path: root/chapter4.md

## Chapter 4

In the previous three chapters, I've explored how and why contemporary green
rhetoric is too often failing, and discussed the particular criticism of the use
of catastrophic language. In the previous chapter, I argued that these
criticisms of catastrophic language do not apply to the use of apocalyptic
language in the most important model of apocalyptic rhetoric in Western
literature, namely, the Apocalypse of John. Now, in this chapter, I aim to
show that in order for green rhetoric to succeed, it should imitate the
apocalyptic rhetorical strategies of the Apocalypse discussed in the previous chapter.

What kinds of action might a green rhetor feasibly seek to evoke addressing a
mass audience in the UK? As in the major economic transformations of the early
twentieth century and post-war era, industrial action could play a crucial role,
although legal restrictions on union activity and the de-industrialised nature
of the UK economy constrain what industrial action can achieve. Alongside
industrial action, people in the UK can join political parties, where they can
shape policies by engaging in internal politics, by voting for candidates for
election, and by standing for election themselves. They can also vote in general
elections, ultimately pressuring the government into prioritising green issues.
In order to increase momentum behind the green movement, they can join protest
groups such as Extinction Rebellion. They can also take direct action, such as
the campaign of non-compliance which forced the repeal of the poll tax in 1990.

Notably, all of these actions may be difficult for those called to take part in
them. Getting involved in politics in any but the most trivial capacity requires
giving up evenings and weekends: annoying for, say, a Masters student, but
potentially a major sacrifice for an exhausted parent working a full-time job.
Standing for election could be costly to your relationships, and expose you to
ridicule and abuse. Protesting or taking direct action could get you arrested.
Organising your workplace could get you fired. Meanwhile, the benefits of a
major green transformation stand far off, and remain largely outside your
control. The call must then be to make a sacrifice for what is good, even if,
paradoxically, it costs you.

This is, in John Collin's terms, an 'ethic for martyrdom.' So, could John's
apocalyptic rhetorical strategies be of use in motivating UK citizens to take
political actions to advance the causes of the green movement?

First of all, catastrophism ought to be deployed in a way which exposes the
evil of present systems and leaves open the possibility of resistance. Nicholas
Beuret uses catastrophic language to expose the falsity, as he sees it, of
'climate transition' rhetoric, and motivate his audience to 'disrupt' that green
transition:

> The impacts \[of climate change\] will be terrible. Already at somewhere
> around 1.5°C the world is suffering an adaptability crisis, with some areas
> becoming barely habitable. At 3°C, deserts and arid zones will spread,
> rainfall will become unreliable and scarce in many places (or torrential in
> others); heat will make whole regions brutally hostile to life during the day.
> All of this will put massive strains on existing infrastructure and services.
> Breakdown will become an everyday experience, rendering more places barely
> livable.
>
> \[…\]
>
> While we know that government isn't coming to save us, we also need to
> understand that no disaster will come to save us. There is no hope to be found
> in fantasies of collapse. There are no easy victories to be claimed. Instead
> we must focus on the hard work of organising, and take courage from each
> other. We must grasp hold of the transition, to reshape it to our ends. We
> must become the climate disruption: the disaster to their plans.
> [@beuret-2025, pp. 201-202]

Beuret's catastrophism functions to expose the evil of the existing system,
show the gravity of the situation, and motivate his audience to resistance.
However, we showed in the previous chapter that John's apocalypticism goes far
beyond catastrophe. While the particular kind of minority cognition favoured by
John -- that is, direct testimony imparted by a divine authority -- may be
unpersuasive to many UK citizens, minority cognition is still necessary.

Recall that, as Thompson [@thompson-revelation] argued, John needed to use
minority cognition in order to resist the overwhelming weight of the majority
epistemology of Greek society, which would have pressed his audience into
submission to the imperial cult. Likewise, in our society, there are
empire-like forces constantly reinforcing dominant epistemologies, and among
these is the fossil fuel industry.

