecologies

ABSTRACT

In this essay, I argue that the ecological turn in rhetorical studies has produced spatiotemporal problems and that these problems are directly tied to the material disciplinary history of ecosystems ecology and its connections to the Anthropocene violence of nuclear colonialism. These spatiotemporal concerns result from rhetoric’s “ecological moment”—a kairotic framework that emphasizes flux but elides material histories. Building from rhetorical scholarship in decolonial historiography and place-based methods, I offer a counterhistory of ecology to demonstrate how our field can better engage with the dynamic narrative pasts that shape contemporary rhetorical ecological inquiry. Through this counterhistory, I provide a method for combating rhetoric’s spatiotemporal concerns, a framework I refer to as field histories, which aims to situate disciplinary practices in place and time by combining historiography and fieldwork.

KEYWORDS:

• Decolonial historiography
• ecological turn
• place-based methods
• rhetorical ecology
• spatiotemporal rhetorics

Acknowledgments

I thank journal editor Jacqueline Rhodes and editorial assistant Rebecca Conklin, as well as the three anonymous reviewers, whose generous feedback helped refine and develop this essay. I also want to thank my graduate committee members, Sidney I. Dobrin and Raúl Sánchez, who offered advice in the early stages of this project. I owe additional thanks to Jacob Greene, Jeremiah Dyehouse, Leah Heilig, Charlie Sterchi, Lee Rozelle, Adam Roberts, and Kimberly Wright who each offered feedback and advice along the way.

Notes

¹ As Ralph Jessop demonstrates, the coinage of the term environment occurs “within a broader narrative of the transmission of organicist, anti-mechanical, counter-Enlightenment discourses, bringing the notion of environment into relation with a much more extensive story of later attempts to undermine the authority or prevalence of mechanism by writers, thinkers, composers, artists, and campaigners throughout the 19th and 20th centuries” (710).

² For more information on the complex historical relationship between environmental theory and fascism, see Greg Garrard’s “Heidegger Nazism Ecocriticism.”

³ For more information on nuclear colonialism in the American West, specifically as it pertains to more-than-human rhetorics in the Anthropocene, see Danielle Endres’s “The Most Nuclear-Bombed Place: Ecological Implications of the US Nuclear Testing Program.”

⁴ In demonstrating this spatiotemporal violence, I build from Anibal Quijano’s argument that “Europeans generated a new temporal perspective of history and relocated the colonized population, along with their respective histories and cultures, in the past of a historical trajectory whose culmination was Europe” (541, qtd. in Clary-Lemon).

⁵ Recent studies suggest that colonial genocide “resulted in a human-driven global impact on the Earth System in the two centuries prior to the Industrial Revolution” (Koch et al., 13). The extreme regrowth of plants “that is thought to have occurred following the arrival of epidemics in the Americas” that resulted in “carbon uptake […] may have reduced atmospheric CO₂ levels and led to a decline in radiative forcing that may then have contributed to the coldest part of the Little Ice Age” (14).

⁶ Haraway argues that “our job is to make the Anthropocene as short/thin as possible and to cultivate with each other in every way imaginable epochs to come that can replenish refuge” (100).

⁷ Following Edbauer’s essay on public rhetoric and ecology, featuring a study of the “Keep Austin Weird” slogan, rhetorical ecologies have led to many studies focusing on place-based methods for conducting place-based research. Numerous recent articles, special issues of journals, and edited collections have drawn from ecology to suggest the importance of fieldwork in rhetorical criticism (Middleton et al., “Articulating”; Middleton et al., Participatory; Senda-Cook et al.) rhetorical ecologies (McGreavy et al.) and “Contextual Fields of Rhetoric” (Ono) for cultivating participatory rhetorical scholarship and pedagogy (Endres et al.), conducting ethnographic research (McKinnon et al.; Rai and Druschke), developing interdisciplinary research methods (Druschke), and responding to global environmental destruction (Pezzullo and de Onís). Taken together, these studies demonstrate the potential and the growing popularity of in situ (or place-based) work influenced by ecological science.