path: root/chapter2.md

## Chapter 2

Among the numerous complaints commentators have expressed about catastrophic
green rhetoric, I will examine three in particular. First, it is alleged that
catastrophic language encourages a fatalistic outlook and therefore persuades
audiences that no proposed solution can be credible. Second, catastrophe is
supposed to promote business as usual and shut down critical discourses,
preventing rhetors from proposing truly credible solutions. Third, critics argue
that catastrophic thinking flattens out power relationships and thus
de-politicises green issues, driving rhetors to use the universal 'we' instead of
identifying an appropriate audience. I will examine each of these complaints in
turn, but first I will explore where catastrophic language comes from and how it
ends up featuring in contemporary green rhetoric.

The word 'catastrophe' first entered English through early modern translations
of Greek plays, meaning the denouement of a plot. Through association with
tragedies, it came to acquire connotations of disaster, and in the nineteenth
century, became closely associated with the (now antiquated) 'catastrophic'
theory of geological time, according to which distinct geological epochs were
divided by sudden cataclysmic events. [@oed-catastrophe]

Anti-nuclear campaigners used the word 'catastrophe' to describe the effects of
a nuclear war, echoing this model of geological time, suggesting that a nuclear
war would have such severe, irreversible consequences that it would represent
the next great cataclysm in geological time. In 1964, Tom Stonier wrote that
'even in a century marked by two "total" wars the totality of the catastrophe we
face in the threat of thermonuclear war is barely imaginable'
[@nuclear-disaster, p. 17], before going on to imagine just that, predicting not
only massive death from shockwaves, firestorms and fallout, but also stark
ecological imbalances leading to insect plagues, total destruction of plant life
and soils in many places, and sudden collapses of existing glaciers followed by
extremely cold weather which 'might initiate another ice age'
[@nuclear-disaster, p. 136].

When the green movement switched from a nuclear master frame to one focused on
climate change, the catastrophic language persisted. When Extinction Rebellion
took to the streets of the UK in 2018, this was their message:

> The science is clear – we are in the sixth mass extinction event and we will
> face catastrophe if we do not act swiftly and robustly. [@xr-declaration]

The phrase 'sixth mass extinction event' categorises the present green crisis
alongside the traditional 'big five' mass extinction events of geological
history [@eb-extinctions], remnants of the catastrophic theory of geological
time.

Similarly, Greta Thunberg favours an imminent, catastrophic model of climate
change:

> Around the year 2030, 10 years 252 days and 10 hours away from now, we will be
> in a position where we set off an irreversible chain reaction beyond human
> control, that will most likely lead to the end of our civilization as we know
> it. [@no-one-is-too-small, p. 82]

The word 'apocalypse' is sometimes used as if to stand for 'catastrophe.' Of
course, the vision recounted in the Apocalypse of John has a great deal in
common with the concept of a geological catastrophe. Cosmos-scale world-changing
events destroy the planet's existing life-supporting systems, and institute new
ones in their place. Al Gore, in his influential global warming campaign film,
_An Inconvenient Truth_, was (and remains) typical in the way he describes the
consequences of certain floods and wildfires as 'like a nature hike through the
Book of Revelations' [@inconvenient-truth]. In the next chapter, I will argue
that reducing apocalypse to mere catastrophe misses out important features of
apocalyptic language as exemplified by John, but for now it is worth noting that
some rhetors use allusions to the Apocalypse in order to function as a
catastrophic symbol.

It has been claimed green catastrophism is fatalistic: that the catastrophe is
implicitly inevitable, and therefore no solution a rhetor might propose can ever
be worth pursuing. To be sure, most green rhetors do not explicitly say this;
rather, they tend to say the very opposite, that it is not too late to avert the
catastrophe: that's why we have to act now! The problem is not that green
rhetors _assert_ that the catastrophe is inevitable, but that inevitability is
implicitly packaged into the symbol of 'catastrophe.'

Part of this is due to the geological connotations of 'catastrophe.'
Paleontologists speculate about the causes of historic mass extinctions:
volcanic eruptions, asteroid strikes, cyclical climate fluctuations gone rogue?
One thing's for sure, there's nothing the dinosaurs could have done to stop it.

Some apocalyptic movements and worldviews have also promoted explicit fatalisms.
One notable contemporary movement is the modern pre-millenialist movement in the
USA. Pre-millenialists believe in the 'Rapture,' based on an interpretation of
Thess 4:17: 'then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with
\[the dead in Christ\] in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air.'

While pre-millenialists have been notable for rejecting the traditional
apocalyptic vision of the USA as the New Jerusalem of Rev 21, and therefore been
at times able to point out distortions and injustices belonging to mainstream
American patriotic ideology [@unveiling-empire, pp. 3-15], the pre-millenialist
outlook is inescapably fatalist. As a result, when the 'social gospel' movement
took off in the late nineteenth century, some pre-millenialists condemned the
movement for failing to trust God's plan to redeem the world in the end-times
and trying to redeem the world by inferior and vain human efforts instead
[@unveiling-empire, p. 10]. Wes Howard-Brooke and Anthony Gwyther have observed
this situation, which can seem contradictory to outsiders:

> \[…\] in the 1950s-1970s, pre-millenialists were also taking frequent aim at what
> they saw as other U.S. cultural signs of the approaching End. Among their
> targets were television \[…\], consumerism, advancing technology, changes in
> gender roles in the family and workplace, the advent of the New Age movement,
> rock and roll, and homosexuality. One thing was certainly true about
> premillenialists: they were willing to look American culture in the eye and
> not flinch. Of course, they had no desire to repair the damage or heal the
> wounds; such malignant forces were simply further evidence that the Second
> Coming was getting closer and closer, and hence, the Rapture of the true
> believers. [@unveiling-empire, p. 14]

In the case of the green movement, a fatalistic outlook may, at best, lead to
what Kvandal & Levy call 'ritualistic' behaviours: 'behaviours characterized by
rigidity, compulsion, and goal demotion.' [@kvandal-2025] While this would
struggle to hold up as an adequate account of ritual behaviours in general, the
authors' point is this: green activists who hold a fatalistic outlook feel
compelled to act in rigidly specific ways, even though they don't have a clear
grasp on the practical outcomes of their behaviour.

