Spring 1998
Volume 24, Number 3

The fear of a poisoned world is being increasingly pressed, debated, debunked, and reiterated from many disciplinary vantage points: medicine, political science, history, sociology, economics, and ethics among others. Seldom however is toxicity discussed as a discourse. This essay aims to define the forms, origins, uses, and critical implications of toxic rhetoric, conceiving it as an interlocked set of toipoi whose force derives partly from the exigencies of an anxiously industrializing culture, partly from deeper-rooted Western attitudes. In order to make this analysis pointed and manageable, and not to outrun the limits of my knowledge, I shall focus on the United States, although many of my points apply to Anglophone settler cultures worldwide, if not also to other regions (and few remain untouched) influenced by Western environmental institutions.

There seem to be at least two reasons why the discourse of toxicity has not been treated with the same attention as its chemical, medical, social, and legal aspects. One is surely the pragmatism that plays a major part in shaping all agendas of discussion. Discourse may seem a low priority when health or even property is jeopardized. Not even most humanistic intellectuals might agree with Emerson's dictum that the most abstract truth is the most practical. Also significant, though, has been the manner in which environmental issues have been framed by the likeliest potential contributors to the inquiry. Within literary and rhetorical studies, the impetus to engage environmental issues has mainly come from the so-called ecocentric movement, which to date has been energized by two chief ethico-political commitments: protection of the endangered natural world and recuperation of a sense of how human beings have been and might be imagined as (re)connected with it, notwithstanding the threat of the death of nature from industrialism and/or postmodernity. 1 Ecocriticism's recency, together with its commitment to recuperation, have limited attention to toxicity per se. 2 The other venue from which environmental issues have been most explored by those interested in discursive formations--cultural studies--has tended to epiphenomenalize the physical environment by conceiving it as social construct and thus as a symptomatic register of political or economic power, or as a site of cultural contestation. 3 Thus ecocriticism has lacked epistemological and political sophistication, while cultural studies has been quick to deconstruct physical environment as mystification of political theater. But let me not sound ungrateful to either, as I am greatly indebted to both, particularly the former, and should like to see a greater cross-fertilization between them. 4 I hope this essay will show one way that this can usefully be done.

1. A helpful conspectus, anthology, and annotated bibliography that may serve as a kind of interim report on ecocriticism's origins and early stages of unfolding is provided by The Ecocriticism Reader, ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Herold Fromm (Athens, Ga., 1996).

2. Note, however, several contributers to Green Culture: Environmental Rhetoric in Contemporary America, ed. Carl G. Herndl and Stuart C. Brown (Madison , Wisc., 1996): M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline S. Palmer, "Millennial Ecology: The Apocalyptic Narrative from Silent Spring to Global Warming," pp. 21-45; Steven B. Katz and Carolyn R. Miller, "The Low-Level Radioactive Waste Siting Controversy in North Carolina: Toward a Rhetorical Model of Risk Communication," pp. 111-40; and Craig Waddell, "Saving the Great Lakes: Public Participation in Environmental Policy," pp. 141-65. In rhetorical studies, see also Killingsworth and Palmer's previous work, Ecopeak: Rhetoric and Environmental Politics in America (Carbondale, Ill., 1992). In literary studies, compare my chapter on "Environmental Apocalypticism" in The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), pp. 280-308.

3. For example, Fredric Jameson: "Pollution, although it's horrifying and dangerous, is maybe simply a spin-off of this new relationship to nature," that is, " the industrialization of agriculture and the transformation of peasents or farmers into agricultural workers" (Fredric Jameson, interview with Paik Nak-chung, in Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, ed. Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake [Durham, N. C., 1996], pp. 353, 352). See also Masao Miyoshi, "A Borderless World? From Colonialism to Transnationalism and the Decline of the Nation-State," Critical Inquiry 19 (Summer 1993): 746-48; rpt. in Global/Local, pp. 94-94. For Jameson the reductive "simply" reflects the belief "that ecological politics tends to be bourgeois politics" (p. 353)--questionable in light of recent events, I argue below. The most extended ecopolitical critiques from this basic perspective are Andrew Ross, Strange Weather: Culture, Science, and Technology in the Age of Limits (London, 1988) and The Chicago Gangster Theory of life: Nature's Debt to Society (London, 1994).

4. Buell, The Environmental ImaginationRealism and Representation: Essays on the Problem of Realism in Relation to Science, Literature, and Culture, ed. George Levine (Madison, Wisc., 1993), pp.27-43; "Searching for Common Ground," in Reinventing Nature? Responses to Postmodern Deconstruction, ed. Micheal E. Soulé and Gary Lease (Washington, D.C., 1995), pp. 47-63; and "Simulated Nature and Natural Simulations: Rethinking the Relation between the Beholder and the World," in Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York, 1995), pp. 409-25.

Lawrence Buell, the John P. Marquand Professor of English at Harvard University, in the author of New England Literary Culture (1986) and The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (1995) among other works. His current projects include a book in progress entitled The Work of Imagination in an Endangered World.