Green Voices: Defending Nature and the Environment in American Civic Discourse

Richard D. Besel · Bernard K. Duffy

Feb 2016 · SUNY Press Open Access Book 43 · State University of New York Press

About this ebook

The written works of nature's leading advocates—from Charles Sumner and John Muir to Rachel Carson and President Jimmy Carter, to name a few—have been the subject of many texts, but their speeches remain relatively unknown or unexamined. Green Voices aims to redress this situation. After all, when it comes to the leaders, heroes, and activists of the environmental movement, their speeches formed part of the fertile earth from which uniquely American environmental expectations, assumptions, and norms germinated and grew. Despite having in common a definitively rhetorical focus, the contributions in this book reflect a variety of methods and approaches. Some concentrate on a single speaker and a single speech. Others look at several speeches. Some are historical in orientation, while others are more theoretical. In other words, this collection examines the broad sweep of US environmental history from the perspective of our most famous and influential environmental figures.

This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to Knowledge Unlatched—an initiative that provides libraries and institutions with a centralized platform to support OA collections and from leading publishing houses and OA initiatives. Learn more at the Knowledge Unlatched website at: https://www.knowledgeunlatched.org/, and access the book online at the SUNY Open Access Repository at http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12648/7126.

About the author

Richard D. Besel is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo and coeditor (with Jnan A. Blau) of Performance on Behalf of the Environment. Bernard K. Duffy is Professor and Department Chair of Communication Studies at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo and coeditor (with Richard W. Leeman) of The Will of a People: A Critical Anthology of Great African American Speeches.