Blog Post #2: Rhetoric, Pluralism, and the Environmental Movement

In A Pragmatic Theory of Rhetoric, Walter Beale claims that rhetoric’s strength consists of openness and centrality—its predilections toward “diversity, pluralism, balance, civility, and the recognition of limits” (106). According to Beale, rhetoric has “a vested interest in openness and variety, in a pluralism of ways of living and of seeing the world” (163)

Beale’s sweeping assertions strike me as exactly right—not necessarily in how they apply to rhetoric (although I won’t begrudge him that), but in how they apply to issues of environmentalism. It seems to me to be a lesson from our other readings that the less open you are, the harder it is to find a workable solution to any given environmental dilemma.

Take Farewell, My Subaru. Even from the outset, Doug Fine’s attempts to go green are riddled with trade-offs, contradictions, and unresolvable quandaries. Installing solar panels frees him from the grid, but the cost of production (particularly of the batteries he needs to store the energy) mean that the choice is less energy-efficient in the short term than what he’d been using before. His VegOil ROAT frees him from the pump, but requires the continued existence of fast-food joints peddling deep-fried foods.

I’d say it’s a great virtue of the author—and a great example to readers—that rather than simply giving up in the face of all these contradictions, Fine at least tries to forge a least-harm route using the tools that are available to him and the best information that’s out there. I may not agree with all his choices (why set up a farm requiring irrigation in an area that’s already depleting its water tables?), but at least Fine doesn’t expect everyone else to follow his particular example. In the Afterword of Farewell, My Subaru, Fine sets out eco-friendly recommendations for readers who can’t or won’t make the sweeping lifestyle changes he did.

Fine recognizes the need for a diversity of approaches to environmentalism that take into account the needs and desires of the people expected to carry them out. The need for pluralism becomes especially clear when we consider cases such as those presented in “Killer of Sheep.”

If you handed a farm to any of the characters in the film, I don’t think you’d further the environmental movement. Like many city dwellers (and I include myself in this), they probably wouldn’t have the skills to work the land or even the desire to; any attempt at “greening” society would have to take into account the fact that local food or a nebulous to desire to reconnect to the earth are often not pressing concerns in peoples’ minds. Even Fine’s Afterword recommendations would be laughable to people who can barely afford to own a car at all—much less worry about what exactly they’re putting in it. That doesn’t mean, though, that environmental concerns should be abandoned—it’s just important to realize that how they’re related and how they’re dealt with really ought to depend on context, and that they, like Beale’s conception of rhetoric, are inextricably tangled with every other field of human interest, including (but certainly not limited to) issues like social justice, poverty, and opportunity.