I guess it takes all kinds of rhetoric to convince people that the world is worth saving. Not in the sense that it can't survive without us, but in the sense that if it's going to survive with us, we probably ought to make some changes.
In terms of rhetoric, I think that Aristotle was ingenious in recognizing the necessity of appeals that reach beyond our capacity for logic, that get at our sensual, emotional, visceral cores and persuade us by appealing to our sense of being in the world rather than by our sense of good, sound, arguments.
As Killingsworth and Palmer demonstrate over and over again, there is no discourse (not even scientific) that doesn't use rhetoric. But there is no individual member of any particular discourse community (not even scientific) that doesn't also have personal values, concerns, and beliefs that must be dealt with and integrated into his or her daily professional and public life.
Creating an environmental ethic is no easy task because codes of ethics, though they deal with the community, are so personal, so private, so close to our identities. And yet, in order to come around to an environmental ethic, in order to promote action, individuals need to join together in recognizing a set of common values on which they can base their own individual action. It takes more than the "wild facts" that K&P describe to move people to action. It takes getting to people personally--through their own moral code, their own desires, passions--before they will change their values, before they will even remotely contemplate changing the ways that they do things.
This is why we need more than scientific rhetoric. And it is especially why scientists need to recognize that they use rhetoric. And why, even further, there is a need for informed discourse between scientists and non-scientists over issues that pertain to us all.
Snapshot: Thinking Like A Mountain; Thinking Like A Scientist
"This is one of his most famous essays," I say.
"Huh?" he asks, as I nudge him, forcing him to turn his attention away from Freakonomics and toward me. He looks over.
"Thinking Like A Mountain," I say. "Listen."
I read the entire essay aloud to him, as he listens, eyes half closed with his book plunked down next to him and his hand over his heart. I don't know if he's really listening. I somewhat doubt it. At any rate, I just wanted to share what I was reading, thinking, feeling. And to hear Leopold's lilting prose out loud. Really, that was the idea. I had already read the essay. Gone pages past it, even. But the green eyes of the wolf nagged at me. The words begged to be voice. I turned back the pages and read it out loud.
When I finished, he had one word. "Beautiful," he said, breathing deeply.
Surprised that I detected no hint of sarcasm, I looked over at him. "Just beautiful," he said. "It encapsulates the entire way I see the world."
I wonder how many who consider themselves scientists would feel that way. I wonder how many scientists' work challenges that feeling of harmony, of wholeness, of tension in the natural world. I wonder how many feel power over nature rather than awe beneath it.
I didn't finish reading Sand County this week. Josh asked to take it with him to D.C., where he's been since Monday morning, attending a "GreenGov" conference for government employees who work in various Environmental divisions. It's a huge conference. DOE Secretary Chu addressed the attendees this morning and said that solar would be coming to the White House by spring.
I wonder what the mountain would say.
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