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## Introduction
My thesis is that green rhetoric must be apocalyptic as modelled by the biblical
Apocalypse of John.
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,'
or 'environmental,' movement.
In the 1960s, major environmental institutions rapidly gained mass membership,
especially among the Western middle classes, 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].
Waves of legislation followed, protecting clean air, clean water, and wildlife.
From the beginning, one of the central issues of the green movement was nuclear
power. Until the 1980s, nuclear power functioned as the 'master frame' of the
green movement: 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 such as that expressed in the
'Russell-Einstein Manifesto' [@russell-einstein]. Carson argued that 'the most
alarming of all man’s assaults upon the environment' was not nuclear weapons,
but chemicals. Nevertheless, 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 informed citizens on how best to prepare for a nuclear
attack, while secretly preparing for tens of millions of civilians to 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, keep-calm-and-carry-on 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, rhetors invented terms such as 'nuclear winter', 'nuclear
holocaust', 'nuclear apocalypse', and 'nuclear Armageddon', arguing 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 has left its mark. Environmental campaigners still tend to
frame climate change in terms of an impending sudden catastrophe which might
strike at any time: a far better description of nuclear winter than of climate
change [@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.
Green rhetoric is not delivering change.
In the chapters which follow, 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 is too catastrophic, or, in the terms
of some critics, 'apocalyptic.' In contrast, I will argue not only that green
rhetors must continue to use catastrophic language, but they must also draw
deeper on other aspects of apocalyptic language as modelled by John of the
Apocalypse which have been heretofore neglected, if green rhetors are to play
their part in delivering change.
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