Joshua Trey Barnett

Enormous ecological losses and profound planetary transformations mean that ours is a time to grieve beyond the human. Yet, Joshua Trey Barnett argues in this eloquent and urgent book, our capacity to grieve for more-than-human others is neither natural nor inevitable. Weaving together personal narratives, theoretical meditations, and insightful readings of cultural artifacts, he suggests that ecological grief is best understood as a rhetorical achievement. As a collection of worldmaking practices, rhetoric makes things matter, bestows value, directs attention, generates knowledge, and foments feelings. By dwelling on three rhetorical practices—naming, archiving, and making visible—Barnett shows how they prepare us to grieve past, present, and future ecological losses. Simultaneously diagnostic and prescriptive, this book reveals rhetorical practices that set our ecological grief into motion and illuminates pathways to more connected, caring earthly coexistence.

Braiding personal narratives and philosophical meditations, throughout this essay I reflect on what it means to care for more-thanhuman others when doing so often leaves us utterly compromised and when the broader conditions under which we coexist on earth with others are themselves antithetical to ecological continuity. Ecologically, the essay is situated in the midst of Cook Forest, an 8,500-acre public park in northwest Pennsylvania, where ancient eastern hemlocks (Tsuga canadensis) find themselves imperiled by the hemlock woolly adelgid (Adelges tsugae), an aphid-like insect native to east Asia. Considering responses to the adelgid at Cook Forest, I engage in a series of philosophical and ethical meditations about ecological care-about its complicities and its conditions of (im)possibility. And, finally, in conversation with Theodor Adorno and Judith Butler, I reflect upon how critique and resistance might open onto still more radical modes of ecological care.

In the Western imaginary, care has long been pictured as a distinctly human activity-an activity undertaken primarily by women-and the paradigmatic image of caregiving has been that of a mother tending to her child. Increasingly, though, both the matricentricity and the anthropocentricity of care are being scrutinized as scholars advocate for more egalitarian and, in a few cases, more ecological conceptions of care. Examples of more-than-human care have been sparse, however, which hampers our collective capacity to imagine care beyond the human. Thus, in this essay I look for imaginative resources in forest ecologist Suzanne Simard's (2021) New York Times bestselling book Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. This encounter reveals two connected concepts-multispecies mothering and caring relations-and opens onto an ecological ethic of care rooted in a commitment to care for caring relations, to sustain the conditions of possibility for the care that we all need to survive and flourish.

What obligations do scholars of rhetoric and public address have to understand, address, and sustain the conditions of earthly coexistence? Only if the field of rhetoric embraces a genuinely ecological notion of rhetoric, the author argues, and only if we collectively commit to addressing the ecological dimensions of our various objects of study, can we truly give back to the earth in ways that honor all that it has given, and continues to give, to us. Toward that end, this essay outlines several dimensions of an "ecocentric rhetoric."

This article presents a reading of Hemlock: A Forest Giant on the Edge, a 2014 collection of essays authored by Harvard Forest ecologists that addresses the ongoing destruction of the eastern hemlock (Tsuga canadensis). Introduced to the eastern U.S. in the early 1950s, the hemlock woolly adelgid has been slowly but surely decimating the eastern hemlock across most of its native range. Hemlock offers an account of the species’ history of decline and recovery as well as of the Harvard Forest researchers’ relationship with this foundational species. Locating within Hemlock a rhetoric of sentiment and science, this essay first considers the authors’ embrace of ecological grief and then demonstrates how they deploy historical and long-term ecological research to channel that grief into some actions rather than others. Thus, this essay unearths how sentiment and science merge and diverge in discourses concerning ecological loss and transformation.

Oscillating between naturalistic observations and conceptual forays, this essay simultaneously performs and introduces the notion of "composing climate change" at the heart of this special issue. Spanning personal narrative, poetry, dialogue, theoretical meditation, thick description, photographic essay, and other modes of scholarly writing, the contributors to this issue experiment with genre, style, and form as they seek to describe, evoke, grasp, disclose, and otherwise imagine what it means and-crucially-what it feels like to be an earthling in a time of tremendous ecological change and profound planetary transformation.

