Jacob Smith

NGOs
Prof. Bracic
2/25/16

From the Apocalyptic to the Mundane

In the current political climate around alternative energy, warming and
environmental degradation the discussions have been centered on the opposition of the
Deniers and those who claim that denial will inevitably cause the extinction of us all. The
nature of this conflict makes the rhetorical form of their arguments the central point by
which both persuasion and policy becomes implemented. The Frame of the Apocalypse to
come that will inevitably destroy our own conceptions of humanity only serves to both
disempower political responses to warming and to efface the ongoing structural violence
caused by our ecological choices that are ignored by these frames. This political
disempowerment manifests itself in the ways in which ant warming activists become split
and end up arguing about the intricacies of warming science instead of creating actual
strategies to combat the common problem. Instead, we should choose to create a
rhetorical frame that foreground the individual relationship to form of structural violence.
Political disempowerment serves to effect every level of governance and their
relations to environmental change on a broader scale. On a more personal level, the
framing of the apocalypse creates a narrative the problem of environmental change as too
large and too fatalistic for the average person to really do anything. This logic of fatalism
begins to manifests itself in a perception by the population that their efforts are both
useless and unable to deal with the totality of the apocalypse. Saffron ONeill and is 2009
write, for the Tyndall center for Climate change research, that these rhetorical frames can

both cause the message to become laughable and creates an oppositional discourse
between the sane majorities against the doom mongers1. This counterintuitive
reaction only serves to create internal dissent within people who may support efforts to
solve climate change because of how it is framed. Scientific elitism on this issue tend to
alienate those who are antiestablishment or against the current the political order. The
problem extends beyond just the discussions because that rhetorical frame shapes how
people perceptually understand the whole political project because it raises into question
the credibility of the speaker in the first place. This, combines itself with its position in
the far away future, allows for us to continually put these issues on the back burner for
someone else to deal with. Busby indicates that crisis based frames are necessary to deal
with the electoral time horizons2, yet this model of crisis politics fails in how it defines
a crisis. The association of crisis with apocalypse ultimately creates a limit for this frame
to change the mindsets of the people .A reframing of the immediacy of the current crisis
for disadvantaged population would in turn create a more effective way of dealing with
the limited amount of time that elections have to deal with because it doesnt focus on the
far future.
Instead this NGO would attempt to create frames that are foregrounded in the
ongoing effects of climate change that we can see on a daily basis. Narratives of places
like Kiribati or even the rising sea level on our own coasts can evoke a strategy of
empathy that spurs strategies to actually change our relationships to warming in the first
1 ONeill, Saffron, and Sophie Nicholson-Cole. "Why Silence Is Not an Option."Nat

Biotechnol Nature Biotechnology 24.10 (2006): 1177. Web.

2 Busby, Joshua W. "Climate Change: The Hardest Problem to Solve." Moral

Movements and Foreign Policy. New York: Cambridge UP, 2010. N. pag. Print.

place. This goes beyond just warming and its effects on our psyche, but also to the ways
we understand waste dumping in places like Flint, Michigan and the ocean have material
effects on the people living those regions. This frame when shown to populations not
effected by climate change would help to create coalitions across ethnic lines through
shared empathy. This goes beyond fundraising for Research and Development and
includes things like setting the agenda for policy makers, engaging in eco-friendly actions
in their daily life and creating deliberative spaces to talk about these very real issues. This
could use strategies similar to the NGO movements, described in Chapter 3 of Activists
beyond borders3 against Argentinian dictatorship and the violence that came along with
it. This drawing connections between different NGO strategies fill in missing the gap
between Environmental problems and a broader mobilization against a shared problem
that affects us all in different ways. This could be implemented in commercials that
showcase the lived reality of many communities relationship to climate change or even
pamphlets and conventions about the ways in which we as individuals are complicit in
certain structure of neoliberal governance that created the issue of climate change in the
first place. This becomes less about the particular choices or policy proposals we choose
to support because the rhetorical form by which we present those over-determine and
structure how people react to those proposals in the first place. Our discussions should
not be about the apocalyptic future that may or may not come but the ongoing violence to
populations we have deemed not important enough to include within our discussions
about climate change

3 Keck, Margaret E., and Kathryn Sikkink. Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy

Networks in International Politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1998. Print.