Environmental Rhetoric Research Articles

Articulating water conservation as colonization: revisiting the “public interest” in Theodore Roosevelt’s First Annual Message

ABSTRACT As policymakers attempt to cope with climate chaos, traditions of water injustice persist. Meanwhile, water problems and solutions in the U.S. arid region have long been discussed through the discourse of conservation. This essay traces water conservation discourse back to Theodore Roosevelt’s 1901 First Annual Message to better understand its relationship to U.S. water colonizing ideologies in today’s context. Attuned to colonization as practices of extraction and ideological articulation, I argue that Roosevelt articulated water policies in the name of the progressive “public interest” with a set of moral, legal, and infrastructural water logics. These logics link the value of progressive water management to specific capacities that expand white settler ecologies in arid regions. Roosevelt's early-twentieth-century articulations are palpable in contemporary calls for water conservation, suggesting major implications for presidential and environmental rhetoric as well as water policymaking.

Understanding historic buildings from an environmental perspective: Finsbury Health Centre – as an environmental rhetoric of modernism

PurposeThis paper aims to examine how the interrelation between architecture and the physical environment came to prominence and influenced the pioneering modernist architects to acquire the features of modern architecture that the British modernists later adopted. How the post-war urban poor of Britain, suffering from ill-health and dire need of sun, air and a good environment, played an essential role in alleviating the environmental concerns of the modern movement architects.Design/methodology/approachThe methodology of this research involves a comprehensive architectural analysis of the Finsbury Health Centre alongside an in-depth historical investigation of modernist design principles. This review article examines books, articles and some archival materials, such as recordings, pictures, etc. on the early phase of British modernism and its environmental dimension by looking at the works of historians, architects and critics.FindingsDesign based on modernist principles. While it can be seen as the political agenda of the Labor Party, this building was not only functionally efficient but also represented the biometric concerns of modern architecture with the most natural means.Research limitations/implicationsWhile this study provides valuable insights, it may be limited by historical documents and data availability.Originality/valueThe originality and value of this paper lie in its examination of the Finsbury Health Centre as a case study, shedding light on the environmental rhetoric of modernism in historic architecture. By providing a holistic assessment of the building’s environmental aspects, this research contributes to both architectural history and contemporary sustainable design practices.

Care and Constraints in the Climate Crisis: An Intersectional Rhetorical Analysis of News Comments about the El Dorado Fire

In September 2020, a gender reveal party started the El Dorado Fire in southern California. We analyzed comments on news coverage of the fire from two outlets with different political leanings to evaluate how the rhetorical process of assigning guilt is influenced by interlocking systems of power, making an intersectional lens useful for analyzing responses to environmental crises. Some comments evoked scapegoat ecology, which is a response to guilt that narrows the scope of climate change to the igniters of the wildfire. Other comments evoked what we call ecological transcendence, which replaces scapegoating with attention to systems-level concerns. In analyzing ecological transcendence, we outline differences between collective action mobilized by inclusive care and seemingly unifying discourses of selective care that foster marginalization and oppression. We contribute to environmental rhetoric and feminist studies by emphasizing the importance of attending to intersectionality in analyzing rhetorics of guilt in ecological contexts and through our proposal of ecological transcendence as an alternative to scapegoat ecology.

Talk is (not so) Cheap: Investor Reactions to Environmental Rhetoric

Talk is (not so) Cheap: Investor Reactions to Environmental Rhetoric

The Rhetoric History of Culture and Nature: The Return of the Native

The effects of industrialization during the Victorian era on the environment in Britain were huge, leading to numerous criticisms. Despite this, there has been limited research done with an ecocritical approach to the Victorians’ interactions with the environment. Further, only a handful of scholars have analyzed Victorian novelists’ representations of their time’s ecology. This article discusses the relationship between man and nature as represented in Thomas Hardy’s novel “The Return of the Native”. Analyzing this work helps us understand Victorian ecological and social criticism of the linkage between man and environment, often considered at the time to be psychologically and biologically strange and intriguing. Analyzing the novel’s different characters and their qualities and interactions with the environment helps us to understand the link between man and his environment today. This article explains how and why Hardy portrays the place of man in the world using the setting of Egdon Heath. Keywords: Culture, Land, Ecocritism, Nature, Writing, Ecosystem, Environmental Rhetoric.

