Technical Communication, Deliberative Rhetoric, and Environmental Discourse: Connections and Directions

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Technical Communication, Deliberative Rhetoric,
and Environmental Discourse Connections and
Directions

• Edited by Nancy W. Coppola and Bill Karis

Volume 11 of the ATTW Contemporary Studies in
Technical Communication Published in 2000
Grace Bernhardt November 13, 2006
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The Rise of Environmental Discourse within
Academia

• 20th anniversary of Earth Day (1990)
• Growing public interest in environmental issues
• Environmental writing is regularly discussed at
  4Cs, meetings of ATTW and MLA, and CPTSC

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Environmental Discourse is

• the language we use to speak and write about the
  environment (xiii)
• Increasingly technical and specialized
• Highly rhetorical
• Increasingly complex

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Technical Communication is

• communication that adapts technical knowledge
  and human values for an intended audience (xiii)
  
• Deliberative
• High stakes
• Interdisciplinary

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Technical Communicators

• translate highly technical information
• take a multidisciplinary approach
• have skills to accommodate the position of the
  scientist and that of the politician
• have the ability to adjust ideas to people and
  people to ideas (xiii)

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Deliberative rhetoric is

• discourse that attempts to change attitudes and
  inspire action regarding matters of public
  concern (xiii)
• Concerned with future and decision making

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Part I Theoretical Perspectives and Models in
Technical Communication and Environmental Rhetoric

• Part I develops a productive overview of
  constructing environmental discourse on the
  framework of theory and models (xxiii).

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• Chapter 1
• Defining Sustainable Development A Case Study in
  Environmental Communication
• By Craig Waddell
• Michigan Tech

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Overview

• Examines the role of the public in the formation
  of environmental policy
• Examines public deliberations on sustainable
  development
• Offers models for public participation
• Discusses how to translate this case to classroom
  practices and tech comm

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Models for Public Participation

• Technocratic
• The One-Way Jeffersonian
• The Interactive Jeffersonian
• The Social Constructionist

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Implications

• The Social Constructionist Model for public
  participation in environmental-policy formation
  can guide both our reflection about and our
  practice of public deliberation in a way that
  encourages respect for participatory democracy
  (15).

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Implications for Tech Comm

• Technical communicators can be
• agents for social change
• ethical decision makers and can disclose harmful
  information to the public
• involved throughout the process

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Part II Visual Thinking and Multimedia
Strategies in Technical Communication and
Environmental Rhetoric

• Part II focuses on an area of study where work
  has only just begunvisual rhetoric in
  environmental communication (xxiii).

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• Chapter 5
• Geology, Photography, and Environmental Rhetoric
  in the American West of 1860-1890
• By Gregory A. Wickliff
• UNC Charlotte

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Overview

• Examines the 19th century geological surveys of
  the American West
• Examines the ways surveys were used as tools of
  colonization of the land and the Natives

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Photographs and Maps

• Photographers recorded
• images of natural wonders for publicity of
  wilderness tourist industry
• images of developing villages like SLC, UT and
  Leadville, CO to show ag and mining industry
  successes and opportunities for profit
• Maps describe natural resources, remapped and
  renamed the land

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OSullivans Photos
Taken by Timothy OSullivan Flash lit picture of
Comstock Mine worker carrying out dangerous
work Not included in survey reports
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Geological Surveys as Tool of Colonization

• Maps and catalogs were a way to affirm dominance
  of white culture
• Surveys portrayed the wild and unique natural
  wonders of the West and encouraged tourism by
  Easterners
• This goal required removal of natives

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Economic Colonization

• Surveys also prompted discussion of mining
  industry, logging, and agriculture
• Needed maps to show areas where new operations
  could be set up

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Portrayal of Natives

• Sentimentalized and objectified
• Survey documents historicize and sentimentalize
  the living Native American cultures in their
  catalogs of dying languages and traditions, their
  conventionally posed, specimen-like portraits of
  pacified tribal chiefs, their images of Native
  American architecture and artifacts. (89)
• Exploitation of Natives and land

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Effects of Surveys

• Used to create scientific record of land to
  legitimize Western colonization that had occurred
  in 1800s
• Surveys are Aristotelian arguments of fact made
  by government-sponsored scientists and directed
  primarily at Eastern capitalists and their
  representatives in Congress. (88)

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Effects of Surveys

• Surveyists espoused an expansionist rhetoric
  that devalued native peoplesand invented a
  mythic West that could be mastered by Eastern
  technology and put to whatever purposes the
  government deemed most appropriate. (108)

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• Chapter 6
• Modernism and a New Picturesque
• The Environmental Rhetoric of Ansel Adams
• By James Frost
• Boise State University

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Overview

• Looks at Ansel Adams nature photography and its
  contribution to environmental causes
• Adams photographs are a form of epideictic
  rhetoric in praise of nature and also a tool of
  deliberative rhetoric

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Adams Shifting Styles
Adams Early Abstract Modernist Style
Adams Later Photographic Picturesque Style
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Power of Photographs

• Adams was discovering that his photographs could
  play a broader social roleAdams could use his
  art photographs of nature for the cause of
  conservation (124).
• Adams began photographing landscapes and
  attempted to record the sublime experience of
  nature

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Nature as other

• Adams exclusion of humans and manmade trails and
  roads implies natures relationship to humans as
  otherThe portrayal of an isolated nature can
  also connote nature as a commodity for
  consumption, a view that was well in keeping with
  the approach the park service took in promoting
  the national parks (131).

