This page was created by Collin Hardwick.
Herndl and Brown, Green Culture: Environmental Rhetoric in Contemporary America.
Discipline/Field: Rhetoric, English, Environmental Studies, Technical Communications
Year: 1996
Main Arguments & Concepts
Green Culture is a collection of texts that deal with the rhetoric that surrounds the environments. While recognizing that the concept of the ‘environment’ is rhetorically constructed, the works in this book focus on the relationship between the language and our geographies/ecologies, as well as environmentalist concerns, like global climate change. In particular, there is a focus on how environmentalist and hegemonic/individualist ideologies can be unexpected bedfellows -- a relationship that may need to be broken in order to create sustainable, ecological change. In their introduction, Herndl and Brown offer a model for studying environmental rhetoric, similar to the rhetorical triangle. The goal is to use this model to both understand the way that the environment is discussed and to use it to identify helpful means of persuasion in creating environmentalist texts.As this is an edited collection, I will include some more in-depth notes on some of my favorite chapters:
Marilyn Cooper, “Environmental Rhetoric in the Age of Hegemonic Policies”
Cooper uses Gramsci to explore the role of hegemony in environmental(ist) rhetorics -- that they can advocate for the current hegemony or a counter-hegemony. With a counter-hegemony, “revolution” can entail simply replacing one hegemony for the other. Cooper uses two environmentalist groups as examples of hegemony and counter-hegemony: she argues that Earth First! advocates for a counter-hegemony and the Nature Conservancy tries to expand the current one (242). Within the chapter, Cooper both analyzes the efficacy of environmentalist rhetoric, and the "dialectical” nature of hegemny(247).
Overall, Cooper’s point is that even movements that seem ‘countercultural,’ like the environmentalist movement, can actually reify the current system. For example, rhetorics surrounding the National Park system masks the real problem with industrialization: “Our gratitude to the government for protecting the park keeps us from seeing how ‘unnatural’ a park is and how bad the environmental crisis is” (252).
“Radical groups like Earth First! struggle to disarticulate positions and principles from the established hegemony and transform them in line with their own priorities; thus, the ‘traditional’ American love of wilderness is disarticulated from the notion of nature as an economic resource and transformed into a respect for the diversity of life (a spiritual value that was also present in the established belief system but suppressed in favor of the economic agenda) that will serve as a basis for a sustainable way of life for human beings and for the platen as a whole” (251).
Related
Bower, Revitalizing the CommonsGrunewald, "The Best of Both Worlds: A Critical Pedagogy of Place"