Dimensions of time and space in narratives for climate action

Abstract Addressing climate change requires engaging with the fluid, dynamic, and amorphous narrative of humanature relationships. I view environmental rhetoric as practices of storytelling that structure reality, guide actions, and shape understanding of the environment. Through rhetorical criticism, I analyzed fragments of climate activist discourse related to the narratives’ temporal and spatial scopes. I argue that reimagining the scope of our climate narratives’ temporal (chronos-kairos) and spatial (chora-topos) dimensions are inventional opportunities to motivate climate action toward more sustainable futures.

The Complex Reality of National Park Development under Authoritarianism

Vietnam is simultaneously an aspiring environmental state and an authoritarian one. As such, it has clearly articulated policies for biodiversity protection, including measures to secure the livelihoods of communities adjacent to national parks. However, the realities on the ground often confound state environmental discourse. The national parks in the highlands were created through new forms of territorial domination after the war, while continued in-migration and development have made these parks contested spaces that are fraught with pervasive inequities and unsettled ethnic relations. Among the consequences of this weak legitimacy are illegal logging and poaching; indecisive management and protection; and rapidly declining biodiversity, with severe impacts on local livelihoods. Based on a study of two parks in southern Vietnam, this article explores the real-life complexities of national park development under authoritarianism, including the persistent gap between state environmental rhetoric and locally negotiated illegalities. It finds that the key characteristics of authoritarian environmentalism drive a bifurcation of environmental management regimes: a formal, top-down domain of policy- and law-making, serving multiple purposes of legitimation, and a contingent domain of provincial development priorities and locally negotiated use rights. Despite the apparent disorder, both are equally significant to the party-state’s resilience.

Engaging complex temporalities in environmental rhetoric

In this essay, we identify a temporal turn in environmental rhetoric. As field researchers, we have experienced different senses of time bumping against one another in intercultural, ecological situations. Although these micro-experiences of time provide a constant grounding for our lives, we are also aware of the macro-expressions of time and the ways that they order our world and understanding of environmental degradation. We detail three interrelated temporal themes in environmental rhetoric. First, we delve into the practical considerations of time, articulating it in relation to how humans address environmental crises. Second, we respond back to ourselves by discussing epistemological concerns of time that emphasize knowing as critical to appropriate action and recognizing the need for impatience in the face of colonial, sexist, and racist systems that have existed for far too long. Lastly, we unpack multiple conceptualizations of time—the ontological commitments of different entities, systems, and cultures—and ask how scholars should conduct their own work given the temporal challenges presented by environmental problems, the demands of the field, the need for radical change, and the necessity of intelligent and meaningful choices. We do not seek to resolve tensions between these three themes but deepen the field's engagement with multiple temporalities. The conclusion offers some pathways to stimulate further scholarship about environmental temporalities.

