Commonplaces Of Scientific Evidence In Environmental Discourses

This book focuses on the uses of scientific evidence within three types of environmental discourses: popular nonfiction books about the environment; traditional and social media texts created by a grassroots environmental group; and a set of data displays that make arguments about global warming in a variety of media and contexts. It traces the operations of eight commonplaces about science and shows how they recur throughout these contexts, starting with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and ending with contemporary blogs and social media. The commonplaces are shown to embed ideological assumptions and simultaneously challenge those assumptions. In addition, the book addresses the potential dangers involved in relying too heavily on aspects of these commonplaces, and how they can undermine the goals of some of the writers who use them.

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- List of Figures and Tables -- List of Abbreviations -- Foreword -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- PART I: Framing -- 1 Proof and Fluid Topics: Topic-Driven Environmental Rhetoric in Modern Society -- 2 Scientist as Hero, Technology as the Enemy: Commonplaces about Science in Environmental Discourses -- 3 Granola-Eating, Birkenstock-Wearing Tree Huggers Who Want to Take Your Guns: Commonplaces of the Environmentalist -- PART II: Place -- 4 Climate Crisis Made Manifest: The Shift from a Topos of Time to a Topos of Place -- 5 Victims "in" and Protectors "of" Appalachia: Place and the Common Topic of Protection in Missing Mountains: We Went to the Mountaintop, but It Wasn't There -- 6 Remembering the Alamo: Commonplaces in Texas Water Policy Arguments -- PART III: Risk and Uncertainty -- 7 Reconstituting Causality: Accident Reports as Posthuman Documentation -- 8 Toward an Apparent Decolonial Feminist Rhetoric of Risk -- 9 Designing Doubt: The Tactical Use of Uncertainty in Hydraulic Fracturing Debates -- PART IV: Sustainability -- 10 Sustainability and Sustainable Development: The Evolution and Use of Confused Notions -- 11 The Three Pillars of Sustainability as a Special Topic of Invention in the Marketing Communication of Plastic-Packaging Companies -- List of Contributors -- Index

Communication Strategies for Engaging Climate Skeptics examines the intersection of climate skepticism and Christianity and proposes strategies for engaging climate skeptics in productive conversations. Despite the scientifically established threats of climate change, there remains a segment of the American population that is skeptical of the scientific consensus on climate change and the urgent need for action. One of the most important stakeholders and conversants in environmental conversations is the religious community. While existing studies have discussed environmentalism as a factor within the religious community, this book positions religion as an important factor in environmentalism and focuses on how identities play a role in environmental conversation. Rather than thinking of religious skeptics as a single unified group, Emma Frances Bloomfield argues that it is essential to recognize there are different types of skeptics so that we can better tailor our communication strategies to engage with them on issues of the environment and climate change. To do so, this work breaks skeptics down into three main types: "separators," "bargainers," and "harmonizers." The book questions monolithic understandings of climate skepticism and considers how competing narratives such as religion, economics, and politics play a large role in climate communication. Considering recent political moves to remove climate change from official records and withdraw from international environmental agreements, it is imperative now more than ever to offer practical solutions to academics, practitioners, and the public to change the conversation. To address these concerns, this book provides both a theoretical examination of the rhetoric of religious climate skeptics and concrete strategies for engaging the religious community in conversations about the environment. This book will be of great interest to students, scholars, and practitioners of climate change science, environmental communication, environmental policy, and religion.

This book presents a detailed exploration into the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT), an enterprise concerned with finding and communicating sustainable ways of living, established in Wales in 1973. Playing a central role in the global green network, this study examines CAT’s history and context for creation, its development over time and its wider influence in the progression of green ideas at the local, national and international levels. Based on original archival and ethnographic research, this book provides the first in-depth analysis of CAT and uses the case study to explore wider issues of sustainability and environmental communication. It situates the Centre within current environmental and political discourse and emphasises the relevance and reach of CAT’s practical solutions and creative educational programme. These practical solutions to the destruction of the environment of human activity are increasingly vital in today’s context of climate change, loss of biodiversity and rising levels of pollution. It debates the spectrum of attitudes between environmentalism and ecologism evident at CAT and in broader conversations surrounding sustainability. Woven throughout the text, the author makes clear what we can learn from CAT’s almost 50 years of experiments and experiences, from his first-hand account of working at the site. This will be a fascinating and revealing read for academics, researchers, students and practitioners interested in all aspects of sustainability and environmental issues.

John Dryzek provides an accessible introduction to thinking about the environment by looking at the way people use language on environmental issues. He analyses the main discourses from the last 30 years and those likely to be influential in future.

Uncovering common threads across types of science skepticism to show why these controversial narratives stick and how we can more effectively counter them through storytelling Science v. Story analyzes four scientific controversies—climate change, evolution, vaccination, and COVID-19—through the lens of storytelling. Instead of viewing stories as adversaries to scientific practices, Emma Frances Bloomfield demonstrates how storytelling is integral to science communication. Drawing from narrative theory and rhetorical studies, Science v. Story examines scientific stories and rival stories, including disingenuous rival stories that undermine scientific conclusions and productive rival stories that work to make science more inclusive. Science v. Story offers two tools to evaluate and build stories: narrative webs and narrative constellations. These visual mapping tools chart the features of a story (i.e., characters, action, sequence, scope, storyteller, and content) to locate opportunities for audience engagement. Bloomfield ultimately argues that we can strengthen science communication by incorporating storytelling in critical ways that are attentive to audience and context.

The City is an Ecosystem maps an interdisciplinary, community-engaged response to the great ecological crises of our time—climate change, biodiversity loss, and social inequality—which pose particular challenges for cities, where more than half the world’s population currently live. Across more than twenty chapters, the three parts of the book cover historical and scientific perspectives on the city as an ecosystem; human rights to the city in relation to urban sustainability; and the city as a sustainability classroom at all educational levels inside and outside formal classroom spaces. It argues that such efforts must be interdisciplinary and widespread to ensure an informed public and educated new generation are equipped to face an uncertain future, particularly relevant in the post-COVID-19 world. Gathering multiple interdisciplinary and community-engaged perspectives on these environmental crises, with contemporary and historical case study discussions, this timely volume cuts across the humanities and social and health sciences, and will be of interest to policymakers, urban ecologists, activists, built environment professionals, educators, and advanced students concerned with the future of our cities.

Feminist Technical Communication introduces readers to technical communication methodology, demonstrating how rhetorical feminist approaches are vital to the future of technical communication. Using an intersectional and transcultural approach, Erin Clark fuses the well-documented surge of work in feminist technical communication throughout the 1990s with the larger social justice turn in the discipline. The first book to situate feminisms and technical communication in relationship as the focal point, Feminist Technical Communication traces the thread of feminisms through technical communication’s connection to social justice studies. Clark theorizes “slow crisis,” a concept made readable to technical communicators by apparent feminisms that can help technical communicators readily recognize and address social justice problems. Clark then applies this framework to the Deepwater Horizon Disaster, an extended crisis that has been publicly framed by a traditional view of efficiency that privileges economic impact. Through rich description of apparent feminist information-gathering techniques and a layered analysis this study offers application far beyond this single disaster, making available new crisis-response possibilities that consider the economy without eliding ecological and human health concerns. Feminist Technical Communication offers a methodological approach to the systematic interrogation of power structures that operate on hidden misogynies. This book is useful to technical communicators, scholars of technical communication and rhetoric, and readers interested in gender studies and public health and is an ideal text for graduate-level seminars focused on feminisms, social justice, and cultural studies.