Under what conditions is social change possible today? The essays comprising this special issue grapple, each in their own way, with this question. Together, the authors contend that any attempt to understand social change must attend to the conditions of possibility for transformations of any kind, as well as the forces that condition us to feel, think, and act (differently). In these opening pages, we trace this underlying thread through to its more explicit appearances in this special issue, that is, to the attention paid by all of the authors to affect and media. We are conditioned by conditions we condition. We, the created creators, shape tools that shape us. We live by our crafts and conditions. It is hard to look them in the face.-John Durham Peters (2015: 51) An act of feeling is an encounter-a contingent event, an opening to the outside.-Steven Shaviro (2012: 63) The essays comprising this special issue grapple, each in their own way, with a vexing question: in a world awash in media, under what conditions is social change possible? By investigating the conditions of social change, rather than focusing solely on the substance of such changes, the authors of these essays underscore the fact that shifts in the social are always already put in play, though neither guaranteed nor determined, by forces that both precede and exceed them. Our argument is not that the thoughts, feelings or actions undertaken by individuals do not set social transformation into motion, as they surely must. Rather, these essays suggest that any analysis of social change must attend to what conditions give rise to these capacities, which are themselves so vital to the making and remaking of the worlds from which we emerge and to which we give shape. By asking specifically after the conditions of social change, we mean to draw attention to what precedes and provokes transformations of many kinds: technological, ecological, economic, political, legal, ethical, cultural, ideological and intellectual, to name a few. Condition functions in this context as both a noun and a verb. As a noun, condition typically refers to something without which something else could not exist or take place: human life without oxygen, for example, is an impossibility. But a condition is not quite the same as a cause: even though human life is unthinkable without oxygen, oxygen itself does not cause human life. One thing can also be conditioned-that is, trained, prepared, shaped, directed, moulded, habituated, acclimatised-by another. When used as a verb, condition suggests

This essay traces several productive points of overlap and departure between the recent philosophical work of Judith Butler and ecological thinking. While ecological philosophers and theorists have often dismissed Butler's treatment of politics and ethics as narrowly anthropocentric, this essay charges that there are considerable conceptual resources within Butler's oeuvre that are not only in accord with much recent ecological theorising but which also stand to enrich our approaches to ecological thinking and politics. Focusing specifically on three conceptual clusters – exposure and precarity; infrastructure and coexistence; and assemblies and assemblages – this essay demonstrates how Butler's work can be leveraged to augment the ways we approach both ecosystems and our more-than-human cohabitants as elements of and actors within the dynamic play of forces that make coexistence more or less possible.

Locating in Todd Haynes's (1995) film Safe an example of " ecological art, " this essay demonstrates how formal and narrative elements of the film generate an " atmospheric rhetoric " within which audiences are invited to attend and attune to both the protagonist's and their own ecological enmeshment. These forms of attention—to the banal details of coexistence—and attunement—to the strange sounds of everyday life in postindustrial societies—provoke a mode of " ecological thought. " As this essay argues, thinking ecologically engenders a meaningful mode of political engagement that invites reflection on the consequences of impure relations.

In this sweeping talk, Joshua Trey Barnett surveys the intersections of global climate change, urban ecology, and visual culture in order to ask and answer: If global climate change is an ongoing yet invisible process that promises to fundamentally transform urban ecologies around the globe, what, if anything, can be done to imagine and visualize the future? And what, if anything, can those visualizations do in the face of the anthropocene's greatest threat?

In this talk, Joshua Trey Barnett introduces the concept of “toxic archives,” photographic accumulations that traverse time and space and, in doing so, also visualize the extent to which socially facilitated forms of death and dying are produced outside of and beyond formal, time-bounded acts of contamination. In tracing the contours of one “toxic archive,” Barnett analyzes three collections of print and digital photographs that have accumulated in the wake of the United States’ use of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War, a toxin whose impacts continue to be felt by second- and third-generation victims in both Vietnam and the United States. In order to apprehend and be responsive to toxic contamination, Barnett contends, we must let toxic archives haunt us.

