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From beyond our borders: Otherreadings on environmentalism andcommunicative actionKent Goshorn a ba Instructor at University of California , Berkeleyb PhD Candidate at the Annenberg School , University ofPennsylvania ,Published online: 06 Jun 2009.

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Quarterly Journal of Speech

Vol. 87, No. 3, August 2001, pp. 321-339

Book ReviewsTarla R. Peterson

From Beyond Our Borders: Other Readings onEnvironmentalism and Communicative Action

Kent Goshorn

Environmental scholarship enjoys a steadily growing presence in the discipline ofcommunication. And, for a host of reasons environmental issues are all but certain

to claim even more of our attention in the dawning century. From grassroots socialnetworks to glossy mainstream publications, environmental movements have become,as Alberto Melucci (1985) puts it, "new media" in their own right. Other Europeantheorists like Ulrich Beck (1992) and Klaus Eder suggest the environment has become acentral "organizing principle of public discourse." Beyond such obvious discourses asenvironmental advocacy and news media coverage, we can detect over the past threedecades a general "greening" of social theory. Environmentalism has become a transfor-mative and constitutive force, not just a topical cluster of issues, events or campaigns tobe studied using the same methods applied to other movement discourses or media texts.

Opportunities Missed and Waiting

Environmental communication scholarship has largely invented itself and built adiverse body of primary research by applying the existing resources of its homediscipline-healthy doses of Burkean, metaphoric and ideographic analyses, standardmass communication models (issue-framing, agenda-setting, behavioral effects), theliterature on conflict—to environmental texts and situations. Its contributions, however,remain largely peripheral to the theorizing of deeper ethical, cognitive and epistemologi-cal re-orientations taking place in and beneath the surface play of green discourse.Students of environmental communication face the twin challenges of deciding what isunique or essential about the questions they ask, as well as how these questions can beenriched by engagement with other disciplines.

Despite the inherently interdisciplinary nature of environmental problems, communi-cation researchers treating these topics have rarely, as Herbst (1993) observes ofcommunication scholarship generally, taken advantage of the freedom to do the trulyinterdisciplinary work our field allows. Conversely, the literatures of other disciplines(e.g., sociology and political science) treating many of the same environmental eventsand relying on the same primary texts, show a dearth of references to communicationscholarship in this area. Thus the situation mirrors more general worries about theinsularity of a communication discipline "that rarely cites outside itself and is even morerarely cited by other disciplines" (Beniger 1993:19; McChesney, 1993).

The concern seems valid. While rhetorical critics were well-positioned three decadesago to move to the forefront of movement scholarship, since then the major develop-

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ments in social movement theory have proceeded largely independent of our contribu-tions. As a result, "meaning" and many important cognitive and ethical communicationquestions raised by social movements have receded to the background. Nonetheless, wehave done rather well in documenting, as McGee (1983) once grumpily insisted,"movement in meaning" and ideas about nature, place, and resources. Yet we oftencontinue to treat environmental communication as "a thing apart" from such of its widercontexts as economics, ideology, or the history of other social movements. Muchresearch remains under-informed by sociological and psychological theory pertaining togroup and class conflict, identity formation, motivation, ideological countermovements,organizational behavior, resources and political opportunity structures—all crucial deter-minants of rhetorical choices made in green and anti-green discourses. If environmentalcommunication research is to move beyond the status of a topical specialization, wemight heed McChesney's recommendation to our entire discipline—to strike out in an"interdisciplinary manner that runs directly counter to the dominant trends in theacademy" (1993:100).

The Discursive Turn, Reflexivity, and the Perils of Constructivism

A glance at recent literature examining persistent problems and promising develop-ments in environmental theory and politics suggests that the opportunities are many.The authors and editors of the volumes here hail from sociology, philosophy, linguistics,political science, science and technology studies, geography, economics, as well ascommunication and cultural studies; more than half come from Europe or Australia.They all offer a rich understanding of the social and intellectual terrains in whichenvironmental discourses are produced, received, or countered.

