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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 up with 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.
How could green rhetors be more effective? 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 genuine politics.
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 St. John, the chief
source of apocalyptic language in the West, was not originally conceived as
catastrophic, 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. I did this through
the case study of arguing for a Green New Deal, arguing that in order to
convince UK citizens to take the political action necessary to bring a Green New
Deal about, green rhetors need to use minority cognition, tribulation language,
and utopian end-time speculation, in similar ways and for similar reasons as
once applied to St. John.
My analysis has severe limits. As I explored in chapter 1, there are many
reasons why green rhetoric is too often failing at present, and there's no good
cause to think that any one solution will fix all. Nor have I made any attempt
to explain why catastrophic motifs are so consistently reproduced in green
rhetoric, nor have I provided a feasible means of ensuring that green rhetors
can and do adopt the apocalyptic strategies I have proposed. In chapter 1, I
warned that a great deal of contemporary green rhetoric does not successfully
identify a practical plan of action or the right audience to carry it out: I am
happy to confess my guilt in the same sin. I have also not given nearly as much
attention to people who hold millenialist worldviews as I would have liked, and
they deserve.
What I do claim, is that, in defiance of the many critics of apocalypticism, a
better green rhetoric would be a more apocalyptic rhetoric, at least in the
sense that it uses similar rhetorical strategies to those deployed by St. John
of the Apocalypse.
To put it another way, both St. John and contemporary green rhetors have the
same rhetorical goal: to motivate an ethic of martyrdom. This puts similar
constraints on the kinds of rhetorical strategies which will and won't work. To
better achieve their goals, green rhetors will have to find minority
epistemologies with which to fight fossil-think, steel their audiences for
tribulations, and engage in utopian end-time speculation to convince their
audiences that their potential sufferings are worth enduring. When they do so,
they will find the path well-trodden by St. John.
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