Agrotopias: An American Literary History of Sustainability. By Abby L. Goode

Parthenogenesis. Agrotopian vision. Gothic fertility. Abby L. Goode transposes these terms into a new context in Agrotopias: An American Literary History, using them to explore sustainability rhetoric from the Revolution era to the early twentieth-century and giving an alternate, historical valence to them along the way. A strength of this book’s method is that it combines these fertility and environmental ideas within the framework of larger cultural movements, including the nineteenth-century phrenology movement, which saw bodily forms as being biologically predetermining, and the twentieth-century Country Life movement, which called for a return to rural farmsteads. Goode’s book is firmly entrenched in nineteenth-century American culture, though the origin thesis she establishes harkens back to Thomas Jefferson and his eighteenth-century agrarian vision. Two features of Agrotopias are especially unique: Goode’s critique of seemingly innocent environmental rhetoric, in particular Jeffersonian agrarianism, through the ages; and her use of little-read, but important, nineteenth-century source material. For the former, she finds instances of writing in which environmental sustainability rhetoric appears nearly side-by-side with nationalist eugenics. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1915 Herland, for instance, balances “a careful cultivation [of] nearly every account of agriculture” in this imaginary land with “eugenic-conservationist notions of racial and environmental regeneration and maintenance” (169). Agrotopias also highlights the striking ways that organizations such as the Sierra Club or even personages such as Michelle Obama, in writing about the White House Kitchen Garden, deploy disturbing, if latent, nation-building and reproductive language in tandem with “back to the soil” environmental rhetoric (2, 190). The cultural movements referenced, and literary works included in each chapter, are rich and unorthodox, ranging from New York newspapers in the 1840s (Albany Freeholder and Young America) to the Texas-based Colored Farmers’ National Alliance in the 1880s and 1890s (109). Goode also finds lesser-known, but important, works by Whitman (a 1928 farming tract, “The Eighteenth Presidency!”), Gilman (a 1909 editorial in Good Housekeeping), and others to complement her thesis regarding sustainability rhetoric and its pernicious coupling with eugenics.

Людвиг Клагес, глубинная экология и концепция friluftsliv в Северной Европе

The article provides a brief overview of the views of philosophers Ludvig Klages, Arne Næss and Villy Sørensen, whose works revolved around the relationship between man and the environment. The article then proceeds to compare their philosophical ideas with the popular concept of friluftsliv which closely intertwines with the lifestyle as well as regional and national identity of Nordic countries. It is revealed that the common ground of both the philosophical constructions of deep ecology and the practice of friluftsliv is the close emotional connection between humanity and nature as its original environment. The analysis of development strategies of friluftsliv in Denmark, Norway and Sweden highlights the potential of friluftsliv phenomenon to be a conduit for fostering wide public solidarity on the ‘green’ agenda and promoting ecological consciousness and eco-citizenship in Nordic countries, which also corresponds to the idea of aesthetic, beautiful actions as formulated by Arne Næss. The conclusion is made that the systematically implemented practice of friluftsliv in Northern Europe can serve as an example of overcoming the conflict between radical environmental alarmism and skepticism and of making environmental care a part of everyday life and national consciousness. The article also notes the threat of right-wing radicalism and right-wing extremism employing the environmental rhetoric in order to increase their popularity among the younger generation. Despite local environmental initiatives conducted under the auspices of such organizations, their ‘green’ rhetoric primarily serves to reinforce their more traditional agenda of restricting immigration and eliminating ‘foreign and hostile’ elements from Nordic society. The conclusion emphasizes the broad potential for the study of national ecological cultures and identities, which could complement and broaden the existing research on the ‘green’ parties and mass environmental movements.

Arguments of green colonialism: a post-dialectical reading of extractivism in the Americas

ABSTRACT Through two of the largest mining companies in the world, Rio Tinto and BHP, this article traces arguments of green colonialism that use techno-determinist environmental rhetoric for extraction purposes. Contributing to environmental communication, de/coloniality studies, and Indigenous research, I argue for a more expansive approach to argument that accounts for situated knowledge, place, and affect as ontological argumentative forces. I introduce a series of case studies on Rio Tinto’s and BHP’s resource colonialisms at different sites of extraction throughout the Americas, particularly in South America, to show how “good” arguments are determined by the modern/colonial matrix power and how decolonial actors speak back. The Argumentation Network of the Americas (ANA) is in a unique position to resist argumentative logics of resource colonialism in the Americas, but argumentation must first address its own extractive models rooted in European ideals of modernism/colonialism.

Tracking Memes in the Wild: Visual Rhetoric and Image Circulation in Environmental Communication

Drawing on recent scholarship in environmental communication and rhetoric, this essay examines the role of visual circulation in digital environmental discourse. We argue that while environmental image circulation is often viewed as an ambivalent, or even performative, practice for environmental citizenship, it is also an important space for cultivating participatory culture online. Adapting a version of Laurie Gries' “Iconographic Tracking” method, we offer three case studies that demonstrate how the digital circulation of environmental memes and iconic images offers important tactics for engaging digital publics that can be deployed by public communication practitioners. Subsequently, we argue for a more nuanced view of image circulation as both a performative and a participatory strategy for environmental communication.

