Jennifer Peeples

The Truth of the Matter: Motherhood, Community and Environmental Justice

Armed with their personal experiences and community ties, the women of Environmental Justice have called into question the distribution of waste in the United States. In this essay, we explore the communicative practices that have enabled the movement to achieve change in extraordinarily difficult contexts. The women use what appears to be a liability, their gender, especially their role as mothers, to challenge practices and policies that threaten their homes, families, and communities.

Toxic Sublime: Imaging Contaminated Landscapes

This essay attempts to address the lack of critical analyses of images of toxins by examining the photography of landscape artists whose goal is to create a presence for contaminated sites. Imaging toxicity is no simple task as many pollutants are invisible and sites of contamination are concealed, especially for those of privilege. Contemporary artists who attempt this challenge are often criticized that the beauty of their images obfuscates the health and environmental risk of the polluted sites they photograph. In response, this essay introduces the concept of the toxic sublime as a means of analyzing the tensions arising from visual representations of environmental contamination: beauty and ugliness, magnitude and insignificance, the known and the unknown, inhabitation and desolation, security and risk. The essay charts the evolution of the sublime in the US, describing how it has evolved from sites of nature to sites of technology to human damaged landscapes, some of which produce a toxic sublime. Through a close examination of Manufactured Landscapes, a twenty-five year retrospective of the images of noted environmental photographer Edward Burtynsky, this essay extends our understanding of the invention of the sublime in images, reconceptualizes the sublime response to contaminated places, as well as adding to our knowledge of how visual texts function to encourage contemplation of the viewers’ position within a polluted world.

Downwind: Articulation and Appropriation of Social Movement Discourse

This essay examines the transformation of ideographs as they are passed from one social movement organization to another. The processes of articulation and appropriation are presented as a means of understanding which circumstances allow for a successful conveyance of discourse. A case study of “downwinder” discourse is offered as a means of analyzing this process and its effect on the construction of identity and place.

Arguing for what No One Wants: The Narratives of Nuclear Waste Storage Proponents.

In this essay, the authors examine the public discourse of three different proponent groups (Native Americans, Industry, and Community Advocates) to gain insight into the narratives used to justify the decision to support a typically unwanted land use. The questions they ask are: first, who are the actors, what is their agency, and what is their purpose, as revealed through an analysis of the compiled text? Second, in what ways do their stories combine into a coherent narrative of support for the project; and, finally, does the meta-narrative resonate with their primarily western states audience? They conclude with suggestions as to how this project informs participants in other waste management controversies.

Corporate Ventriloquism: Corporate Advocacy, the Coal Industry, and the Appropriation of Voice

In the second decade of the 21st century, the U.S. coal industry is facing unprecedented challenges. While for many years coal provided nearly half of U.S. electricity, in the spring of 2012 that share dropped to below 40% and is expected to continue falling (Energy Information Administration, 2012).1 Coal production is increasing not in Appalachia, the primary U.S. source for coal historically, but in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin (Goodell, 2006). Market competition from the natural gas industry combined with well organized climate and anti-mountaintop removal (MTR) campaigns have significantly curtailed the production of new coal-fired power plants in the United States (EIA, 2012). Under the Obama administration, the Environmental Protection Agency appears to be somewhat more amenable than the Bush administration to regulating carbon emissions as a pollutant, and more interested in enforcing Clean Water Act provisions applicable to MTR mining (Broder, 2012). Combined with sharp reductions in the number of coal mining jobs due to the increased efficiency of coal mining techniques, these circumstances have put the coal industry in Appalachia in a precarious position.

Trashing South-Central: Place and Identity in a Community-Level Environmental Justice Dispute

Communities involved in conflicts over local‐level environmental issues recognize that who they are and how their neighborhoods are portrayed can greatly influence the outcome of their disputes. In this essay, I explore a community‐level conflict in South‐Central Los Angeles where residents were opposing the construction of a garbage incinerator. I examine the ways that the rhetorics of place and identity were used to alter the siting of the unwanted facility. I find that boundaries between the personal and the public, the home and the community, and the insiders and the outsiders are all reconstructed as stakeholders attempt to reframe the controversy for their benefit. This study expands our knowledge of environmental communication research by examining the construction of place and identity, community activism, and environmental toxins.

Introduction: Voice and the Environment—Critical Perspectives

Clean water, air, and soil. Wild and open spaces. Uncontaminated foods. Healthy bodies and communities. These are some of the scarce resources that come to mind when thinking about environmental issues. And yet there is another limited resource, one that is intricately tied to the environment and yet often not recognized as such: voice. While there is often a cacophony of people talking, what is missing is the acknowledged voice, the one that is given an audience, allowed to be impactful and transformative in its assertions—the one that is heard. As Couldry (2010) warns, voice is in crisis. We daily witness the devastation aided by the loudly expressed agendas of a small minority of people who are able to dictate the environmental outcomes for the majority. As we maintain in this book, as voice goes, so goes the environment.

The Energy Covenant: Energy Dominance and the Rhetoric of the Aggrieved

The Trump Administration has adopted “energy dominance” as its guiding ideology for energy policy, marking a notable shift from decades of “energy security” rhetoric. This paper analyzes how Secretary of Interior Ryan Zinke, one of the administration’s key spokespeople for energy dominance, uses “energy covenant renewal” to frame the importance of energy dominance for the conservative base. Covenant renewal is a modified form of the jeremiad; Zinke uses it to unite conservative identities around energy politics and policies. Energy dominance thus invites those who feel aggrieved under Obama administration regulatory policy and the multicultural identity politics of the left to renew their commitment to fossil fuels, American exceptionalism, and a restored social order and privilege.

The Technological Shell Game

“The Technological Shell Game” examines the industry’s persistent use of the “clean coal” trope to resist environmental regulation. The chapter interprets “clean coal” as a case of strategic ambiguity in which the industry invokes different definitions of “clean coal” to play a “technological shell game” with audiences, offering the promise of clean coal while hiding what exactly is meant by clean coal. This rhetorical strategy can unite disparate audiences in support of “clean coal,” but it obfuscates the coal industry’s resistance to regulation by appearing to work voluntarily and proactively toward technological solutions to environmental problems. The shell game enables the industry to finesse contradictions between its neoliberal calls for smaller government and deregulation, and its demand that the federal government subsidize carbon capture and sequestration technologies.

The Hypocrite’s Trap

“Hypocrite’s Trap” examines the coal industry’s response to the fossil fuel divestment movement. Using a realist style of rhetoric, the coal industry and its allies in the oil and gas industry, conservative think tanks, and conservative media set a rhetorical trap for divestment advocates, the “Hypocrite’s Trap.” Three moves set the trap: establishing ignorance, exposing complicity, and naming hypocrisy. Industry advocacy characterizes the divestment movement as idealistic and unrealistic, elitist and dangerous, and hypocritical and immoral. In so doing, the hypocrite’s trap thus reinscribes divestment activists as individual consumers, rather than members of a collective movement. It also positions itself as a heroic provider of energy for the poor. This strategy positions the advocates of divestment as hypocrites but also reasserts the neoliberal reality, reasonableness, and virtue of the market.