Calling on the cognitive science of religion, the authors assert that 'there is
a general consensus that human beings tend to ritualize more of their behavior
when they lose agency under conditions of stress, uncertainty, or hazards more
generally.' They note the example of Greta Thunberg sailing across the Atlantic
in a zero-carbon vessel to speak at the United Nations. The huge effort involved
in that act seems disproportionate to the small impact on greenhouse gas
emissions against simply flying to New York instead. Fatalism might lead to
politically productive behaviours, and the authors mention examples of civil
disobedience. But the fact that ritualistic behaviours are severed from
practical outcomes makes it a pretty bad bet:

> By not allowing for hope that the world can be salvaged, this form of social
> activism provides outlets in which activists alleviate anxiety by obtaining a
> (simulated) sense of agency in the face of an uncontrollable threat.
> [@kvandal-2025, p. 701]

Alleviating anxiety is not a bad thing, but it doesn't aim to solve the root
cause of the problem. Juli Gittinger has shown that fatalistic climate narratives
have driven some people in the US to join the 'prepper' movement, accumulating
stockpiles of essential goods, building emergency shelters, learning 'survival
skills,' and collecting weapons to defend your family's patch from desperate
outsiders in the event of social meltdown. [@american-apocalyptic,
see esp. chp. 3, 4] 'Prepper' culture (which
owes its existence to Cold War fears of all-out nuclear war
[@american-apocalyptic, pp. 48-56] and is sometimes also pursued as a result of
certain pre-millenialist beliefs [@unveiling-empire, p. 5]) might be a minority
pursuit, but it is a response to the same apocalyptic storytelling which is a
widespread phenomenon in mainstream American media. This media landscape
neutralises what might have been active concern and transforms it into apathetic
fatalism [@american-apocalyptic, p. 60]. Good rhetoric must persuade its
audience that the proposed solutions are feasible: fatalism persuades the
audience that no solution is feasible at all.

A second problem with catastrophic language is that it is conservative.
For some rhetors, the urgency of the crisis means that
established power structures must be supported to work at full throttle, and we
certainly haven't got time to replace or transform them. But if, as
many political analysts contend, green harms are an inevitable
consequence of business as usual, then such narratives obstruct the
political critique needed to propose a truly credible solution to green
issues. For example, the International Monetary Fund recently reported:

> Aligning capital flows on a low-carbon trajectory has become a critical policy
> objective \[…\] Private finance is key to achieving these objectives, while
> climate and financial policies, such as a transition-oriented climate
> information architecture, are complementary. [@imf-apr-2023, p. 46]

The IMF presumes that massive capital flows can only come from the private
sector, ignoring the fact that many historical economic transformations have been
driven by command-and-control. Tacitly, the IMF assumes that the neoliberal
order, in which governments are held hostage by markets, is permanent and
inevitable. The figure of climate catastrophe functions here to prevent audiences from
imagining a different kind of society. This contributes to the tendency of green rhetors
to propose incredible solutions, such as voluntary austerity, impossible global
agreements, or 'smart' market fixes isolated from a sustainable political
programme.

But perhaps the most vicious criticism of green catastrophism is that since
green catastrophism reverberates strongly with 'Anthropocene' discourses, such
rhetoric ignores social structure and therefore de-politicises green issues.

Anthropocene discourse is catastrophic. The arrival of the Anthropocene means
the end of the Holocene, defined as the time when the climate was hospitable to
the growth of human civilization. The Anthropocene is thus inherently perceived
as a threat to human survival. Critics, meanwhile, lambast such narratives,
accusing them of deploying threats of catastrophe to distract from the
importance of economic structure in driving the climate crisis.

Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg, to take one typical example, argue that the
Anthropocene discourse of climate catastrophe emphasises the 'anthropos', the
universal human subject, implying that social relations within the human species
are relatively unimportant, and what matters is some universal, natural trait of
the biological species, such as greed or the ability to make fire. In reality,
the climate catastrophe is not the result of a biological trait, but an historical
process, and therefore a social structure.

In the views of political philosophers, the present 'post-political' age
encourages a process they call 'de-politicisation' [see e.g. @taskale-2016]. In
this analysis, politics inherently involves contest between interest groups. For
example, when a landlord seeks to increase the rent, they may face contest from
their tenants, in the form of legal appeals or rent strikes. At present,
however, political contests are increasingly de-politicised by means of outside
technocratic experts employed to generate supposedly objectively ideal solutions
through scientific, economic measurements. Conflict is replaced with consensus.

Green catastrophism, because of its Anthropocene tendencies, contributes to
de-politicisation. Anthropocene thinking blinds rhetors to the social
differentiation which grounds political conflict. Rhetors are therefore driven
to use the imaginary universal human 'we' and ignore how humans are in fact
divided into groups with contradictory interests, thus preventing them from
identifying an appropriate audience, a fundamental of successful rhetoric.

In sum, green catastrophism is accused of encouraging a fatalist outlook,
disarming radical discourses in favour of business as usual, and de-politicising
green issues by obscuring the importance of social structure. In all these ways,
catastrophic language in green rhetoric can help explain why green rhetors are
getting the fundamentals of successful rhetoric wrong.