Topic-Driven Environmental Rhetoric

Derek G. Ross is Associate Professor in the Master of Technical and Professional Communication Program at Auburn University, USA. His work has appeared Technical Communication, Written Communication, and IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, among others. He is the Ethics Editor/Columnist for Intercom Magazine and Co-Director of LUCIA, Auburn’s Laboratory for Usability, Communication, Interaction, and Accessibility.

Foreword

[Carl Herndl]

Introduction

[Derek G. Ross]

Part I: Framing

1. Proof and Fluid Topics: Topic-Driven Environmental Rhetoric in Modern Society

[Derek G. Ross]

2. Scientist as Hero, Technology as the Enemy: Commonplaces about Science in Environmental Discourses

[Denise Tillery]

3. Granola-Eating, Birkenstock-Wearing, Tree Huggers Who Want to Take Your Guns: Commonplaces of the Environmentalist

[Beth Jorgensen]

Part II: Place

4. Climate Crisis Made Manifest: The Shift From a Topos of Time To a Topos of Place

[Esben Bjerggaard Nielsen]

5. Victims "in" and Protectors "of" Appalachia: Place and the Common Topic of Protection in Missing Mountains: We Went to the Mountaintop, but it Wasn’t There

[Joshua P. Ewalt and James G. Cantrill]

6. Remembering the Alamo: Commonplaces in Texas Water Policy Arguments

[Ken Baake]

Part III: Risk and Uncertainty

7. Reconstituting Causality: Accident Reports as Posthuman Documentation

[Daniel Richards]

8. Toward an Apparent Decolonial Feminist Rhetoric of Risk

[Angela M. Haas and Erin A. Frost]

9. Designing Doubt: The Tactical Use of Uncertainty in Hydraulic Fracturing Debates

[Jacqueline N. Kerr]

Part IV: Sustainability

10. Sustainability and Sustainable Development: The Evolution and Use of Confused Notions

[Cynthia R. Haller]

11. The Three Pillars of Sustainability as a Special Topic of Invention in the Marketing Discourse of Plastic-Packaging Companies

[Edward A. Malone and Shristy Bashyal]