Deep Ambivalence and Wild Objects: Toward a Strange Environmental Rhetoric

Carl Herndl and Stuart Brown argue that the complexity of environmental rhetoric is such that its concerns are embedded in both our lived experiences and across many intellectual endeavors. To think through environmentalism, they suggest, is to think through rhetoric, and both entail crossing boundaries. Environmentalism and its concomitant rhetorics, however, frequently draw a bold line between humans and nonhuman nature, and so long as rhetoric remains wedded to the human and the human alone, environmental rhetoric will continue to miss the mark. A strange environmental rhetoric, which blurs the line between humans and nonhumans, calls for more relations and not less—not a removal of humans from the environment, but another way of comporting ourselves with environments.