25 February 2017

The Shredding of Our Moral Core

According to Immanuel Kant, "We can judge the heart of a (person) by his(/her) treatment of animals." In a more general sense, that behavior, along with how people treat the environment, probably also says something about the heart of a society.

It is with a heavy heart then that I have watched recent environmental policy coups play out around the United States. For example, as this article from BuzzFeed describes, the Republican-controlled US House of Representatives recently passed legislation to reinstitute the barbaric killing of wolves and bears on wildlife refuges in Alaska. The approved tactics include aerial shooting and killing pups and cubs in their dens. To say nothing of the fact that these activities would take place on wildlife refuges, the inhumane legislation reveals those supporting it as sadistic, sociopathic, and bereft of conscience.

Morally corrupt as it is, the wolf-bear policy displays a cunning level of strategy. Targeting wolves and bears proves a clever tactic for unraveling the threads of human concern and environmental policy. As apex predators, those species indicate the health of the ecosystems in which they live. When they're wiped out, proponents of environmental exploitation can more easily make the case that extracting resources will not damage an ecosystem anymore than it already is. Additionally, as charismatic megafauna, wolves and bears generate public concern, and people rally to save them. In short, these species are critical to environmental preservation, and it is no accident legislators are targeting them.

We see the reasons for using bears and wolves as strategic targets in environmental policy proposals and decisions across the country. Stripping the species of their federal protections takes the first step in breaking down the systemic mechanisms that foster, institute, and enact our environmental ethics. Eliminating key reasons to protect the land opens the door to proposals that allow for expanded environmental exploitation. For example, we've already seen a proposal to permit oil and gas drilling in national parks and renewed efforts by Democrats and Republicans in the state of Alaska to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Ultimately, taking federal government out of the picture puts our environment in the hands of private interests, which is exactly the point of these policies. One of the best (though most egregious) examples of this process comes from Oregon, where a state board led by Democratic State Treasurer Tobias Read voted to sell off the Elliott State Forest to private interests. Covering the story, Men's Journal calls the sale "the natural conclusion of a land losing federal protection" and "a bad sign for America's public lands." Throwing away our heritage of conservation and our responsibility to future generations, the board sold the forest for short-term profits.

In the place where our moral and environmental ethics once found their footing, a corporate callus now resides, an indifference to anything other than consuming resources and making money. That's how, according to Greenpeace, the public relations firm for Energy Transfer Partners, the company building the Dakota Access Pipeline, ended up writing the letter in which the Republican governors of North Dakota, South Dakota, and Iowa asked the Army Corps of Engineers to approve the pipeline.

At their heart, these actions by our elected officials represent a bipartisan, corporate attack on the core of our society and the shredding of our moral and environmental fabric.

11 February 2017

Now Presenting: The Search for Alternative Voices

In our attempts to respond to nature's signals, we clearly need the help of new voices, and I recently gave a presentation on how critical rhetoric allows us to identify these alternative perspectives.

Much of my research in environmental communication focuses on rhetoric, especially one approach to rhetorical criticism called critical rhetoric. When I was asked to deliver a presentation for the Humanities Research Forum Series at the University of South Dakota, I brought together several papers in which I had employed critical rhetoric. Below, you can view the Prezi I used to present my presentation aids for the talk:



Critical rhetoric challenges power by deconstructing meaning and identifying and advocating for marginalized voices. That focus makes it particularly useful as environmental communication scholars pursue new ways of articulating the relationship between humans and nature.

The Prezi above addresses several key aspects of the presentation I gave on critical rhetoric's potential. First, it explains the value of laying out environmental discourse about the human-nature relationship on a continuum. Part of the continuum addresses discourses found in newspaper coverage of global warming. These discourses include nature-as-out-of reach, nature-as-antagonist, and nature-as-co-present, the latter of which represents an important alternative perspective that challenges its more dominant counterparts. Next, the continuum adds components through an analysis of the Web site, The Featured Creature. Together, the discourses from the newspaper coverage and The Featured Creature provide a fuller picture of the human-nature relationship. 

The presentation also discusses how an analysis of The Nature Conservancy's Liquid Courage Web site suggests that elements of physical distance can be added to a public participation model to enhance research into environmental communication. Liquid Courage demonstrates the value of physical-distance elements in our relationship with nature.

As our environmental issues grow more complex and the urgency to address them increases, critical rhetoric presents us with an important tool in finding the voices that can help us respond to environmental signals.