These volumes are linked by a number of themes: the open-endedness or polysemy ofenvironment as a signifying system and ideological playing field; postmodern relativismand reflexivity; multiple time frames; anxieties and avoidance around irrevocabledamage to the planet; tensions between the social construction of environmental issuesand the materiality of nature and power, between the limits of knowledge and theoverabundance of information, between lay and expert epistemology, between globaliza-tion and local or "situated knowledges" and concern for place, between the urgency ofaction and communication ethics, between the potential democratization of societythrough environmental politics and the inadequacy of current political frameworks forachieving socially equitable reforms.

Greenspeak is the most explicitly directed at practical environmental discourse, asconcerned with the "ecology of language" as with the language of ecology. From theirshared vantage points of philosophy, psychology, and linguistics, Rom Harre and hiscolleagues dissect linguistic, cultural, and temporal dimensions of the unruly "cluster ofdialects" through which environmental issues are conceptualized and conveyed. Through-out, they are concerned with the "greening" of language, of public discourse and oflinguistics itself—linguistic change being a primary means of transforming the way peoplethink and talk about the environment. This means examining both the objectiveadequacy of different discourses (including those from physical science) to reflectecological phenomena and criteria, and the intersubjective adequacy of languages totranslate such information across different cultural constructions of nature and environ-ment. The authors explicate numerous textual examples of vagueness, underdifferentia-

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tion and biases that are unwittingly carried by language itself but also often deliberatelyexploited.

Unsurprisingly, the authors find a "mismatch between the resources of our languageand the resources needed to deal with the complexities of environmental questions." Infascinating chapters on ethno-ecology (stressing the connection between biological andlinguistic diversity) and "linguistics as environmentalism," they make a plea for theincorporation of multiple cultural perspectives in policy discourse. (By extension, thepreservation of cultures is as important as it is problematic for global environmentalagendas.) Theoretically, the adequacy of language to apprehend our environmentalcondition(s) and knowledge(s) can be improved through a sort of linguistic eclecticismand pluralism. But they also remind us of the familiar principle that there will always be ascientific and cognitive gap "between what we can know and what we need to know"about the environment. (How and to what extent indigenous cultures have ever bridgedthat gap remains highly contentious.)

In the west this gap is largely bridged rhetorically. Yet environmental rhetoric signalsnot a rejection of science, as naysayers are apt to claim, but aspires to serve as a heuristicanswering both the objective inadequacy of science and its disjunction from evaluative(moral and aesthetic) discourses. "Greenspeak" emerges from efforts to integrate scien-tific knowledge claims with "what is linguistically realized as advocacy or program orcritical commentary on human practices." In a critical green linguistics, the projects ofrhetoric, science, and politics are conjoined, for clearly not all rhetorical devices are ofequal value, and the "greening" of language can as easily conceal ideological compro-mise and serve the evasion, denial or outright subversion of consequential ecologicalawareness and action. As true of many sincere iterations of environmental concern as ofcynical "greenwashing" campaigns by industry, this problem is central to the critique of"ecological modernization" undertaken in the next work.

The authors in Risk, Environment, and Modernity extend and challenge the seminal workof German sociologist Ulrich Beck, whose twin theses of the "risk society" (1992) andreflexive modernization have yet to be incorporated into most American social move-ment analyses and environmental critiques. Finding more positive potential than Beckhimself in the social construction of environmental problems, the editors of this volumecomplain that the "overwhelmingly realist," positivist voices of technocratic environmen-talism have masked "important cultural, social and existential dimensions" of theenvironmental crisis, to which they redirect our attention. They find that individuallife-worlds, identities, local knowledges and domestic routines have been disrupted byand struggle with a tide of environmental information and new ethical orientations, oftenexperienced bureaucratically. Conversely, several of the authors address the paradoxesand perils of the green movement's "success" signaled by its institutionalization andintegration into governmental agencies, foundations, industry science, and media rou-tines. Confronting the question of how the movement can't remain a radical but alsodemocratically inclusive presence in the public sphere, they observe that environmental-ism is subject to its own "dialectic of enlightenment," whereby critical reason metamor-phoses into technology, bureaucratic administration and positivist science. However,most of the contributors still harbor hopes for the potential of environmental issues toopen up and democratize politics.

