I've just written a new abstract for my upcoming Masters dissertation. Hopefully it shows how my thinking is developing.

(I'm also just really pleased that I managed to write something today. I've been suffering from blank page syndrome.)

Since the 1960s, a political movement has emerged in the West, dominated by the middle classes, seeking to defend the non-human world against human abuse: the green movement. Greens have developed a palette of common rhetorical techniques, which we can call ‘green rhetoric’. Since the 1990s, climate change has become the master frame for green issues, and green rhetoric has been dominated by the narrative of an impending climate catastrophe. However, in that time, most of the movement’s most important demands for social-scale change have not happened: green rhetoric is not working. Some scholars, attempting to explain what’s gone wrong, pinpoint how green rhetoric uses apocalyptic language, and implies that green rhetoric would be more effective were it to be less apocalyptic.  In this dissertation, I argue against this conclusion, and aim to show that, in order to succeed, green rhetoric must become more apocalyptic, not less.
