Charles darwin and the crisis of ecology: A rhetorical perspective

Rhetorical critics need to be sensitive to the broader possibilities of their role as accessory to the historian. In addition to analyzing persuasive works in relationship to the initial audiences to which they were addressed rhetorical critics might also profitably examine message levels ignored by initial audiences but which may potentially be very meaningful to later ones. Darwin's Origin of Species is here treated not as a work of the past but as a contemporary document whose message about man and the environment is significant for our time.