Taking a nearly opposite tack, Raymond Murphy's Sociology and Nature battles on twohistorical and intellectual fronts: against the modernist-humanist hubris of traditional

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"sociology as if nature did not matter," and against the cultural relativism and politicalcomplacency implied by contemporary constructivist sensibilities applied to environmen-tal realities. The greening of the social sciences was barely underway when, ironically, itbegan to be undermined by the insights of constructivism and the labors of deconstruc-tion. Where Beck highlights the social construction and symbolic mediation of environ-mental issues with a clear concern for how these public processes often complicate,compromise and undermine decisive action, Murphy worries about intellectuals, ascritical overseers of these processes, taking constructivist, culturalist and postmodernistapproaches so far that the very materiality of the environment gets dismissed. Theenvironmentalist critique can too easily be relegated to the status of one of manycompeting social narratives built on philosophically arbitrary foundations. Examiningthe fine line between useful explorations of how problems like pollution or the loss ofbiodiversity are constructed, and their counterproducive labelling as "social scares,"Murphy gives the most thorough account, to date, of the de facto alignment betweenconstructivists and reactionary, anti-environmental forces, who conjoin postmoderndoubt and relativism with scientific uncertainty to forestall action.

Progressive Postmodernism

Though decidedly less critical of the constructivist turn, and apparently sympathetic toeverything "post-," the Australian authors of Eco-Impacts and the Greening ofPostmodernityecho Murphy's concern with past "ecological exclusions" by sociology, cultural studies,and communication studies. Rather than focusing primarily on such absences, however,Jagtenberg and McKie provide a freewheeling survey of environmentalism's erraticpoints of contact with these academic fields and with media and popular culture. Theauthors do the useful service of reviewing the few journal editions in cultural studies andcommunication with environmental themes, devote a chapter to the greening of mediastudies, and another to a wide array of entertainment and educational programming onenvironmental issues. Ascendant sensitivity to "spatiality" is evident throughout thebook in its examination of shifting social, conceptual, and disciplinary boundaries, as theauthors borrow from postmodern theorists like Jameson, Soja, and Haraway in "map-ping" changes in the contemporary intellectual landscape instigated by environmentalconcerns. They also explore, too fleetingly, how such postmodernist themes as death andfear, self and identity, chaos, cyber-literature, consumerism and promotional culture,play out within the framework of environmental thought.

Beck (1992) notes that the discourse of risk has disrupted many traditional politicalalignments and antagonisms. After briefly reviewing the contentious relations of greenpolitics with labor and the left, and its more sympathetic alignments with feminism, thecounterculture, New Ageism, and indigenous people (at least in Australia), Jactenbergand McKie (mirroring Murphy) take on the long-overdue task of examining, in anevenhanded way, the affinities and distinctions between Andrew Ross's eco-skepticismand that of conservative anti-environmentalists. Eco-Impacts is admirable for its ambition,breadth, and eclectic weaving together of so many theoretical concerns. Perhaps itsgreatest virtue is that it constantly strives for constructive synthesis between the conflict-ing epistemologies, theoretical orientations and political commitments brought into playin environmental discourses, rather than honing those lines of division.

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Class, Culture and Environmental Justice

In the issue of "environmental justice," one can observe the collision and uneasyalliance of two major historical lines of progressive development: the quest for material-economic advancement and equal civic participation associated with traditional or "old"social movements, on the one hand, and the "postmaterialist" concerns sometimesassociated with "new" social movements, on the other. Three recent books grapple withthe meanings of and means to environmental justice, focusing on the experience ofdifference in lived environments and within the environmental movement itself. InJustice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, well-known Marxist geographer, DavidHarvey ponders how to integrate space, place, and environment into the analysis oftemporal social processes. Harvey conceives the problem of environmental justice in the"spatialization of difference," and situates the problem in a tension between the "militantparticularisms" of postmodernity (local knowledges, the subjective experiences ofmarginalized groups, specialized academic discourses), and the "global ambitions" ofongoing modernist projects (universal moral principles, science, the implicitly Utopianvisions of Marxism and environmentalism, the global reach of capital and informationsystems).

This sprawling work begins with an introduction to dialectics, and the importance of"relational thinking" becomes clear as we consider the many different ways culturesvalue and transform nature, producing the complex interactions of social and ecologicalchange. It reminds us that social, economic, and ecological analyses are often conductedsimultaneously at different scales of space and time without necessarily identifying whichones, as Harre also observed. Harvey's work challenges rhetorical critics to examine howthese different scales of time or space in which environmental discourses are implicitlygrounded, help generate their moral and logical authority or operate as sources ofinvention.

