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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 to 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^[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 \[EVIDENCE\]. Rachel Carson's _Silent Spring_ helped to kick
green rhetoric up to the highest level of politics in the US and other countries
\[EVIDENCE\]. 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
\[EVIDENCE\]. This kind of rhetoric proliferated, and in its wake followed wave
upon wave of legislation \[EVIDENCE\].
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 \[EVIDENCE\].
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 \[EVIDENCE\].
Such rhetoric served to quell resistance to pro-nuclear policies, so those who
opposed those policies attacked this narrative \[EVIDENCE\]. 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 \[EVIDENCE\].
In the 1980s and 1990s, climate change moved in to take over the role of the
green movement's master frame \[EVIDENCE\]. However, the movement's nuclear
heritage left an indelible impression on the way greens talked about climate
change \[EVIDENCE\].
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 recent decades, many of the most important political demands of the green
movement have not been realised, and many scholars have supposed that green
rhetoric is not fulfilling its proper function of delivering change. In this
rest of this dissertation, I will first explore why it might be that green
rhetoric is failing to deliver political change, before exploring in more detail
one particular allegation: green rhetoric isn't working because it is too
apocalyptic. I will argue that this diagnosis is unhelpful and untrue. In
contrast, I will argue not only that green rhetors must continue to use
apocalyptic end-of-the-world language, but that they must draw deeper on other
aspects of apocalyptic language which have been heretofore neglected by green
rhetors, if they are to play their proper part in delivering political change.
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