In Green Voices: Defending Nature and the Environment in American Civic Discourse, editors Richard D. Besel and Bernard K. Duffy attempt to address the oversight that most modern rhetorical scholarship focuses on the written works of environmentalists rather than their spoken words. To redress this paucity, the editors collect a series of analyses focused only on U.S. environmental speeches curated specifically to examine “the broad sweep of U.S. environmental history from the perspective of nature’s leading advocates” (2). Besel and Duffy work to represent a wide array of orators, arranging analyses in a “roughly chronological manner” to better help the reader perceive “the historical arc of U.S. environmentalism as it unfolded in the pages of great and influential speeches” (4). The breadth of speakers, both in terms of topic and decade, as well as the variety of analytical methodologies applied to their spoken words, makes this collection a unique and useful addition to the growing corpus on environmental communication research.
A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric