Herndl and Brown, “Introduction” to Green Culture: Environmental Rhetoric in Contemporary America

The authors of this text are Carl G. Herndl, who is a professor in the Department of English at the University of South Florida, and Stuart C. Brown, who is a research associate in the School of Biological Sciences at University of Adelaide. The primary audience for this text is the students of these two professors or any others professors doing research on rhetoric. The text mentions that Aristotle defined rhetoric as ” the discovery of the possible means of persuasion.” They add on to this saying that rhetoric is also ” a tool that allowed people to explore significant social and moral issues and make wise or prudent decisions.” This text mainly focuses on environmental rhetoric. It says that rhetoric is able to help us understand environmental debates. It goes on to bring up various nature articles and essays that use discourse and environmental rhetoric to get their point across. One piece that they bring up is Diane Ackerman’s essay “Albatrosses.” They point out how this essay uses rhetoric to persuade its reader into thinking that the keeping the environment and its animals, such as the albatross, safe is a social responsibility. At they end they bring up a rhetoric model for environmental discourse. The model includes regulatory discourse, which is for the larger institutions that make the decision and set the environmental policy, scientific discourse, which is for environmental sciences, and poetic discourse, which is for the language that is used. Writing can use all or just some of these. The model only demonstrates the dominate discourses. Texts and be broken down even further but this is just a simple model. I think that the texts primary rhetorical purpose is to first show what rhetoric is in more broad sense, the break it down. In this text they decide to break down the environmental rhetoric.