A material fact about human experience on Earth is that we are, mostly, confined to a terrestrial existence. Unless we make a living at sea as merchants, fishers, or voyagers, our experiences with aquatic territories tend to be far more limited than those on land. Yet, with water covering three quarters of the Earth’s surface and with our own bodies mostly composed of this material, our very existence is much more fluid than we might, at first, perceive. As environmentalist Rachel Carson once remarked, this fluidity connects us to ecologies across time and space:
To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh, to watch the flight of shore birds that have swept up and down the surf lines of the continents for untold thousands of years, to see the running of the old eels and the young shad to the sea, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be. 1
Of course, while Carson’s ecological attunement was novel and persuasive for her particular audiences, indigenous inhabitants of what is now known as North America have long cultivated sensibilities to the mutual permeability of ecosystems and bodies. 2 The Nez Perce, for instance, practice weyekin, or embodied listening, by which they ground themselves in their lived environments, sensing deeply, searching for resonance among bodily and natural rhythms, and finding ways to mimic those rhythms through bodily performance. 3 For Blackfeet people listening is a communicative act that can open “deeply significant consultations with non-human spirits and powers that are active in the world.” 4 And for Penobscot natives, narratives of the river reposition the order of time—as Penobscot elder Butch Phillips explains, “Most stories usually began with simply ‘a long time ago’ and events that happened hundreds of years ago might be interpreted by the listener to have taken place during the elder’s lifetime.” 5 Here, embodied listening and storytelling attune to an interactional ecology spanning time and space, in practices that indigenous communities have maintained in the face of centuries of colonial effort to marginalize them.
Following these and countless other examples, this book explores how ecological care and ecological attunement can be cultivated in tandem. Like Carson’s attunement, first to the sea and then to the devastating effects of biocides, the chapters in this volume have been, in different ways, shaped by the perceived fragility of earth’s living and non-living systems at a critical moment in the planet’s material history. On a daily basis the intensification of contemporary capitalism is eroding our ability to depend on the very substances with which we subsist. Our entrapment in the material logic of fossil fuel economies and transportation systems has us trenching the earth to pipe oil through watersheds and ecosystems. The pesticide use Carson protested advances on a vast scale, in conjunction with disproportionate cancer rates and the decimation of bee colonies. Mass deforestation continues to satiate land development and meat consumption; the circulation of plastics outlasts the year of their production more than ten-fold; and oceanic vitality is dampened by thick sheens of oil and waves of plastic debris. 6 Through all this resounds our undeniable, but much denied, mass alteration of the world’s climate. 7 Today‚ our material, ecological interdependencies are felt across scales, with scientists sounding notes still more apocalyptic than Carson’s. 8
Meanwhile, modes of addressivity have been evolving. While recent years have seen a rise in mass actions, from Occupy, to Standing Rock, to Black Lives Matter, the effects are often more energeic than institutional: these efforts have resulted in complex networks of coalitional investments and sparked new approaches to resistance, with participants shifting from rhetorics of protest to rhetorics of occupation, mattering, and protection. In these diverse venues, water is championed as part of native land rights, men don pink ribbons alongside women marchers, and hashtags decorate bodies, protest signs, and sidewalks. Movements for change, in short, are becoming more ecological—more mobile, micro, coalitional, and hybrid. And with this, a space is opening for greater ecological care.
Scholarship in rhetorical studies and environmental communication offers rich potential for affirming this opening, yet this potential has not been fully realized. In seeking entryways for reckoning with today’s myriad crises, environmental communication scholars have valued the ecological perspectives of scientists, indigenous elders, activists, and many others. From environmental communication scholarship we have learned how ecological attunement enables deep engagement with, and care for, the natural and human worlds. Meanwhile, in rhetorical theory, richly ecological perspectives have been forwarded to explore connections between interdependency and addressivity. In the process, rhetoric as traditionally conceived has become more networked, material, hybrid, immersive, and consequently dynamic. However, those developments have not always made connections to ecological care, and they have often been isolated from one another via rhetoric’s institutional divides across speech and writing.
The purpose of the current volume is to entangle these often independent lines of ecological thinking in order to advance an ecological approach to care. In Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s terms, care is “a living terrain” and “a thick, non-innocent requisite of collective thinking in interdependent worlds” wherein vibrant attachments among people and things can take root. 9 Seeking to enrich the “living terrain” of ecological care in rhetorical studies, we gather diverse contributors from environmental communication, environmental rhetoric, rhetoric, communication, composition, and environmental studies. Our chapters unfold ecological approaches in contact with a range of contemporary exigencies, including climate change, nuclear testing and waste, oceanic pollution and acidification, immigration politics, community activism, local foodways, river dams, and fossil fuel dependency. 10 Together these chapters reveal how ecological orientations to our tactics of intervention, modalities of investment, and approaches to human-nonhuman well-being enrich our capacities to care for and with the world. Although there is surely room for more inter- and intradisciplinary diversification, especially connecting with indigenous and non-Western approaches, the current collection makes an important first step in situating the ecology as a productive trope for such connective, collective work. In this, we are not seeking to produce a unified notion of the ecological. Indeed, the trope of the ecology is neither singular nor static—rather it is itself ecological or tropic, “continuously reconfigured through repetition and difference, expressing rhetoric’s creative potential.” 11 The diversity across the chapters as contributors variously engage with rhetoric becoming ecological and ecology becoming rhetorical, as Nathan Stormer describes in the Afterword, is both intentional and tensional. What we mean by this is that the shifting, and sometimes conflicting, notions of rhetoric and ecology across the chapters is an enactment of the stochasticity that drives creative change. Our hope is that this volume will catalyze further ecological turnings in ways that engage rhetoric’s human and nonhuman participants in a richer milieu of care.
To set the stage for this project, this introduction takes a moment to look back at the recent history of rhetorical studies and environmental communication, tracing the emergence of several complementary but fairly disparate ecological “turns.” We trace these turns genealogically and tropically—not only to describe or even re-describe them, but also to participate in their ongoing turning. As Diane Keeling reminds us, the “‘same’ bodies of work” produce different turns and tropes, and here we encounter key works with a heightened attunement to their ecological tendencies. 12 In the spirit of genealogy, we follow these tendencies not as linear paths forged by intending authors, but rather as overdetermined orientations emergent from diverse concepts, practices, and objects of study. We also turn these paths in new directions, angling them to unfamiliar audiences and prompting their entanglement. Individually and together, our genealogies show the possibility of being more ecological than we are and also reveal how ecological we have always been. 13
The ecological turns we identify coincide with a larger turning in recent interdisciplinary work that embraces ecology as distinct from environment. In the next section (“Ecological Matters”), we first explore this distinctive sense of the ecological via recent “new materialisms.” Then, in “Rhetoric’s Ecological Turns,” we trace the emergence of resonant ecological approaches to rhetoric that largely predate discussions of new materialism. We do not (and could not) comprehensively cover rhetoric’s many ecological trajectories‚ but rather articulate three genealogical paths as initial provocations:
- 1.The development of models of “constitutive rhetoric” in the past several decades of communication scholarship, especially as they have sparked ecological attunements through discussions of articulation and transhum...