“Her Program’s Progress”

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Radical Hope and Global Environmental History: Teaching with Erika Bsumek

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History Underfoot

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Two Bowies, One Knife

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IHS Roundtable: “Teaching Climate Change: Perspectives from History and the Humanities”

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Inside the Coal Industry’s Rhetorical Playbook

If citizens have heard anything about the upheaval in the U.S. coal industry, it is probably the insistence that President Obama and the EPA have waged a “war on coal.” This phrase is written into President-elect Donald Trump’s energy platform, which promises to “end the war on coal.

Industrial Apocalyptic: Neoliberalism, Coal, and the Burlesque Frame

Rhetorical scholarship and cultural commentary has demonstrated that environmentalist voices are consistently associated with apocalyptic rhetoric. However, this association deflects attention from the apocalyptic rhetoric that comes from industry and countermovements to environmentalism. This essay seeks to remedy that oversight by proposing the concept of “industrial apocalyptic” as a significant rhetorical form in environmental controversy. Based on analysis of the rhetoric of the US coal industry, we find that these industrial apocalyptic narratives rely on a burlesque frame in order to disrupt the categories of establishment and outsider, and thus thwart environmental regulation. Ultimately, we argue that industrial apocalyptic co-opts environmentalist appeals for radical change in the service of blocking such change and naturalizes neoliberal ideology as the common-sense discourse of the center

Environmental melodrama, coal, and the politics of sustainable energy in \u3ci\u3eThe Last Mountain\u3c/i\u3e

The Last Mountain is a 2011 Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) film. It examines an aggressive form of strip mining in West Virginia known as mountaintop removal (MTR). The Last Mountain was the first of more than 40 MTR films to be distributed nationally and, as such, marks the entry of the issue onto the political scene in the USA. This essay analyses the film’s use of environmental melodrama to define the problems related to MTR and create identification between victims of MTR and viewers. However, the latter portion of the film attempts to scale up from the melodramatic depiction of MTR to advocacy on broader issues regarding renewable energy and global climate change. In doing so, the film breaks with melodramatic form, draining its emotional power, foreclosing systemic political action, and limiting its overall effectiveness as a sustainability narrative

Erika Bsumek on Navajo Artisans at the Trading Post

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