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Adams Rhetoric

• Nature is sacred and primordial, a national
  heritage and spiritual resource (134) that must
  be preserved
• Adams rhetoric presents a nature always
  ordered, beautiful and untouched by humanity
  (135).
• Adams developed an ethos by presenting a large
  body of work in print

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Reading Adams Today

• A heightened awareness of environmental loss has
  led many to see Adams photographs as no longer
  representative of the American landscape (136).
• Photographs are too Edenic do not show humans
  and their technological appendages

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Challenges for Environmental Rhetoricians

• Environmentalists must communicate the value in
  nature while also defining the concurrent domains
  of nature and humanity (136)
• Environmentalists must construct reality, and
  photographs are a powerful part of this discourse
  (136)

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Part III Case Studies in Technical Communication
and Environmental Rhetoric

• Part III develops specific cases of
  environmental rhetoric in use and offers
  strategies for implementation and practice
  (xxiii).

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• Chapter 11
• Rhetoric, Habermas, and the Adirondak Park
• An Exemplum for Rhetoricians
• By Bill Karis
• Clarkson University

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Overview

• Case example of NYs Adirondak Park and debate
  there over two proposed commercial projects
• Examples show the range of values that influence
  decision making and the potential for
  deliberative rhetoric to affect decision making

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Technological Expediency

• In most public decisions, technological
  expediency takes precedence over other values
• Environmental debate suggests that processes can
  be and are being implemented that allow for
  greater inclusion of different values into
  deliberative rhetoric (228).

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Rhetoric and Public Participation

• Debates provide potential for deliberative
  rhetoric to make a positive contribution to such
  decision making within our society (226)
• Author argues Habermas would point to preferred
  condition in which all values and interests would
  be considered (229)

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The Role of Rhetoric

• Rhetorics role in environmental issues should
  be to help people discover how to synthesize and
  mesh technical knowledge with human values (233).

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Part IV Scientific Inquiry in Technical
Communication and Environmental Rhetoric

• Part IV is a section on scientific inquiry and
  deliberative rhetoric, which demonstrates that
  empirical evidence and credible reasoning can
  advance environmental action (xxiii).

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• Chapter 14
• Environmental Policymaking and the Report Genre
• By Carolyn D. Rude
• Texas Tech University

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Overview

• Mainstream environmental organizations rely on
  reports for information to support their efforts
• Within academia, the report genre is overlooked
  and seen as an end product with a limited
  audience
• Author examines two reports by the Union of
  Concerned Scientists (UCS)

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Rhetorical Analysis of Reports

• Author argues that A rhetorical analysis cannot
  stop with the words on the page (information,
  arrangement, style, and delivery), but must also
  consider how the rhetorical choices serve other
  purposes (271).

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Rhetorical Analysis of Reports

• Understanding the report in the context of
  advocacy increases the potential for using the
  genre powerfully (270).
• Author looks at reports in context of other work
  and as a strategic piece of writing

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Characteristics of UCS Reports

• Strategic tool for launching action
• Forward-looking
• Use science but interpret findings through lens
  of social responsibility
• Inviting style and visuals
• Organized around issues and options rather than
  methods and results

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The Value of Reports

• UCS reports serve three purposesthey are
  identifiers of sound science, advocacy, and
  social responsibility (273)
• UCS reports reflect a scientific commitment to
  accurate information, an activist and pragmatic
  commitment to advocacy and action, and an ethical
  commitment to solving social problems (274).

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Deliberative Rhetoric in UCS Reports

• UCS reports focus on change rather than on
  control, on technical solutions rather than
  regulation, on future actions rather than
  remediation of past actions (275)
• UCS reports use deliberative rhetoric to focus on
  the future and epideictic rhetoric to politely
  shame policymakers (275)

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Pedagogical Implications

• Teaching the use of reports for policymaking
  should emphasize their purpose and issues of
  social responsibility in addition to form and
  method
• We can reconceive the report not as the end of a
  study, but rather as a tool for action (282)

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• Summing up!

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Themes across the Readings

• Deliberative rhetoric in environmental
  communication
• Divisions within environmental communication
• Our roles as educators of future technical
  communicators and public citizens

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Public Deliberation

• Environmental communication offers opportunity to
  
• demonstrate the need for technical communication
• revive our concern with public deliberation as an
  area of study

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Divisions in Environmental Communication

• Tendency to group the environmental movement into
  two views/approachespreservationists and
  conservationists, environmentalists and
  developmentalists, jobs vs. the environment
  (11-12)
• Tendency towards use of oppositional pairs such
  as logger/tree hugger or environmentalist/devel
  oper triggers a predetermined bias and a
  simplistic response to environmental problems
  (23)

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Divisions in Environmental Communication

• the language of divisiveness, of polarity and
  exclusion, draws lines between groups and frames
  arguments so people stop thinking and stop
  talkingit creates a simplistic dichotomy between
  us and them, between the environmentalist who
  wants to protect the environment at any cost and
  the developmentalist who wants to preserve
  economic prosperity at any cost to the
  environment (23-24)

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Pedagogical Value

• We can emphasize ability of technical
  communicators to combine their knowledge of
  scientific topics with their skill in rhetoric
• We can teach rhetoric and technical communication
  as a vital activity that is key to public
  participation

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Limitations

• Collection does not include an examination of the
  rhetorical styles of different agenciesGreenpeace
  vs. Sierra Club vs. The Nature Conservancy
• More concrete examples of ways to bring lessons
  from environmental communication into the
  classroom