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## Introduction

My thesis is that green rhetoric would be more successful were it to be more
apocalyptic, not less.

While the word 'rhetoric' is often used to suggest empty or untrustworthy
political speech, my sense is much broader than this. By 'rhetoric', I mean an
utterance with an agenda. A speaker counts as a 'rhetor' in this sense when they
are putting forth language with the intention of causing their audience to make
something happen.

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.].

In the 1960s, major environmental institutions rapidly gained mass membership,
especially among the urban professional middle classes, in many Western nations,
forming the basis of the modern green movement [@sutton-environment, p. 103].
Rachel Carson's _Silent Spring_ caused a huge public controversy over the use of
poison to control alleged environmental threats, and thus helped to kick green
rhetoric up to the highest level of politics in the US and other countries
[@silent-spring, pp. 122-124]. In its wake followed wave upon wave of
legislation. To sample just some of the US federal legislation in the decade
following _Silent Spring_:

- Clean Air Act 1963
- Wilderness Act 1964
- National Environmental Policy Act 1969
- Occupational Safety and Health Act 1970
- Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act 1972

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.

For example, in _Silent Spring_, Carson wrote that 'only within the moment of time
represented by the present century has one species – man – acquired significant
power to alter the nature of his world.' This statement echoed widespread
sentiments about nuclear power. For example, in what became known as the
'Russell-Einstein Manifesto,' eleven eminent scientists including Bertrand
Russell and Albert Einstein appealed to the public to put aside national
security concerns and consider themselves 'only as members of a biological
species,' and warned that nuclear weapons threatened 'universal death'
[@russell-einstein]. Carson argued that 'the most alarming of all man’s assaults
upon the environment' was not nuclear weapons, but chemicals. Nevertheless, in
order to make her point, she adopted an explicitly nuclear framing:

> In this now universal contamination of the environment, chemicals are the
> sinister and little-recognized partners of radiation in changing the very
> nature of the world – the very nature of its life. [@silent-spring, p. 17]

At times, governments, particularly in nuclear-armed NATO states such as the US
and the UK, distributed public information campaigns informing citizens on how
to prepare for a nuclear attack, while secretly preparing in the knowledge that
tens of millions of civilians would be killed directly, probably resulting in a
total breakdown of civil society [@american-apocalyptic, pp. 48-53;
@young-2017; @waller-2026].

In the views of anti-nuclear campaigners, such rhetoric served to quell
resistance to pro-nuclear policies. A CND leaflet from the 1980s asserted that:

> The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament does not wish to belittle the efforts of
> Civil Defence workers who train themselves to help their fellow-citizens in
> distress. Our argument is with the Government which pretends that they can
> save millions if a nuclear war breaks out. They use Civil Defence to delude
> people that Britain could survive an all-out nuclear attack. [@cnd-civil-defence]

To fight back against this rhetoric, rhetors invented terms such as 'nuclear
winter', 'nuclear holocaust', 'nuclear apocalypse', and 'nuclear Armageddon',
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 [see e.g.
@nuclear-winters-tale, chp. 6].

Beginning in the late 1980s, climate change moved in to take over the role of
the green movement's master frame [@rootes-2012]. However, the movement's
nuclear heritage left an indelible impression on the way greens talked about
climate change. Environmental campaigners tended to frame climate change in
terms of an impending sudden catastrophe which might strike at any time: a model
far better suited to the prospect of nuclear winter than that of climate change
unfolding over decades and centuries [@ertelt-2018, pp. 25-38]. In 1990,
Margaret Thatcher described the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
as an 'early warning system' [@thatcher-1990-05-15]. The Greenpeace Report on
global warming of the same year noted that 'even nuclear-weapons laboratories
host conferences on the greenhouse effect these days' [@greenpeace-report, p. 1]
and concluded in response to what it called the 'greenhouse threat' that 'the
prospects of future environmental security being compromised by global warming
are now so real as to make adoption of a precautionary response imperative – in
other words, policy should focus on buying insurance' [@greenpeace-report, p.
460].

This is where green rhetoric stands today. 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 the motif of catastrophe most strongly associated
with apocalyptic, but 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.