This Land is Our Land: Protesting to Protect Places on the Margin

ABSTRACT

In 2008 Tim DeChristopher illegally bid on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) parcels offered for energy exploration leases near National Parks in Utah. DeChristopher and his supporters founded Peaceful Uprising, a climate justice movement, in response to his actions. We analyze mediated news coverage and in situ rhetoric gathered via rhetorical fieldwork to examine the ways that Peaceful Uprising combined place-based rhetoric and place-as rhetoric tactics to protect these park-adjacent lands from oil and gas leases and to protect DeChristopher from being convicted for making false bids on the leases. This analysis offers a unique example of place-based protest that is focused on otherwise ignored BLM lands. Moreover, we focus on a place—Salt Lake City—that is not conventionally perceived as a bastion of activism and protest about climate change. Our analysis expands the place in protest framework to considerations of: 1) the convergence of the place-based and place-as rhetoric tactics, and 2) the potential of place in protest appeals to enact different futurities.

KEYWORDS:

• social movements
• environmental communication
• place
• rhetoric
• public lands

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 While we used participatory critical rhetoric in this analysis, rhetorical fieldwork is a broad category that characterizes a variety of approaches to combining rhetoric with qualitative methods. (Endres et al., 2016; Hauser, 2011; Hess, 2011; McKinnon et al., 2016; Pezzullo, 2007; Pezzullo & de Onís, 2018; Rai & Druschke, 2018)

2 Both authors attended PeaceUp protests. One of the authors attended one protest event. The other author attended five events. Texts produced from this fieldwork include: 16 videos totaling 1:15 h, 73 still images, 34 pages of fieldnotes totaling 19,500 words, 21 social media screengrabs, 17 songs that were released as an album (available on the PeaceUp website), 15.5 h of audio recording, and various physical items including songbooks, pamphlets, buttons, an orange sash and zip tie.

3 One of the authors was present in both places during fieldwork (dates: 2/18/11, 2/27/11, and 7/31/11).