Communicating Environmental Patriotism

A Rhetorical History of the American Environmental Movement

Anne Marie Todd

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134075461
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

Environmental patriotism, the belief that the national environment defines a country's greatness, is a significant strand in twentieth century American environmentalism. This book is the first to explore the history of environmental patriotism in America through the intriguing stories of environmental patriots and the rhetoric of their speeches and propaganda,

The See America First movement began in 1906 with the aim of protecting and promoting the landscapes of the American West. In 1908, Gifford Pinchot and President Theodore Roosevelt hosted the White House Conservation Conference to promote the wise use of natural resources for generations of Americans. In 1912, Pittsburgh's smoke investigation condemned the effects of coal smoke on the city's environment. In World War II, a massive propaganda effort mobilized millions of Americans to plant victory gardens to save resources for the war abroad. While these may not seem like crucial moments for the American environmental movement, this new history of American environmentalism shows that they are linked by patriotism.

The book offers a provoking critique of environmentalists' communication strategies and suggests patriotism as a persuasive hook for new ways to make environmental issues a national priority. This original research should be of interest to scholars of environmental communication, environmental history, American history and environmental philosophy.

1 Introduction

This book responds to American apathy toward the escalating global environmental crisis. Every day, we read about new evidence of alarming environmental destruction. Staggering consumption in the global north and devastating poverty in the global south besieges biodiversity.¹ Every twenty minutes a species becomes extinct,² leading Richard Leakey to call this the Sixth Extinction.³ The “cumulative effects” of the “extraction and conversion of both fossil fuels and nonfossil energies, industrial production, and rapid urbanization” have caused “destabilizing global biospheric change.”⁴ The Larsen B ice shelf in Antarctica, a harbinger of climate change, has shrunk 85 percent since 1995 (the year when Larsen A collapsed into the ocean).⁵ Glacial melting contributes to sea-level rise that will likely reach 0.8–2.0 meters by 2100.⁶ At the low end, this will flood thirteen thousand square miles of the United States,⁷ including New York City’s 520 miles of waterfront.⁸ Already vulnerable coastal communities can expect more storms like Hurricane Katrina.⁹ Preparation for and cleanup after these storms will cost billions.¹⁰ Meanwhile, the Southwest United States will experience “mega droughts” much more prolonged than the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, as part of a “permanent drying” beginning in 2050.¹¹ March 2012 was the warmest March on record for the United States and other countries, breaking fifteen thousand heat records.¹² The summer of 2012 brought extreme droughts that were natural disasters—devastating crops and water supplies. By 2025, two-thirds of the world’s population will face a scarcity of fresh, clean drinking water. Already, a child dies every eight seconds from waterborne illness.¹³ The impacts of thirst will be felt soonest in “hot stains,” regions already running out of drinking water, such as Northern China, large swaths of Africa, Australia and the Midwestern United States.¹⁴

This is the planet we have made.¹⁵ Americans throw away 25 billion Styrofoam cups each year and 2.5 million plastic bottles every hour.¹⁶ We have created an area in the Pacific Ocean, twice the size of the continental United States, where the water is more plastic than natural.¹⁷ The world consumes almost ninety million barrels of oil every day; the United States almost twenty million of that.¹⁸ Many environmental scientists warn that such fossil fuel consumption has brought us to the tipping point in our effect on the nation’s climate systems.¹⁹ The International Energy Agency contends that there is a narrow window for altering our fossil fuel infrastructure before the moment to combat climate change is “lost forever.”²⁰

While there is general agreement that the scale of the climate crisis requires system-wide change, individuals are called upon again and again to “do our part.” Take for example a Nissan Leaf advertisement featuring a polar bear that travels from the Arctic just to give a hug of thanks to a driver of this electric car. Or consider public service announcements that proclaim that individuals can “power off” climate change with the flip of a switch. We encounter similar messages daily where we live, work and play. But these messages are not working. Fewer Americans perform individual conservation tasks than five years ago.²¹ Since 2010, “American public opinion on climate and environmental issues has gone through what may be a historic, negative shift.”²² So why, given the ubiquity of environmental messages, are Americans so apathetic about the growing environmental crisis?