The fossil fuel industry has consistently employed the same PR contractors and
even scientific researchers as the tobacco industry in their efforts to use
science to defend their profits [@hulac-jul-2016]. They have also used the same
strategies, including manufacturing scientific controversy, 'information
laundering' through think-tanks, and providing financial support to scientists
who promote views in line with their interests [@smoke-mirrors-hot-air]. Fossil
fuel companies have used balancing norms in journalism to demand an equal public
hearing for climate sceptics over their opponents, creating a public impression
that the experts are divided on the reality of human-caused climate change or
the urgency of the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions [@leah-2011, pp.
204-208]. Fossil fuel companies have obscured their involvement in their own
strategies by funneling their money through legal vehicles called 'donor
foundations,' which give their money to think-tanks on their behalf while
protecting their anonymity [@brulle-2014]. When climate sceptics don't leave a
paper trail tracing their money back to the fossil fuel companies who benefit
from the promotion of their views, they are much harder to refute, particularly
in cultures like the UK and US which place a high value on the freedom of speech.

Therefore, as long as the fossil fuel industry has significant power, the
majority epistemology of our society cannot help but be partially shaped by
fossil fuel interests. To escape fossil-think requires minority cognition.

This has precedents even within the green movement. In the view of Linda Lear,
the effect of _Silent Spring_, Rachel Carson's damning exposé on the chemical
industry, was to not only bring about regulation, but end an era of
unquestioning trust in government agencies and chemical companies. She exposed
that they hadn't done their homework or had lied. In a Cold War context,
questioning the techno-scientific-industrial authorities could be perceived as
traitorous. Chemical companies fought hard against her, sued the publishers to
try and prevent it being published, then spent a quarter of a million dollars on
an aggressive publicity campaign against her. She was attacked for being
'emotional' and an 'hysterical woman.' The fact she had published novels was
cited as evidence that she couldn't be a real scientist, and her literary
writing style as evidence that what she was writing couldn't be real science.
Carson had no PhD, no academic institution, and no network of scientific
colleagues to back her up. [@silent-spring, pp. 122-124]

To fight the chemical industry, Carson had to adopt minority epistemology. So,
alongside her considerable arsenal of traditional scientific facts, she included
in her book historical facts based on lived experience, with no attempt to fit
them into clearly-defined quantifiable metrics in the scientific style favoured
by the chemical industry. One unforgettable example was her report of a
parathion poisoning incident. First, agricultural workers who had sprayed
parathion on crops fell sick. After that, the physicians who treated them fell
sick too. Finally, the same illness struck the hospital staff who had washed the
patients' clothes. [@silent-spring, p. 27]

Like John, Carson was also forced to undermine the chemical industry's majority
epistemology. In _Silent Spring_, she showed how the chemical industry funded
the same science which enabled its profits. She undermined their conceptual
frameworks, arguing that the use of words like 'pesticide' and 'insecticide'
function to mask the truth that the chemicals involved are in fact poisons. And
she showed how the chemical lobby used science to dismiss valid first-hand
experiences and impose their solutions on people against their interests and
expressed desires. For instance, she told the story of Joseph Sweeny, a forestry
official in Ohio, who, in opting for a targeted approach to containing dutch elm
disease rather than blanket poisoning, had to go against the advice of the
chemical companies, the universities, and the US Department of Agriculture
[@silent-spring, p. 57].

More recently, Sunita Narain, a veteran of India's environmental regulator, the
Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), has written about the CSE's attempts
to regulate air pollution, junk food, greenhouse gas emissions, protection of
wildlife, and waste management, among other issues. Interests fought them in the
courts, in the legislative process, and in the public square.

> The fact is that every issue is contested because of conflicts of interest. It
> is contested because it is the contest of ideas and the contest of realities.
> To engage in this contest requires research and an ability to stand against
> the stated truth—or what I have called the established fact. \[…\] We had to
> fight the 'established' science of diesel in our fight for clean air; the
> 'established' science of pesticides in our work on toxins and food safety; the
> 'established' science of conservation in our effort to bring a new way to
> manage wildlife so that people also benefit. [@conflicts-of-interest, pp. x-xi]

If green rhetors today want to persuade their audiences,
they're going to have to fight the majority epistemology, held firmly in place
by fossil interests. To do that, they'll need to exploit minority cognition,
undermining the epistemologies that best serve fossil interests and finding
alternatives which oppose them.

