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 ## Introduction
+
+My thesis is that green rhetoric would be more successful were it to be more
+apocalyptic, not less. In order for this claim to be coherent, 'green rhetoric'
+must denote a real thing: some real set of language-events. Furthermore, 'green
+rhetoric' must be more than an arbitrary set of language-events, with nothing
+more binding them together than my own imagination: green rhetoric must display
+some shared linguistic characteristics and agendas. Else making claims about its
+linguistic characteristics, or identifying when it would or wouldn't be
+'successful', would be incoherent. So, let me do just that.
+
+By 'green rhetoric', I'm referring, of course, to a kind of rhetoric. While the
+word 'rhetoric' is often used to suggest empty or untrustworthy political
+speech, my sense is much broader than this. By 'rhetoric', I simply mean an
+utterance with an agenda. A speaker counts as a 'rhetor', and is producing
+'rhetoric', just when they are putting forth an utterance (or writing, or
+non-verbal communication) with the intention of causing their audience make
+something happen as a result of their utterance. 'Rhetoric' in this sense is a
+very broad category of language. A politician making a speech, of course, might
+count as a rhetor, but so might a military officer issuing an order, or a lover
+seducing their partner to bed, or a friend texting to a group chat: 'pub quiz
+tn?'
+
+By 'green', I am narrowing down that very broad category to specifically the
+political rhetoric belonging to a particular historical situation: the green
+movement[^1].
+
+[1]: We could use a range of epithets in the place of 'green': environmental,
+conservation, nature, wilding, re-wilding, climate, ecological, to name but a
+few. For the purposes of this dissertation, I will prefer the name 'green' to
+refer to this movement and the closely-related cluster of issues which these
+names represent.
+
+The green movement began in the 1960s. Major institutions rapidly gained mass
+membership, especially among the urban professional middle classes, in many
+Western nations. Rachel Carson's _Silent Spring_ helped to kick green rhetoric
+up to the highest level of politics in the US and other countries. Carson made
+use of well-established forms of language which distinguished between 'nature'
+and 'civilisation', and called on her audience to protect pristine nature from
+the clutches of corrupting civilisation. This kind of rhetoric proliferated, and
+in its wake followed wave upon wave of legislation.
+
+From the beginning, one of the central issues of the green movement was nuclear
+power.
+
+Throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, nuclear power functioned as the dominant
+'master frame' of the green movement, so that all other green issues tended to
+be framed in nuclear terms.
+
+At times, governments attempted to persuade their citizens that a nuclear war
+could be fought and won, even though they knew this wasn't true. Such rhetoric
+served to quell resistance to pro-nuclear policies, so those who opposed those
+policies attacked this narrative. To do this, rhetors invented terms such as
+'nuclear winter', 'nuclear holocaust', 'nuclear apocalypse', and 'nuclear
+Armageddon', while attempting to persuade their audiences that a nuclear war
+would bring about the end of the world, and must therefore be avoided at all
+costs.
+
+In the 1980s and 1990s, climate change moved in to take over the role of the
+green movement's master frame. However, the movement's nuclear heritage left an
+indelible impression on the way greens talked about climate change.
+
+So, for the last three decades, the green movement has overwhelmingly framed
+climate change in terms of an impending catastrophe which would bring about the
+end of the world.
+
+This, then, is green rhetoric. Green rhetoric is that produced by people
+associated with the green movement in order to bring about solutions to that
+movement's issues. The green movement, in turn, is a predominantly urban,
+professional middle-class Western political movement which emerged in the 1960s
+to protect 'nature' against the encroachment of 'civilisation', and which has
+now adopted climate change as a 'master frame' for its issues.
+
+In this rest of this dissertation, I will \[TODO\]