To address this question, consider the phrase “think globally act locally,” a mainstay of American environmentalism for decades. This phrase has global roots: Scottish city planner Patrick Geddes originated this phrase in his 1915 book Cities in Evolution. There he argued that “local character” is not “old-world quaintness,” but is achieved only in consideration of “the whole environment, and in active sympathy with the essential and characteristic life of the place concerned.”²³ Geddes’s point that a sense of the local is only properly understood in a broader context is now commonly understood as the concept of an “ecosystem,” though that term would not be coined for another twenty years.²⁴

American environmentalists often attribute “think globally act locally” to David Brower, leader of environmental groups including the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, League of Conservation Voters and the Earth Island Institute.²⁵ In 1966, Brower led the Sierra Club’s successful campaign to prohibit dams in the Grand Canyon, although it prompted his ousting and nearly bankrupted the Club.²⁶ Brower then founded the international organization Friends of the Earth with the conviction a global response was necessary to stem the “cirrhosis of the environment,” arguing that “DDT knows no bounds, and neither does pollution.”²⁷ “Think globally act locally” rhetorically responded to the growing problem of transboundary pollution.

Others credit René Dubos with authoring the phrase. Dubos was a French-born American microbiologist, environmentalist and advisor to the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in 1972. In “The Despairing Optimist,” Dubos argued that real progress should not be identified by a blind faith in technology, but should be defined by human values.²⁸ In an interview where he first used the phrase, Dubos laid out an ecological wisdom, noting, “It’s very good to think about problems in a global way, I think it is a good intellectual exercise, but the only way where you can do something is in your own locality. So think globally, but act locally. If you cannot do something about that stream or those lovely marshlands in your town, then how do you think you are going to save the globe?”²⁹ A scientist whose practice of communicating to the public was notable at the time, Dubos lectured on local environmental effects such as urban pollution, telling audiences: “Cultivate your garden. And then after that, you can perhaps think on the larger scale about global problems.”³⁰ Only One Earth, his 1972 report to the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm written with Barbara Ward, inspired the motto for the conference, which marked the birth of the United Nations Environment Programme. The report advocated for “care and maintenance of a small planet”³¹ and offered a prescient view of today’s climate crisis, arguing that “it only takes the smallest movement at its fulcrum to swing a seesaw out of the horizontal [but] … the effects are global and catastrophic.”³² “Think globally act locally” continues to inspire and progressive pundits readily repeat this quote to urge action on climate change.

Yet, the diverse origin stories of “think globally act locally” are lost in the bright green maxim plastered on fenders and tote bags.³³ Such sloganeering obscures the complex history and meaning of this phrase, short-circuiting other, more meaningful calls for action. This illustrates environmentalists’ broader communication problem. First, it is immobilizing to place the onus on individual action to solve the environmental crisis. A range of social, cognitive and institutional barriers explain America’s reluctance to engage in civic action on climate change.³⁴ Stressing the grand scale of the problem while arguing for individual action creates a disconnect that encourages people to think individual efforts are meaningless. “Changing one light bulb will not make a difference, but the cumulative impact of every American household changing one light bulb is surprisingly large.”³⁵ Many of us, in fact, have changed our light bulbs but these small changes have not had the “cumulative impact” for which we might hope. Placing the impetus for action on the individual debilitates a comprehensive response to the global environmental crisis.

