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authorJoe Carstairs <me@joeac.net>2026-06-30 15:47:00 +0100
committerJoe Carstairs <me@joeac.net>2026-06-30 15:47:00 +0100
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-## Conclusion
+## Summary
+
+Green rhetoric is not working. The green movement is going backwards in many of
+its key demands.
+
+Part of the reason for this, as I explored in chapter 1, is that green rhetors
+aren't getting the fundamentals right. By focusing on individual consumption
+choices and science denial, they mis-diagnose the root causes of green harms.
+Their exhortations, apparently delivered to the universal human collective,
+doesn't match up with the interests and powers of their real audiences, namely,
+the Western middle classes. As a result, they end up proposing solutions that
+aren't feasible.
+
+How could green rhetors be more effective? One common suggestion, explored in
+chapter 2, is that green rhetors should avoid the motif of catastrophe, or, in a
+certain sense, 'apocalypse.' Catastrophic rhetoric has been accused of creating
+resignation, despair, apathy, and dismissal, and of killing genuine politics.
+This line of thought, together with the fact that 'apocalypse' is treated as a
+catastrophic symbol in popular culture, leads Frances Flannery to suggest that
+green rhetors should avoid evoking apocalyptic associations.
+
+However, in chapter 3, I argued that the Apocalypse of St. John, the chief
+source of apocalyptic language in the West, was not originally conceived as
+catastrophic, and did not create the aforementioned negative reactions, but
+rather used apocalyptic language as an essential tool in the author's rhetorical
+strategy.
+
+In chapter 4, I went further, and argued that in order to succeed now, green
+rhetors must use similar apocalyptic rhetorical strategies. I did this through
+the case study of arguing for a Green New Deal, arguing that in order to
+convince UK citizens to take the political action necessary to bring a Green New
+Deal about, green rhetors need to use minority cognition, tribulation language,
+and utopian end-time speculation, in similar ways and for similar reasons as
+once applied to St. John.
+
+My analysis has severe limits. As I explored in chapter 1, there are many
+reasons why green rhetoric is too often failing at present, and there's no good
+cause to think that any one solution will fix all. Nor have I made any attempt
+to explain why catastrophic motifs are so consistently reproduced in green
+rhetoric, nor have I provided a feasible means of ensuring that green rhetors
+can and do adopt the apocalyptic strategies I have proposed. In chapter 1, I
+warned that a great deal of contemporary green rhetoric does not successfully
+identify a practical plan of action or the right audience to carry it out: I am
+happy to confess my guilt in the same sin. I have also not given nearly as much
+attention to people who hold millenialist worldviews as I would have liked, and
+they deserve.
+
+What I do claim, is that, in defiance of the many critics of apocalypticism, a
+better green rhetoric would be a more apocalyptic rhetoric, at least in the
+sense that it uses similar rhetorical strategies to those deployed by St. John
+of the Apocalypse.
+
+To put it another way, both St. John and contemporary green rhetors have the
+same rhetorical goal: to motivate an ethic of martyrdom. This puts similar
+constraints on the kinds of rhetorical strategies which will and won't work. To
+better achieve their goals, green rhetors will have to find minority
+epistemologies with which to fight fossil-think, steel their audiences for
+tribulations, and engage in utopian end-time speculation to convince their
+audiences that their potential sufferings are worth enduring. When they do so,
+they will find the path well-trodden by St. John.