Herndl and Brown

The introduction to “Green Culture: Environmental Rhetoric in Contemporary America” is written by Carl G. Herndl and and Stuart C. Brown. Carl Herndl is an associate professor of English at New Mexico State University where he teaches and writes about discourse and he also has written multiple published works of literature. Stuart Brown also teaches at New Mexico State University, and he teaches rhetorical history and criticism and is also an author of multiple composition textbooks. Because both authors are professors, this text is directed towards an audience of students and fellow faculty members, but it is also directed towards environmentalists. The entire text is about environmental rhetoric and discourse, and the idea that language has an impact on the environment. This means that the text is directed towards main groups of people, those who study rhetoric and those who study the environment. This text is hard to understand in my opinion, so it was hard for me to find one concrete definition of what the authors idea of rhetoric was, but I think I understood their overall meaning of rhetoric. I think that when they say things like “what we know, and how we know it, and who can speak about it authoritatively are largely determined by our language” and that the environment “is a concept and an associated set of cultural values” and that “there is no objective environment” the authors are not in actuality discussing the environment, but a complex idea about rhetoric. I think what the authors are saying is that each person has their own individual concept of the environment that is influenced by rhetoric in things like literature and media, and that the concept of the environment, or anything in the world for that matter, is entirely subjective and varies from person to person. They are saying that everybody’s words carry meaning, whether done intentionally or not, and that each persons words and language builds a subjective conceptual meaning in the heads of themselves and the people around them of what they believe is the world that is around them. I believe that this extremely complicated idea of rhetoric is the main message of the text, and the primary rhetorical purpose is to portray to the audience that their words carry meaning in every person that they interact with.