Council for Environmental Mutual Aid: Environmental Protection and CMEA Issues

The article deals with the initiatives of the CMEA member states in the field of environmental protection. The holding of the UN conference on the environment in Stockholm in 1972 actualized the environmental agenda both in the world and within the socialist camp. In parallel with the preparations for the UN conference in 1972, the journal “Problems of Peace and Socialism” held an international symposium “Marxism-Leninism and the Problems of Environmental Conservation”. This event was designed to develop a common point of view for communist parties on environmental protection. In 1976, an international meeting on environmental protection was held at the CMEA Secretariat. The meeting was organized by the Institute of Economics of the World Socialist System of the USSR Academy of Sciences and the Committee on Scientific and Technical Cooperation of CMEA. The main issues of the meeting were related to the state policy on environmental protection and use of natural resources in the CMEA member countries. Thus it can be stated that in the CMEA countries, as well as all over the world, since the 1970s the attention to environmental issues began to grow. At the same time, environmental rhetoric was often in conflict with the current objectives of the economies of the CMEA countries. Although the official discourse was dominated by the idea of aspirations for the future, the leaders preferred to solve the problems of the current moment.

Green Nationalism in a Resource-Based State: Environmental Agenda and National Identity in Russian Regions

The growth of global environmental problems and the strengthening of environmental rhetoric in the world have led to the awareness of the environmental issues among ordinary citizens. In many societies, the growing interest in environmental issues coincided with the reincarnation of nationally charged discourses. This led to the emergence of such a political hybrid as green nationalism. Green nationalism is understood as a movement focused on environmental demands related to the advancement of national or subnational interests, as well as the protection of minority interests. It is based on rhetoric that addresses national attributes such as territorial identity and cultural cohesion, as well as environmental issues. Its development can take place according to different scenarios: “from the top down” due to the efforts of political elites to form civic nationalism based on ideas about the nation’s contribution to solving global environmental problems, or “from the bottom up” through the actualization and protection of the interests of the minority. However, the study of the phenomenon of green nationalism entails the need to comprehend several important paradoxes. The first paradox is based on the clash of global and local interests. On the one hand, environmentalism is a global movement focused on solving such global environmental problems as climate change, pollution of seas and oceans, and deforestation. On the other hand, environmental issues create opportunities for strengthening national or local identity. The second paradox is determined by the influence of the political regime on the importance of environmental concerns for societies. Traditionally, it is believed that environmental values are successfully formed and maintained in societies with a democratic regime. However, environmental issues are also discussed under hybrid or authoritarian political regimes. In the situation where open political protest is impossible, subnational movements for political autonomy and national independence can take the form of environmental protests. The third paradox is associated with the peculiarities of the perception of natural resources in states that are dependent on their extraction. On the one hand, natural resources are the basis of economic well-being in such societies, which legitimizes the consumer logic of dealing with nature. On the other hand, in such states, the importance of nature as a national treasure is emphasized, which contributes to the development of environmental activities. Our article provides answers to the following research questions: How does the global environmental agenda lead to an intensification of nationalist discourses? Why does green nationalism emerge and successfully develop in a resource-based state? Why is environmentalism, usually oriented toward democratic values, in demand in authoritarian states? These issues will be considered in the article on the examples of environmental conflicts and protests in Russian regions, which are closely related to the maintenance of national or subnational identity. The main cases for the analysis were protests against the development of the Shikhan Kushtau in Bashkiria (2020) and conflicts of the Indigenous peoples of the North with the oil company in the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug (2017). The research was carried out on the basis of qualitative methodology. The main research methods were semistructured interviews with protesters. The results of the study show that environmental issues are becoming a serious tool for mobilizing society as they entwine with issues of national/subnational identity, as well as ideas about social justice. Article in Russian

