Abstract
This paper addresses the issue of public engagement in environmental risk contexts through a rhetorical analysis of the key term “community” in a risk assessment of mining-caused soil contamination. Drawing on Burke's concept of terministic screens and method of cluster criticism, the analysis shows the divergent constitutions of “community” in the Sudbury Soils Study's official discourse and the citizen-activist rhetoric of the Community Committee on the Sudbury Soils Study. Tracing the verbal and visual clusters within each organization's articulation of “community” as place and people reveals how the official Study's technical-regulatory ideology of environmental risk and citizen participation is countered by the Community Committee's contestatory environmental justice ideology. These competing views of “community” are mutually constitutive in that the official Study's mainstream risk discourse establishes the terms for the Community Committee's reactive counter-discourse, thus limiting citizen participation mainly to questions of “downstream” impacts. Our rhetorical analysis of “community” suggests a generative method for understanding the complex power relations animating specific risk communication contexts as well as for potentially reinventing “community” in terms more conducive to meaningful citizen engagement.
Notes
2. “Public” and “community” are not, of course, synonymous terms, but in the context of the Sudbury Soils Study they were frequently closely associated.
3. The separation of the Human Health and Ecological portions of the study—both in time and substance—is worth noting, particularly in its implications for how “environment” (human vs. non-human?) was understood by the Study.
4. There was no explanation of how the interests of either the public or the environment were to be determined.
5. A local union leader argued against the consensus model of decision-making that the Technical Committee had adopted, claiming that it created the possibility for one or both of the mining company representatives to veto any decision with which they disagreed—that is, they could prevent consensus. The critique of the Study's process by union representatives resulted in them being permitted to “observe” what had formerly been closed-door meetings among the six “stakeholders.”
6. See Agyeman (Citation2005) and Gould, Lewis, and Timmons Roberts (Citation2004) on labor–environmental, or “Blue–Green,” coalitions.
7. The Committee was chaired by a former Sudbury resident-activist who had, several years before, become the National Coordinator of Mining Watch Canada based out of Ottawa. The “healthcare” representative was from the Centre de santé communautaire de Sudbury whose mandate includes advocating for the rights of francophone community members to receive health services in French.
8. See Corburn (Citation2002) for a discussion of “cumulative exposure assessment” as a response to environmental justice critiques of the traditional focus on individual contaminants.
9. The SARA (Sudbury Area Risk Assessment) Group was the consortium of consulting firms hired to conduct the assessment.
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