Second, “think global act local” asserts a binary separation between our lived experience and global context. Linguist George Lakoff notes that we cannot think globally because global causes and risks are “systemic, not local. The localization of causation and risk is what has brought about our twin disasters [of economic and ecological meltdown]. We have to think in global, systems terms and we don’t do so naturally.”³⁶ Part of the reason we cannot think in these terms is because ever-expanding global markets teach us not to. Global corporations successfully emulate and reinterpret our local experiences through product localization, the strategy of adapting products to appeal to a demographic or region. McDonald’s offers a variety of culturally sensitive burgers: in India, the McAloo Tiki made from potatoes and peas and the Maharaja Mac made of mutton and chicken are bestsellers. The company now offers the salmon McLaks burger in Norway, and in Morocco, a localized version of the McArabia grilled chicken sandwich served on flatbread.³⁷ In China, KFC’s chicken grows spicier farther inland.³⁸ Nestle offers nineteen flavors of its Kit Kat bar in Japan to appeal to regional tastes. These include yubari melon, green beans and cherries in the northern regions, red potatoes and yuzu fruit in the south, and blueberry and soybean in Tokyo. Miso, soy sauce and green tea flavors are popular throughout, and when Nestle discovered that the Japanese name for the chocolate bar, Kitto Katsu, means “surely win,” it had great success marketing the candy as a good luck gift for students taking college entrance exams.³⁹ Now, “think global act local” is a marketing tool that global systems use to define our daily lives.

Our most basic relationship with the environment—the consumption of natural resources—is invisible in a global economy where international systems of production, distribution and communication hide the processes by which we extract and use resources. These systems of distribution and consumption make it difficult to reconcile our lived experience with the infrastructure of industry, the networks of global commerce. Thus, the appeal to “think global and act local” does not resonate because systems of distribution and consumption are made remote by design: we do not see how our iPods get made. By asserting individuals as change agents, we risk atomizing ourselves from the larger processes of which we are a part and discouraging institutional change. Calls for personal conservation to support global ideals disconnect individuals from their local context, casting global action as impossible and rendering local thought ineffective.

Third, “think global act local” distinguishes between thinking and acting, suggesting we should think one way and act another. The slogan creates a separation of thought from action, so that thinking becomes at once “enough” and “too much.” At best, it is enough to think global: this is the marketing mentality of web-based activism that favors global tracking of members through “clicks” or “likes” often at the expense of encouraging deep commitments from these individuals in their own communities. At worst, thinking global prevents us from acting local because we are caught up in never ending debates about the effects of our actions. We hesitate at the grocery store when asked “paper or plastic?” The effect of our choice is not clear: the life of the bag is invisible so we see neither its production nor its disposal. Urged to “make a difference” we are paralyzed because we cannot see what difference our actions make. Our lives are filled with well-meaning actions, but we cannot consider the broader implications of these activities.

By disconnecting thinking from acting, “think global act local” fails to mobilize action on the environment. A focus on the results of individual actions eclipses the interconnectedness at the root of Dubos’ “ecological view” that any organism “could be understood only in the context of the relationships it forms with everything else.”⁴⁰ The phrase masquerades as an ethical claim, but because it does not connect (global) knowledge with (local) action, it does not provide a moral framework to help us consider the value or moral worth of our decisions. Ethically informed choices emerge from an understanding not just of the effects of our actions but of the way our actions constitute the world in which we act. “Think global act local” divorces thinking from acting, short-circuiting attempts to consider individual actions within a global context. Environmental advocates would do well to reconsider this rhetorical strategy.

We have a communication problem. It is not merely a question of how we might effectively communicate an environmental ethic on a bumper sticker. It is important to consider how we create and deliver messages, but the more fundamental issue is how we think about communication—specifically, how we think about rhetoric. Most often, this term is used dismissively, as in “that’s just rhetoric.” This dismissal sees rhetoric as simply a gesture—a flourish that has no bearing on the matter at hand. As the art of persuasion— Aristotle defined rhetoric as the best available...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• 2. See America First and aesthetic patriotism
• 3. Early conservationists and new patriotism
• 4. Smoke abatement and civic patriotism
• 5. World War II conservation and wartime patriotism
• 6. The decline of environmental patriotism in America
• 7. Conclusions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index