The Rhetoric of Sustainability

Fifteen years ago, Cheryl Glotfelty accurately proclaimed, “If your knowledge of the outside world were limited to what you could infer from the major publications of the literary profession, you would quickly discern that race, class, and gender were the hot topics … but you would never suspect that the earth’s life support systems were under stress. Indeed, you might never know that there was an earth at all” (Glotfelty & Fromm, 1996, p. xvi). ¹ Since then, publications in the field of literary studies as a whole have increasingly engaged with issues of sustainability. As Owens (2001, p. 3) indicates, these texts cover a range of specializations, including environmental rhetoric (Bruner & Oelschlaeger, 1994; Herndl & Brown, 1996), ecofeminism (McAndrew, 1996), the rhetoric of sustainability (Killingsworth & Palmer, 1992), environmental discourse and communication (Cantrill & Oravec, 1996), nature writing and composition (Roorda, 1998), postcolonialism and environmental pedagogy (Brown, 2000), and ecocom-position (Dobrin & Weisser, 2001, 2002). Despite this body of work, however, some scholars argue that the field remains far behind other disciplines in considering our research and teaching in light of environmental pressures.