A Sense of Urgency: How the Climate Crisis is Changing Rhetoric

Discourse around global warming is changing to mirror the intensity of the crisis, according to this listless study. Hawhee (Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw), an English professor at Pennsylvania State University, examines four works of climate activism and explores how they elicit feelings of urgency. She contends that U.S. congressional hearings from 2019 in which teenage activists discussed the “anxiety, depression, fear [and] pain of betrayal” they felt about the future highlighted the emotional consequences of a warming world. Hawhee considers how “flatten the curve” graphs used to justify Covid-19 lockdowns have been repurposed by climate activists to convey the importance of reducing carbon emissions, and how artist Maya Lin transported 49 dying cedar trees to New York City’s Madison Square Park for an art installation that made the crisis’s impact immediate. However, these relatively obscure case studies don’t reveal much about mainstream climate discourse, and the straightforward analysis is hampered by impenetrable jargon, as when Hawhee observes that a 2019 funeral ceremony for a melted Icelandic glacier encouraged attendees to imagine a future beset by ecological loss: “A set of specific chronotypes... allowed organizers and speakers at the event to exploit the temporal and generic flexibility of the epideictic genre.” This murky, unenlightening meditation doesn’t bring the heat. Photos. (June)