Cassie Lagner- Green Culture by Herndl and Brown

Throughout the reading it showed that Carl Herndl and Stuart Brown were the writers of this reading. This reading was published at the University of Wisconsin in the year 1996. Carl Herndl works at the University of South Florida in the English department. He has been writing in the topics of science and environmental issues for a long time. Stuart Brown was “an exemplar of second-wave rhetoric studies” who was apart of the faculty at New Mexico State University. He and some other colleagues created NMSU’s doctoral program in Rhetoric and Professional Communication. I would say the primary audience for this piece is colleagues or other rhetoricians. I feel this way because along with the other readings we have read this semester, this reading was dense and it had a lot of information through it. I believe the main objective as to why this reading was created was to inform other rhetoricians on what Herndl and Brown thought environmental rhetoric is. In the reading there was a line that stated, “we can define the environment and how it is affected by our actions only through the language we have developed to talk about these issues”. I believe this is an important line in the text because it shows how rhetoric is used in environmental terms. A huge part of this text is the diagram that has the three forms of environmental rhetoric. These are the three forms are Ethnocentric (ethos), Ecocentric (pathos), and Anthropocentric (logos). Ethnocentric (ethos) represents the discourse of impactful institutions that makes the “rules” for the environment. The next one, Ecocentric (pathos) represents the language we use to describe nature and the environment. Lastly, in the diagram, is Anthropocentric (logos). This represents people or words that represents environment as a science. Meaning this looks into all the sciences or nature. I feel these three descriptions describe the meaning of environmental rhetoric.