By participating in this seminar, students will become acquainted with the history and development of, as well as contemporary trends in, the field of environmental rhetoric. Our focus will be on how environmental rhetoric, broadly conceived, is productive of humans' experiences with, understandings of, and responses to the more-than-human world. We will explore environmental rhetorics that are visual, material, embodied, felt, provocative, risky, destructive, and caring.

In this course, we will adopt the view that rhetoric is a suite of worldmaking practices, our handiest toolkit for making things-ideas, beliefs, values, people, more-than-human beings, the earth, et cetera-matter in some ways rather than others. Through a series of close and careful encounters with texts written by rhetorical theorists from antiquity to the present, we will explore both the promises and the perils of this view of rhetoric. Along the way we will contemplate how theories of rhetoric can capacitate us for the difficult yet necessary work of building and sustaining shared worlds on earth.

The ecological crises most characteristic of our time are planetary in scope and scale. To avoid the planetary, then, is to sidestep the most pressing, the most thought-provoking issue of our time-namely, how we ought to dwell upon the earth. And yet, how to dwell upon the earth is by no means obvious. We will attend to the 'earthly' in this senior seminar by carefully reading, discussing, and putting to work key texts by several significant thinkers:. Each of these thinkers integrates, more or less explicitly, a consideration of the earthly into their thought. By examining how these thinkers attend to the earthly in their own writing, we will begin to develop an earthly perspective of our own, which we will collectively cultivate as we make way for an 'earthen rhetoric,' that is, a way of thinking about and speaking of the earthly.

This course is an experiment in thinking ecologically about communication. Together, we will consider the impacts that (human) communication may have on ecological systems as well as the implications of ecological insights for the study of communication more generally. Moving across various intellectual terrains (nature writing, ecocriticism, rhetorical theory, and philosophy, to name a few), we will collectively explore human and other-than-human modes, styles, and media of communication. In the process, we will also place the commonsense concept of communication under critical pressure. Given our proximity to the North Shore, we will pursue opportunities to think with ecological communication practices in northeastern Minnesota as well.

Both terms in the course title—rhetorical and criticism—are contested, themselves open to interpretation. What do we mean by these terms? What is accomplished by their union? What practices do they designate singularly and collectively? What relation do they share with theory? We will try to locate answers to these and other questions. This course operates on two levels simultaneously: at one level, it functions as an introduction to several major modes of rhetorical criticism practiced by contemporary scholars; at another level, the course provides opportunities for students to engage in the act of rhetorical criticism themselves. Throughout the course we will indulge in a series of theoretical detours, each of which is intended to make your work as a rhetorical critic strong, incisive, and rigorous. We will begin by considering several theories of rhetoric, and by exploring the opportunities and challenges of what is called " criticism. " Then we will turn our attention to the concept of " text, " asking what it means to " read " critically and creatively. From there, we will trace the relationship between ideology and rhetoric across several contexts, including science. Toward the end of the semester, we will engage the issue of " force " as it relates to rhetorical criticism and in this way open onto the question of what rhetorics do in the world.

What is called rhetoric? " We will wander round (with) this question. We will put it under pressure. We will try to hear its many resonances. Thus, we will ask it several ways: What is designated by the word " rhetoric " ? What is understood by rhetoric in the discourse of Western philosophy? What is called for in rhetoric? And, finally, what is it that calls us to rhetoric? In wandering about (with) these questions, considerable resources will be culled from the works of philosophers of rhetoric such as Plato, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, and Butler, to name just a few. As we wander, we will confront other questions that link philosophy to rhetoric: questions of knowledge, for instance, as well as of ethics, politics, subjectivity, and power. The course will be given as a series of ten lectures with time for queries, discussion, and refutations. Your success in this course depends principally upon your willingness and ability to read, write, think, and discuss the philosophical aspects of rhetoric in sustained and increasingly sophisticated ways.