This thesis examines how particular forms of mass media spurred and guided the United States environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Its objective is to better understand how mass media contributed to the evolution of the environmental movement. Three particular types of media form the basis of this study: writing (books, newspapers, and magazines), audio-visual material (movies and television), and photographs. These three mediums of communications and their intrinsic effects on the human psyche and society as a whole are major contributing factors to a raised environmental consciousness, a lasting legacy of environmentalism, and the promotion of the environmental movement itself.

Metaphor as tool is a concept that has increasing analysis and support in the past several years. Long before the wealth of contemporary analysis, Rachel Carson produced Silent Spring, a book hailed as the motivation for a new environmental movement in the United States. The use of metaphor in Silent Spring is most apparent in the title. The title's focus, however poignant, even moving and motivating, is complemented by a rich set of metaphorical entailments and implications that reinforce and strengthen the title's metaphor and represent systemic forces and practices that lead to and prevent a spring of silence. Carson skillfully appropriated marketing metaphors used by chemical companies to sell insecticides and pesticides. She transformed these metaphors into powerful criticisms of indiscriminate chemical practices, forcefully undercutting industry arguments for chemicals as a means of guaranteeing "control." The effects of Carson's metaphors, built on a strong, complex foundation of scientific studies, invite reader participation and interaction as outlined by Lakoff and Johnson. The metaphors further entertain, educate, explain, describe in the sense of Wittgenstein's language games, and tightly integrate action and language. More fundamentally, her metaphors helped to establish a systems view and nature-oriented paradigm for analyzing, and resolving environmental issues and problems in the United States, creating a framework for debate and policy development and implementation, in the vein of Schon's and Rein's arguments for framing and policy design. The metaphors also set a stage for personal motivation by connecting individual human homes to nature and the global environment. / Master of Science

Environmental rhetoric has the capacity to render private citizens a concerned public. In doing so, it can prompt in individual practices of what, in classical rhetoric, was described as civic virtue and engage them in activities of responsible citizenship that work toward practical change. Within the recent tradition of environmental public discourse in the United States, Rachel Carson and Al Gore have each realized this capacity in their use of environmental rhetoric, by addressing, respectively, the issues of pesticide pollution and global warming in ways that galvanized citizens as an active public. This thesis examines the reasons behind this effectiveness. It asserts that both Carson and Gore employed a modernized epideictic as a rhetorical tool through which on the one hand, enabled them to invoke the shared values and associated emotions that have the capacity to bind citizens together in common cause, and on the other hand, to convey their own ethical character as civic speakers worthy of trust and emulation. My project in this thesis is to comprehensively track the process of arousing those political emotions and character in the writings of Rachel Carson and Al Gore, both of whom entered the public discourse in moments of environmental crises.

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Thesis (M.A.)--Miami University, Dept. of History, 2005. / Title from first page of PDF document. Document formatted into pages; contains [1], ii, 89 p. : maps. Includes bibliographical references (p. 70-89).