path: root/chapter0.md

## 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 [@sutton-environment, p. 103]. Rachel Carson's _Silent Spring_
caused a huge public controversy 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]. 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. Just to give a flavour just of US federal legislation in the decade
following _Silent Spring_:

- Clean Air Act 1963
- Wilderness Act 1964
- National Emissions Standards Act 1965
- 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. Strontium 90, released
> through nuclear explosions into the air, comes to earth in rain or drifts down
> as fallout, lodges in soil, enters into the grass or corn or wheat grown
> there, and in time takes up its abode in the bones of a human being, there to
> remain until his death. Similarly, chemicals sprayed on croplands or forests
> or gardens lie long in soil, entering into living organisms, passing from one
> to another in a chain of poisoning and death. Or they pass mysteriously by
> underground streams until they emerge and, through the alchemy of air and
> sunlight, combine into new forms that kill vegetation, sicken cattle, and work
> unknown harm on those who drink from once-pure wells. [@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]. The word choice – 'threat,' 'security,' 'insurance' – all coheres better
with the mental model of an impending instantaneous event than an epoch of
gradual and persistent change.

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.

## TODO

- Evidence: environmental movement attracted middle-class members in the 1960s