Making sense of salmon: Synecdoche and Irony in a natural resource crisis

Abstract

This essay examines the function of synecdoche as a master trope in the environmental discourse surrounding the salmon crisis in the Pacific Northwest. It argues that synecdoche as a rhetorical construct has shaped and expressed public, political and scientific views of salmon in at least four critical ways. First, salmon has been rendered synecdochic as a Northwest icon by both Native Americans who first occupied the region and by European Americans who followed. Second, the story of the salmon as told by Northwesterners, which stems from its life cycle and reinforces its iconic status, is conveyed in synecdochic form. Third, the complexity of problems facing salmon and the prospects for recovery are described in terms of an intricate web of part for whole and whole for part relationships. And fourth, the human folly described in the history of the salmon crisis extends the synecdochic patterns in the discourse to conclude with an ironic lament about salmon and life as a whole. As such, synecdoche combines with irony to establish a pattern for crisis discourse that reveals human folly in a way to overcome it.