Commonplaces of Scientific Evidence in Environmental Discourses

Denise Tillery

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351691536
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Rhetoric
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book focuses on the uses of scientific evidence within three types of environmental discourses: popular nonfiction books about the environment; traditional and social media texts created by a grassroots environmental group; and a set of data displays that make arguments about global warming in a variety of media and contexts. It traces the operations of eight commonplaces about science and shows how they recur throughout these contexts, starting with Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and ending with contemporary blogs and social media. The commonplaces are shown to embed ideological assumptions and simultaneously challenge those assumptions. In addition, the book addresses the potential dangers involved in relying too heavily on aspects of these commonplaces, and how they can undermine the goals of some of the writers who use them.

1 Introduction

Patterns of Scientific Argument in Environmental Discourses

More than twenty years ago, Killingsworth and Palmer (1992) coined the term “ecospeak” to describe the state of environmental discourse in America; they argued that essentially the two sides of any environmental debate spoke past each other and fell into patterns of speech that foreclosed any possibility of deliberation (Killingsworth & Palmer, 1992, p. 8). In 2018, the map of environmental discourses looks much more complex, but we can still easily identify the two opposing sides on most issues: those whom Killingsworth and Palmer frame as “developmentalists,” pro-business growth, anti-tax, and pro-property rights, and environmentalists of all persuasion (p. 9). Of course, there are many different shades on each side, but when any environmental issue is deliberated, whether it is a local, land-use matter or a global problem like climate change, arguments will reliably split along these typical fault lines.

Those fault lines have been well established for more than fifty years, but over the last two decades, the field of arguments has become much more complex. Thanks to the Internet, scientific information has become easily accessible to anyone, and it has become much easier for ordinary citizens to create a platform to advocate for their views. Anyone who is interested in improving the environment, from a former vice president with a “bully pulpit” to launch a major documentary, to local neighborhood activists with a desire to protect a location that’s literally in their back yards, to a scientist whose research on climate change is co-opted and reproduced by bloggers both hostile to and supportive of his findings, must engage with a shifting field of multiple discourses, communities, and identities. I am interested in the ways that writers concerned about the environment use scientific discourses and scientific evidence to make a variety of arguments in these contexts. In particular, I am interested in several ongoing questions:

• What role is played by scientific evidence in discourses about the environment, and how can it be used most effectively?
• How have different genres evolved in concert with new media forms to transform environmental discourses over the last two decades?
• What specific values, appeals, and rhetorical strategies work to empower people to want to make changes in their relationships to the environment?

This book investigates three specific sites of environmental discourse: popular non-fiction books about the environment in the tradition of Silent Spring, discourses from a local non-profit group dedicated to preserving a natural space, and data displays about climate change and how they are transformed in different contexts. The scope of this book ranges from the global—non-fiction books aimed at mass market audiences—to the local—activists creating documents and digital sources for highly specific, local contexts—to the blogosphere, with its contradictory global reach and highly focused communities of readers. This range of discourses is only a small selection of the vast field of environmental discourses I could consider, but it offers sufficient scope and variety for me to make meaningful connections among writers in different contexts who are grappling with similar problems. By taking a variety of methodological approaches to snapshots of a few specific discursive contexts, I can create a fuller picture of how scientific evidence functions in environmental discourses.

To provide a context for my study, I briefly overview the history of environmental writing in America and then offer a literature review of technical communication and rhetorical studies in environmental research. This survey of scholarship in the field will highlight trends and findings that are of most value to scholars of rhetoric and technical communication interested in researching environmental topics. After surveying the research on environmental communication from these fields, I will describe the methods I use to study my three sets of texts and contexts, and then describe the lenses through which I view these discourses. Finally, I will offer a brief overview of each chapter, showing how those lenses will be used to analyze each set of discourses.

History of American Environmentalism: Emergence of the Topics

As I will describe in the Methods section, this book is in part a topical analysis of environmental discourses. A history of the American environmental movement provides useful context for this study, as it is clear that some of the commonplaces I trace through contemporary discourses emerged early on in the conservation movement. As noted by earlier scholars in environmental rhetoric, including Killingsworth and Palmer (1992) and Herndl and Brown (1996), the fissures we see in environmental issues today can be traced back at least a century.

