Green Discourse

“Of our environment, what we say is what we see,” argue communication scholars James Cantrill and Christine Oravec in the introduction to their landmark volume The Symbolic Earth: Discourse and our Creation of the Environment. This statement captures the fundamental principle underlying the concept of green discourse: Language shapes the human experience of, and effect on, the environment. Although ideas about the environment are based in part on material experiences, language and other forms of symbolic expression become the primary means through which experience is interpreted and meaning conveyed to others. When individuals and groups use language and other symbols to influence public thinking and behavior regarding environmental issues, they are producing green discourse. Green discourse refers to the ways in which symbols are mobilized to convey environmental perspectives. The term has been used in a variety of ways to characterize a wide range of environmental discourses, including image events, toxic tours of contaminated communities, farmers' and ranchers' public responses to environmental management plans, and of course, the rhetorical production of those purporting to conserve, protect, or defend the natural world.

Most commonly, the concept of “green discourse” is used to characterize the language of the environmental movement. Its terminology, however, has proliferated in recent years, reflecting the extent to which perceptions of environmental realities are related to the symbols a society uses. Green discourse often challenges anthropocentric and utilitarian, usufruct views of the environment by positing the intrinsic value of all life. In many cases, green discourses emphasize principles of ecological holism and interconnection among all life forms. An emphasis on wildness and the sublime is also featured prominently in much green discourse. More recently, sustainability and differentiated responsibilities have become part of the dominant discourse of environmentalism.

The history of green discourse is difficult, if not impossible, to trace because it is embedded in literature, art, and philosophy, as well as the discursive production of the contemporary environmental movement. The blossoming of a tradition of green philosophical and literary discourse in the United States is commonly linked with writers such as Henry David Thoreau, Rachel Carson, and Aldo Leopold, though more radical figures such as Edward Abbey (who popularized the term monkeywrenching) can also be said to proffer a green discourse. The general emphasis of green discourse in these and other writers' works is on preservation, conservation, protection, and recognition of humans' implication in the more-than-human world. In the realm of art, green discourse is frequently associated with work that articulates a sublime experience of nature, exemplified by early landscape painters of the West such as Thomas Moran. Green discourse might also characterize the symbolic expression contained within online projects such as the Green Museum.

A wide variety of philosophical and religious traditions have profoundly influenced green discourse during the last century. The deep roots of green ideology extend from pre-Socratic Greek to Romantic to Marxist philosophy, while also drawing from indigenous, Christian, Buddhist, Taoist, and other spiritual traditions. Judeo-Christian religious ideology is pervasive as an underpinning of much resource management and wise use discourse oriented toward stewardship and conservation. The discourses of deep ecology and ecological holism are frequently linked to Eastern mystical and spiritual traditions, as well as pan-psychic views of nature as ecologically sacred. Contemporary green discourse also [Page 207]takes many forms. Ecofeminist discourses, for example, analogize the degradation of women and nature under patriarchy. Such discourse resists objectivity and replaces it with a subjective view in which humans love, care, and nurture the environment while recognizing the holism of the deep ecological view. Radical green discourses and Green Party manifestos share principles of nonviolence, social justice, demilitarization, community-based economics, global responsibility, and consideration of the rights of future generations.

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