It All Hinges on China: Environmental Governance in the Twenty-First Century

It All Hinges on China: Environmental Governance in the Twenty-First Century

‘A Strong, Sustainable Legacy:’ The Environment and Japan’s Winter Olympics

In the Olympic movement, common usage of the terms ‘legacy’ and ‘sustainability’ tends to conflate the two, suggesting that the two concepts are symbiotic and unquestionably linked. However, many of the winter Olympics’ ‘legacies’ are decidedly unsustainable. Scholars and activists have highlighted the immense water demands needed for producing fake snow, the changes in biodiversity resulting from carving out ski/luge/skeleton courses and lifts on mountains, the impact of artificially prolonged snow cover on vegetation, and the long-lasting environmental impacts of major infrastructure projects such as new train lines, highways, airports, and arenas. The legacies (or outcomes) of Japan’s two winter Olympics shed light on critical environmental issues and highlight Japan’s significant role in the supplementation of environmental concern and rhetoric into the Olympic movement. The increasing focus on the environment by Olympic organizers in Japan did not emerge because citizens or planners inherently cared more about ecological issues than those in other nations, nor because of any cultural or religious connections to nature. Interrogating Japan’s role in making environmental sustainability part of the Olympic movement, and specifically the role that winter Olympics played in that process, clarifies the persistent gap between the rhetoric and realities of Olympic legacy and sustainability.

Urban Renewal in the “Human Renaissance”

ABSTRACT In the post–World War II era, state and federal legislators introduced a legal rhetoric of the environment and urban renewal that reshaped discourse and decision-making by municipal leaders and African American activists in Pittsburgh. This study presents a fuller historical analysis of the regulatory framework and sociopolitical context of Pittsburgh's postwar urban renewal by examining the environment, renewal, race, and the law as interrelated and inextricable concepts. It argues that both white political leaders and Black activists navigated a shifting regulatory framework and legal environmental rhetoric to craft divergent narratives of urban renewal. By examining municipal, state, and federal laws, urban planning documents, court decisions, and newspaper articles, this analysis demonstrates the evolution of environmental arguments with changing social, legal, and political contexts from the postwar years to the 1970s. Conclusions reveal a fluid definition of “environment” and demonstrate the ongoing struggle for power over decision-making spaces.

Transcorporeal Identification and Strategic Essentialism in Eco-Horror: mother!’s Ecofeminist Rhetorical Strategies

ABSTRACT The eco-horror film mother! tells the story of mother, who navigates a tenuous relationship with her husband, Him, while an increasing number of people invade their home. mother! deploys strategic essentialism and identification as ecofeminist rhetorical strategies to show the dual exploitation of women and nature. The character of mother is a strategic essentializing of the Mother Nature archetype, which I call “womanature,” that evokes the interconnectedness of oppression and audience complicity in womanature’s suffering. Additionally, the film enacts “transcorporeal identification” to identify the audience with both mother and her home and to demonstrate how to listen, understand, and acknowledge nonhuman life. mother! warns us of the consequences if we fail to listen to mother (nature) and illustrates how horror films can function as vehicles for environmental rhetoric.

Promising pipelines and hydrocarbon nationalism: the sociality of unbuilt infrastructure in indigenous Siberia

Promising pipelines and hydrocarbon nationalism: the sociality of unbuilt infrastructure in indigenous Siberia

The Arctic policy of India

The article is devoted to the Indian Arctic policy. The author examines the history of Delhi’s presence in the region from the time of colonial dependence until the moment the country received the status of the permanent observer of the Arctic Council in 2013. Much attention is paid to the analysis of two opposed opinions on the role of India in the region. One group of scientists, referring to the lack of domestic energy resources, need to diversify energy flows and prevent China’s undivided dominance on the Arctic shelf, insists on India’s comprehensive (scientific, economic, and strategic) participation in the Arctic agenda. Another group, based on alarmist environmental rhetoric, advocates limiting interference into the region’s affairs. Analysis of external and internal conditions leads to the conclusion that none of the lines can be implemented completely. An uncertainty of India’s Arctic strategy, however, makes it possible to identify some trends and make a forecast on the future actions of the Asian giant in the region.