Strategic Gestures in Bill McKibben's Climate Change Rhetoric

Peter K Bsumek,Jennifer Peeples,Steve Schwarze,Jen Schneider

doi:10.3389/fcomm.2019.00040

Abstract

Although Bill McKibben is widely recognized as one of the leading strategists of the US climate change movement, several observers identify significant limitations to his approach to climate advocacy and politics. These criticisms are based on his reliance upon “symbolic gestures,” such as campaigns to promote fossil fuel divestment and stop fossil fuel infrastructure construction. In this essay we reconsider McKibben’s work, drawing specifically on his speeches given from 2013-2016 in support of the fossil fuel divestment campaign and campaigns attempting to block the construction of fossil fuel infrastructure, in order to show how McKibben’s strategic orientation is grounded in a politics of gesture. His speeches provide a model for how to reconceive gestures and assemble them for political ends. Beyond the case of McKibben our analysis contributes the concept of strategic gestures to identify and theorize social movement interventions that have significant symbolic and material consequences.

Highlights

In 2006, author Bill McKibben found himself at “the end of my relatively quiet life as mostly a writer and the start of a hectic stint being mostly an activist” (McKibben, 2016a)
McKibben has been a prominent voice in opposing the Keystone XL pipeline, fostering fossil fuel divestment campaigns, and orchestrating the 2014 and 2017 People’s Climate Marches
Communication scholar Matthew Nisbet acknowledges that McKibben is “arguably the most prominent climate change activist in the United States” (Nisbet, 2013, p. 41)

Summary

Introduction

In 2006, author Bill McKibben found himself at “the end of my relatively quiet life as mostly a writer and the start of a hectic stint being mostly an activist” (McKibben, 2016a). Based on an analysis of McKibben’s speeches, we offer the notion of strategic gestures as a concept to identify and theorize a rhetorical assemblage of movements, actions, and performances that have significant symbolic and material consequences.

Results

Conclusion