Environmental Justice and the New Pluralism is a welcome effort to develop a theoreticalperspective on the environmental justice movement, not just reiterate its conflict with anallegedly moribund and elitist "mainstream" environmentalism. This work puts themovement's intellectual as well as political potential in a historical context, harkeningback to William James and other early proponents of a more radically visionary, ratherthan merely competitive pluralism. Also indebted to Habermas's theory of communica-tive action and its extension in John Dryzek's work on "ecological rationality," Schlos-berg's book is one of the few to link environmental communication to social movementtheory and history, showing how this new movement has reflexively built on theexperiences and failures of environmentalism, feminism, and labor. Recognizing interac-tive social/political networks as the movement's most significant organizing structure,Schlosberg draws our attention back to communication within a social movement,de-emphasizing analysis of discursive content and eschewing discussion of substantiveenvironmental problems. What further sets the book apart is its primary focus onpraxis-putting means, process and participation on an equal level with the substantivegoals of activism, indeed making them one.

For some, the book may stand or fall on its debatable initial premise. Schlosbergattributes the failures of the mainstream environmental movement to its alleged embraceof the conventional political means of interest group pluralism, ultimately relying on ahierarchy of experts and detached professional representatives. The justice movementhas answered by reinvigorating the tactics of grassroots activism that characterized the

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early phases of modern environmentalism. Seeing a connection between the relativeopenness of the existing political formation and the forms of political communicationthat ensue, Schlosberg argues that the problem of environmental justice and themovement's often confrontational practices must be understood through theories of thesubject and of the state. Poor people and minorities experience exposure to environmen-tal hazards in ways that mirror their experience of difference and participation in thecivic and political arenas. They respond accordingly: to systemic indifference, withstridency; to inequity, with an emphasis on equal participation; to exclusion andvoicelessness, with community and group autonomy that may itself exclude "outsiders"from the mainstream. Much as the pluralist linguistics of "greenspeak" might enrich anddiversify the way environmental problems are collectively envisioned, "critical plural-ism" would diversify green political dialogue and practice by drawing attention to thevarieties of experience—political and otherwise.

Environmental scholarship imposes an especially heavy burden of substantive knowl-edge about matters extraneous to the communication discipline. Rudimentary ground-ing in some combination of the physical sciences, agricultural and resource practices,political economy, and regulatory policy (to name a few) is often required simply tounderstand what speakers are doing rhetorically in their public arguments. To grasp thetension between the environmental justice movement and traditional, conservation-oriented environmentalism, not only requires knowledge of the history of environmen-talism and of the social struggles of various minority and indigenous communities. Anunderstanding of structural change in the American and global political economies isalso essential, to avoid overly moral readings of such conflict. This latter background isprovided in the first three chapters of Faber's edited volume, The Struggle for EcologicalDemocracy. The remaining selections provide a window onto the diversity of environmen-tal justice issues, from battles within the mainstream movement over NAFTA to thesurvival struggles of pastoral villages in northern New Mexico. The historical details andthe centrality of cultural identity in these local and regional struggles, the passions theyprovoke, along with arguable inaccuracies in some of these accounts, also remind us howeasy it is for symbol-laden language to become reified as analysis or official movementhistory. The mix of personal interviews from the trenches of activism, participant-observers' accounts, and political-economic analysis in this volume, however, also assistsus in this task.

Reflexive Reaction: The Ongoing Challenge

The fault-lines and fragile alliances within environmentalism identified in these studiesof environmental justice, like the theoretical tensions in other works reviewed above,make the counter-environmental practices discussed in Sharon Beder's Global Spin, allthe more significant. Beder's fellow Australian, Alex Carey, claimed that the three greatpolitical developments of the 20th Century were the growth of democracy, of corporatepower, and of "corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power againstdemocracy" (Carey 1995:vi). Nowhere has this been more evident than in the conflu-ence of corporate resources, public relations techniques, conservative institutions andgrassroots organizations comprising the contemporary anti-environmental movement.