Environmental historians point to early American naturalists as seminal figures, including individuals such as William Bertram, whose 1791 travel writings include meticulous descriptions of the environment (and native American populations) of North and South Carolina and Georgia. Bertram’s work helped to shape the consciousness of wilderness as a unique virtue in America (Shabecoff, 2012). In the early nineteenth century, the prominent naturalist John James Audubon published his books and essays, complete with meticulous color engravings, which contributed to a shared understanding that natural spaces and species should be intrinsically valued and protected (Johnson-Sheehan & Morgan, 2008). Although Audubon himself was later criticized for his habit of killing the birds first so he could paint them as accurately as possible, his vivid illustrations, paired with accurate scientific information about habitats, are inextricably linked to the preservation-oriented society that bears his name (Johnson-Sheehan & Moran, 2008). And the popularity of his work also formed the backdrop for the nature-centered literary traditions of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

The American Transcendentalists, particularly Thoreau, play a significant role in the development of American environmentalist thinking (Kirk, 2001; Opie & Elliot, 1996; Shabecoff, 2012). Thoreau’s famous statement “in Wildness is the preservation of the world” is often quoted by contemporary environmentalists, particularly deep ecologists, and the works of Emerson and Thoreau were both influential for John Muir (Opie & Elliot, 1996; Thoreau, “Walking,” 1862). Thoreau’s works anticipated several themes that recur in contemporary environmental discourses, including a distrust of industrialism and technology and a sense that nature is intrinsically valuable beyond the resources that it can provide us.

Muir was involved in one of the earliest public controversies that brought conservation to the forefront of public consciousness: the battle over damming the Hetch Hetchy Valley. Hetch Hetchy was a pristine valley near Yosemite that Muir had originally included in his proposed map of what would eventually be designated as Yosemite National Park. But in 1901, the city of San Francisco put in a claim to dam the valley to ensure a reliable water supply for the growing city (Oravec, 1984). The Sierra Club, led by Muir, launched an appeal to the general public while Congress debated. Gifford Pinchot, the prominent forester and politician long identified as embodying a utilitarian conservationist approach, argued in favor of the dam. Pinchot believed that damming Hetch Hetchy was justifiable because the reservoir would serve a large and growing population; this stance exemplified his conservationist approach, where natural spaces require protection in part to manage the resources and keep them available for exploitation by future generations (Miller, 2013; Opie & Elliot, 1996). Opie and Elliot characterized the Hetch Hetchy struggle as a clash between “Common Sense Realism” and American Romanticism:

The battle for Hetch Hetchy evokes the oppositional binary responses that persist today when Americans talk and think about the continent that they inhabit. This response may be seen in the rhetoric of the two primary antagonists, the preservationist Muir and the conservationist Pinchot.

(p. 27)

President Theodore Roosevelt ultimately decided in favor of the city, and the Hetch Hetchy dam remains in place, and controversial, to this day.

While Roosevelt landed on the utilitarian side of that particular debate, he demonstrated a sense of the importance of both preservation and conservation throughout his political career. The Antiquities Act of 1906, which was designed to protect and preserve natural spaces, was passed under his administration and spurred a new surge of conservation writing (Johnson-Sheehan & Morgan, 2008). Ten years later, President Woodrow Wilson signed the act creating the National Park Service, which set aside land strictly for preservation and protection, as opposed to the conservationist approach to land management typical of both the National U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management.

These early political controversies, and the newly created institutions that developed to respond to and manage them, shaped environmental discourses for decades to come. Even in the eighteenth century, it is possible to see the outlines of some of the commonplaces about science that recur throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The drawings and writings of Audubon, for example, reveal the key role played by meticulous scientific observation as a way to capture and represent aspects of nature for audiences who could not experience it directly for themselves. Audubon’s accurate depictions of birds generated a sense of empathy for these wild creatures that directly contributed to the development of the preservation-minded Audubon Society. Similarly, the vivid descriptions of early naturalists such as Bertram were highly influential on later thinkers, including Thoreau, whose writings laid a framework for activists such as Muir.

In Thoreau’s writings, as well as Muir’s, we see a distrust of science and, most especially, technology, as it is used in service of development that causes environmental degradation. Thoreau, for example, was critical of technological developments such as the telegraph and the railroad, and was also critical of industrialization, thus anticipating many themes of modern environmentalism (Shabecoff, 2012). His claim was that the telegraph would be constructed, but we would “have nothing important to communicate … As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly” (Thoreau, 1854, p. 307). Among his other conservationist views, his critiques of the telegraph and the railroad suggest a sense of technological development as a hubristic enterprise.

Muir makes the connection between technology and hubris much more explicit. Muir associates technological interventions such as dam building with profit-seeking unrestrained capitalism:

These temple destroyers, devotees of raging commercialism, seem to have perfect contempt for Nature, and instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the Mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar … Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well dam for water-tanks the people’s cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man.

