Reverb

As my companions and I walked under the scores of imposing cottonwood trees on our trek to the Rio Grande, one of them inquired about all of the knee and hip-high vegetation surrounding the ground beneath their trunks and everywhere in between, pointing at one in particular. “It’s just a weed,” were the words that flew out of my mouth. No more than, no less than—it was just a weed. “I can’t believe you just said that,” my fellow trekker challenged.

Mechanized woman, walking along, oblivious. Leopold’s question, “How could a weed be a book?” (50), rumbled through my head. Inured and indoctrinated by a lifetime of easy transportation, acres of concrete and asphalt, shiny plumbing, cozy abodes, and plentiful food, understanding a weed did not even register a blip on my radar.

According to Killingsworth and Palmer, “a discourse’s ability to create valences,” is what creates positive attraction to it by the general public, and “the drama of rhetorical appeal in American environmental politics is thus a contest to win the favor of the mass public by creating language that stimulates first consent and then identification” (25). Leopold begins Sand County with an epistemic discourse, then veers slightly into the polemic and sarcastic, and sprinkles all of it liberally with metaphor, simile, and analogy—valences that become the attractors for readers like me. When Leopold asserts, “even the pigs look solvent,” one’s mind cannot help but envision a fat, pink pig waving wads of hundred-dollar bills in its front hooves (127). The message of pork versus progress resonates clearly.

Carefully chosen adjectives and well-directed syntax layer and infuse Rachel Carson’s science-based Silent Spring to achieve much the same effect as Leopold does. “The chemical weed killers are a bright new toy” that “give a giddy sense of power over nature to those who wield them,” run counter to and create points of attachment for the reader, unlike the factual discourse several sentences prior that disclose that four million acres of rangeland are sprayed each year (68).

Language and word choice in and of itself has the power to decide and to create. A headline in the small sidebar, “Around The World” in The Albuquerque Journal on Saturday, October 9, read: “Toxic Levels in Danube OK.” Toxic means poisonous, and OK expresses agreement. Like Carson, I wonder: “Who has made the decision that sets in motion these chains of poisonings, this ever-widening wave of death that spreads out, like ripples when a pebble is dropped into a still pond?” (127). The wily tropes and weighty adjectives of Leopold and Carson are words and phrases that attach and endure, ever in opposition to “those that walk unseeing through the world, unaware alike of its beauties, its wonders, and the strange and sometimes terrible intensity of the lives that are being lived about us” (Carson 249).