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## Summary
Green rhetoric is not working. The green movement is going backwards in many of
its key demands.
Part of the reason for this, as I explored in chapter 1, is that green rhetors
aren't getting the fundamentals right. By focusing on individual consumption
choices and science denial, they mis-diagnose the root causes of green harms.
Their exhortations, apparently delivered to the universal human collective,
doesn't match the interests and powers of their real audiences, namely,
the Western middle classes. As a result, they end up proposing solutions that
aren't feasible.
Why are green rhetors failing on the fundamentals? One common suggestion, explored in
chapter 2, is that green rhetors should avoid the motif of catastrophe, or, in a
certain sense, 'apocalypse.' Catastrophic rhetoric has been accused of creating
resignation, despair, apathy, and dismissal, and of killing political contest,
driving the fundamental problems discussed in chapter 1.
This line of thought, together with the fact that 'apocalypse' is treated as a
catastrophic symbol in popular culture, leads Frances Flannery to suggest that
green rhetors should avoid evoking apocalyptic associations.
However, in chapter 3, I argued that the Apocalypse of John, the chief
source of apocalyptic language in the West, had a very different catastrophic
dialectic, and did not create the aforementioned negative reactions, but rather
used apocalyptic language as an essential tool in the author's rhetorical
strategy. In chapter 4, I went further, and argued that in order to succeed now,
green rhetors must use similar apocalyptic rhetorical strategies.
My analysis has severe limits. There's no good reason to believe that reviving
good apocalyptic language would solve all the problems facing green rhetors, nor
have I proposed any practical plan of action which could lead green rhetors to
change their literary style in the ways I prefer. I have also mostly assumed
that green rhetoric is only addressed to people who do not hold millenialist
worldviews, and this is of course untrue. Many people with a huge stake in green
issues, from the Appalachians to the Congo, hold millenialist worldviews. My
analysis is significantly weaker for having largely ignored these people.
What I do claim, is that, contra the many critics of apocalypticism, and
despite the fact that apocalypticism, like all good things, can and is twisted
to evil ends, green rhetors must draw on John's apocalyptic rhetorical strategies.
Since ancient times, apocalyptic imagination has been used to name and shame
idolatrous economic and ideological systems which pretend to the divine status
of eternal peace and prosperity, while in reality driving massive violence and
destruction which can only end in either revolution or collective suicide. For
all that, the apocalypticist is no cynic: John sees a realistic vision of
social, indeed cosmic, transformation at the end of all things, which has
motivated revolution and resistance for centuries. In the fight for a greener
world, apocalyptic is as necessary as ever.
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