The second feature of John's rhetoric I considered was the theme of
tribulations. Just as John's audience stood to lose out if they resisted the
imperial cult, UK citizens stand to lose out, in time, money, and friends, if
they take political action for a greener future. If audiences are to understand
how such a sacrifice could be good for them, they will need to see that their
sacrifices are not meaningless, but part of a much larger context. Ann Pettifor,
in her book arguing for her version of a Green New Deal, shows this green
tribulation rhetoric in action:

> For change to happen, both courage and leadership will be essential. As I
> write this, the people of Hong Kong have assembled in their millions to
> challenge the extraordinary power of the Chinese government. In light of the
> history of Chinese protest, that takes guts. During the April 2019 Extinction
> Rebellion demonstrations, Farhana Yamin, an international climate lawyer and
> diplomat, defiantly charged through a police line and superglued her hands to
> the pavement outside the London HQ of oil company Shell. For a woman of her
> distinction and reputation, that took courage. Yamin was not alone. Hundreds
> of ordinary people demonstrated courage. They sacrificed personal lives,
> livelihoods and relationships to endure arrest and draw attention to the fact
> that humanity is facing an unprecedented global emergency.
> [@pettifor-gnd, p. 109]

Finally, the third feature of John's rhetoric I examined was his end-time
speculation. This is already so much a part of green rhetoric that it has led
to considerable meta-discussion already, particularly on the relative merits of
utopian against dystopian schemas [@green-utopias; @forget-me-not, Epilogue]. I
have already examined one example from _The Future We Choose_
[@future-we-choose]. Green rhetors seem to find it irresistible to speculate on
where this might all end, for good or ill. Even the Cold-War-inspired total
catastrophism is one perspective on the end times.

John, like all biblical apocalypticists, affirms a utopian end-time. As I
discussed in the previous chapter, this is important to his rhetorical goals.
There is no use pointing to a dystopia, or (perhaps worse still) concluding
that we can't really be certain what the ultimate future holds. Such
conclusions would create doubt and fear amongst his audience, and suggest to
them that keeping your head down and submitting to the imperial ideology might
be a safer wager than risking everything on a God who might not be willing or
able to save those who love him. Instead, John, pointing to God's
all-encompassing sovereignty and justice, makes a redemptive end appear
irresistible, thus encouraging his audience to bet the house on Jesus.

Green rhetors ought to take note of this. A few mainstream rhetors have expressed
pessimism about the end, but the dominant motif is uncertainty. _The Future We
Choose_ makes this clear from the very title. In _Forget Me Not_, Sophie
Pavelle insists that although she could conclude either with a dystopian vision
or a utopian vision, she refuses to do either, because the scientific evidence
does not warrant either conclusion [@forget-me-not, Epilogue].

This won't do, as should be obvious from the foregoing. If there are no
scientifically valid utopian visions for the future of planet Earth, then green
rhetors must have unscientific visions instead. John faced a similar challenge,
and likewise adopted a minority epistemology -- an eschatological vision -- in
order to convince his audience that the good fight was worth fighting.

Many advocates of the Green New Deal concept show how eschatological speculation
can work rhetorically even within strictly secular limits, including the
self-branded eco-socialist scholar and activist, Max Ajl:

> Imagine a world of cities with mottled yards full of chestnut, pecan, or
> breadfruit trees, below them perennial raspberry bushes or the dusky crimson
> and pale yellow of pomegranates, trellises wrapped in grapes and squash, and
> lower, lifting out from healthy obsidian soil, a palette of landrace tomatoes
> and peppers. Roofs are coated with patterned raised beds. Side-yards feature
> fishponds, which receive all kinds of manure, fattening up their inhabitants.
> \[_…etc ad nauseam_\] [@ajl-gnd, p. 117]

Ajl, as with many other Green New Deal activists, recognises that having and
sharing the right utopian vision plays an essential role in bringing about
transformative political change. While acknowledging that real political change
involves defeats and compromises as well as victories, he lambasts what he sees
as underly-ambitious political programmes on the grounds that, in the pursuit of
'realism,' they give up the fight for a better world before the battle has even
begun: 'if one is building a struggle that accepts a compromised horizon, one is
not going to reach a further horizon' [@ajl-gnd, p. 95]. Or, as utopia scholar
Lisa Garforth puts it:

> The hopeful but shallow utopianism in popular environmentalism and global
> policy-making can be compared with radical ecopolitical visions and similarly
> unsettling postnatural philosophies. Where the former works around
> modifications of and continuities with business as usual, the latter imagines
> a break – in culture, politics and modes of subjectivity. [@green-utopias, p. 153]

In sum, minority cognition, tribulation discourse, and utopian end-time
speculation as displayed in the Apocalypse of John are essential apocalyptic
rhetorical strategies for today's green rhetors.