Beder's book is the best so far of several on this subject, and the first complete work byan academic. Covering practices from the "astroturf" (ersatz grassroots) Wise Usegroups to "greenwashing" corporate advertisements to SLAPPs (strategic lawsuits against

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public participation), Beder surveys the major components of a loosely coordinated buthighly rationalized and systematic counterrevolution against environmentalism. Shedemonstrates the extent of the social-scientific research and strategic thinking used toproduce Wise Use's naturalistic "backlash" rhetoric, its coordination with the output ofconservative, "free-market" think tanks, and its insinuation into popular discourse,which is easily taken for unscripted public opinion. Among the most interesting chaptersare those discussing how public affairs departments of large companies employ psycho-logical profiling and deceptive information-gathering to neutralize citizen activism andto formulate anticipatory communications on policy controversies and industrial acci-dents. She finds, for example, that journalists and activists lured into "cooperativeproblem-solving" ventures are manipulated and observed much like focus groupparticipants in political or product advertising campaigns, to assess their reactions tohypothetical scenarios or to assess the comparative potential for specific spin-controlthemes to produce naturalistic copy favorable to clients' interests. Similar profilingtechniques are used to co-opt, divide and conquer different factions and psychologicaltypes within the ranks of green activism.

As the implications of environmental problems become more far-reaching in scaleand scope, it is also clear that resistance to green politics will continue, and the forms ittakes will multiply. But the obstacles to a "greening" of society are not all overtlypolitical. Surely much of what is unique and essential about the persuasive tasksdescribed in the work of environmental communication, lies in the challenge of thinkingecologically-in terms of complex environmental, social, and economic interrelation-ships, over multiple time scales, and always materially. Advocates must simultaneouslycommunicate all this to diverse audiences with competing social or political agendas anddiverse cultural orientations, under the here-and-now pressures and limitations of publicaddress. The texts reviewed here give us a bracing sense of that challenge while pointingto the many directions environmental discourse is taking. Rhetorical scholars cancontinue to expand their horizons by helping to chart the course.

Books Reviewed

Sharon Beder. Global Spin. The Corporate Assault on Environmentalism. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green,1998. 277 pp., $19.95 (paper).

Daniel Faber (Ed.). The Struggle for Ecological Democracy: Environmental Justice Movements in the United States. NewYork: Guilford, 1998, 366 pp., $18.95 (paper).

Rom Harre, Jens Brockmeier, Peter Muhlhausler. Greenspeak. A Study of Environmental Discourse. ThousandOaks, CA/London: Sage, 1999, 201 pp., $29.95 (paper).

David Harvey. Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 1997, 468 pp.,$27.95 (paper).

Tom Jagtenberg and David McKie. Eco-Impacts and the Greening of Postmodernity: New Maps for CommunicationStudies, Cultural Studies, and Sociology. Thousand Oaks/London: Sage, 1997, 301 pp., $27.95 (paper).

Scott Lash, Bronislaw Szerszynski, and Brian Wynne (Eds.). Risk, Environment and Modernity. London/Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996, 294 pp., $24.95 (paper).

Raymond Murphy. Sociology and Nature: Social Action in Context. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997, 336 pp.,$28.00 (paper).

David Schlosberg. Environmental Justice and the New Pluralism: The Challenge of Difference for Environmentalism.Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, 223 pp., $45.00 (cloth).

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NoteKent Goshorn is an instructor at University of California, Berkeley, and a PhD Candidate at the Annenberg School,

University of Pennsylvania.

ReferencesBeck, Ulrich (1992). Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications.Beniger, James R. (1993). Communication-Embrace the subject, not the field. Journal of Communication 43 (4), 18-25.

Herbst, Susan (1993). History, Philosophy, and Public Opinion Research. Journal of Communication 43/4,Autumn, 140-145.

McChesney, Robert (1993). Critical Communication Research at the Crossroads. Journal of Communication 43/4,98-104.

McGee, Michael Calvin (1983). Social movement as meaning. Central States Speech Journal 34 (Spring), 74-77.Melucci, Alberto (1985). The symbolic challenge of contemporary movements. Social Research 52 (4), 789-816.Press, Daniel (1994). Democratic Dilemmas in the Age of Ecology. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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