(Muir, 1912; quoted in Opie & Elliot, 1996, p. 28)

The idea that science and technology are associated with hubristic attempts to control nature that was at the center of this debate over Hetch Hetchy is one of the prominent themes that I identify as circulating within contemporary environmental discourses, especially in relation to the use of science.

Similarly, Muir’s own life, and the way he is personified as the avatar of pure preservationism against the more pragmatic Pinchot, is also symbolic of another theme that circulates within environmental discourses: the image or narrative of a heroic scientist who stands up for truth against dominant cultural forces. The Sierra Club argues that “John Muir was a greater American than all but a handful of U.S. Presidents,” in that he “popularized a radically new concept in American land use” (Wood, 1994). Muir famously led Roosevelt on a tour of Yosemite in 1903, although, of course, Muir failed to convince Roosevelt to save Hetch Hetchy, which was excluded from Yosemite National Park (Todd, 2013). Muir is in some senses a template for future scientists who “speak truth to power”: a prominent naturalist who incorporated both geology and botany in his meticulous descriptions of Northern California, he simultaneously relied on science to develop careful descriptions of nature and critiqued science for its contributions to humankind’s tendencies toward the domination of nature.

Throughout the twentieth century, the progress of environmental movements has been punctuated by various tensions already evident in 1903. Mid-century writers such as Aldo Leopold (A Sand County Almanac, 1949) and Rachel Carson (Silent Spring, 1962) argued for the protection of natural spaces, both on their own terms (Leopold, in particular, embodies the conservationist approach advocated by Muir) and for the protection of human health (Carson relies on both arguments). Todd (2013) describes a thirty-year effort to battle smoke and air pollution in the industrial city of Philadelphia, culminating in national smoke regulations in 1946. These struggles mirrored similar fights across the Atlantic in industrial cities including London; such attempts to control air pollution focused primarily on human health and secondarily on aesthetics, with less focus on harms to the natural environment.

Environmental histories point to two events in the 1960s that galvanized Americans to take environmentalism seriously as a political cause: the publication of Silent Spring and the spectacular fire of chemical pollutants in the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland (Egan, 2007; Shabecoff, 2012; Waddell, 2000). Environmental movements were associated with many other counter-culture movements throughout the 1960s, including antinuclear protests and protests against the Vietnam War (Shabecoff, 2012). Although environmental movements became increasingly fractured into more mainstream groups such as the Sierra Club and the National Conservation Fund, and more radical activist groups such as Earth First! and Greenpeace, still, this era saw some major legislative achievements. In 1963, the Clean Air Act was passed, and in 1970, President Richard Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), establishing the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and spawning a new genre through which environmental actions could be taken: the environmental impact statement (Miller, 1984). And in 1980, President Jimmy Carter signed the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, otherwise known as Superfund, establishing both funding and the process required for cleaning up highly contaminated sites. This Act, like the NEPA, also required extensive public notification and participation. These legislative achievements established the framework for a large category of environmental discourses throughout the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

This brief survey of the history of American environmentalism reveals several themes that continue to recur in contemporary environmental discourses. First, from the very beginning, scientific discourses and environmental discourses have been inextricable. From the initial colonization of the Americas by Europeans, naturalists have used scientific or proto-scientific methods to describe and classify new species and represent the new natural environment in which they found themselves. These naturalists, while relying on scientific practices and scientific training to capture and represent nature in their texts, were often the first ones to sound the alarm about species being threatened with extinction because of human activity. So, one of the very early tensions in environmental discourses remains the simultaneous reliance on science and discomfort with technology and innovation, particularly when it is paired with unrestrained capitalism.

Second, starting even before the Antiquities Act of 1906, new regulations have not only generated bureaucratic institutions including the National Park Service, the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and the EPA, but they have also driven the professionalism of various types of experts in environmental science, and they have generated mountains of reports, proposals, action plans, and environmental impact statements. Professional development of expertise, the protection of the environment, and the generation of new genres of written and electronic documents all go hand in hand. While literary works such as William Bartram’s Travels, Audubon’s books and illustrations, Thoreau’s Walden, and E...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Patterns of Scientific Argument in Environmental Discourses
• 2 Scientific Commonplaces in Popular Environmental Writing
• 3 A Grassroots Organization Shapes Its Environment through Digital and Social Means
• 4 Scientific Commonplaces in Data Displays
• 5 Conclusion
• Index