Granola-eating, Birkenstock-wearing tree-huggers who want to take your guns: Reframing the rhetoric of sustainable agriculture

Abstract

Environmentalists have long been perceived as radical idealists who are out of touch with the needs of average citizens. Meanwhile, the environmental movement has been marked from within by overlapping and competing concerns which have alienated key groups of potential allies. For example, concerns about humane treatment of animals, both wild and domestic, overlap and compete with wilderness preservation, crop and husbandry practices, and hunting and fishing. Moreover, public discourse is grounded upon an incoherent and incommensurate paradigm of rational liberalism which assumes that quantitative data and linear reasoning are absolute, transparent, and sufficient to persuade the public to “go green,” and thus neglects to address the experiential values of the general. Against this background, sustainable agriculture struggles to invent itself as relevant to both consumers and producers. This paper examines the rhetorical and paradigmatic missteps of the environmental movement and suggests ways to re-frame the rhetoric of food production and consumption to appeal to held values, personal responsibility, and community, thus fueling consumer demand for local, sustainable, organic food.