Voice and Environmental Communication

Stephen Depoe, J. Peeples

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137433732
• eBook ISBN: 9781137433749
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Environmental Science
• Index: Social Sciences

Voice and Environmental Communication explores how people give voice to, and listen to the voices of, the environment. This foundational book introduces the relationship between these two fundamental aspects of human existence and extends our knowledge of the role of voice in the study of environmental communication.

Section I

Voice and Environmental Advocacy

1

Corporate Ventriloquism: Corporate Advocacy, the Coal Industry, and the Appropriation of Voice

Peter K. Bsumek, Jen Schneider, Steve Schwarze, and Jennifer Peeples

In the second decade of the 21st century, the U.S. coal industry is facing unprecedented challenges. While for many years coal provided nearly half of U.S. electricity, in the spring of 2012 that share dropped to below 40% and is expected to continue falling (Energy Information Administration, 2012).¹ Coal production is increasing not in Appalachia, the primary U.S. source for coal historically, but in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin (Goodell, 2006). Market competition from the natural gas industry combined with well organized climate and anti-mountaintop removal (MTR) campaigns have significantly curtailed the production of new coal-fired power plants in the United States (EIA, 2012). Under the Obama administration, the Environmental Protection Agency appears to be somewhat more amenable than the Bush administration to regulating carbon emissions as a pollutant, and more interested in enforcing Clean Water Act provisions applicable to MTR mining (Broder, 2012). Combined with sharp reductions in the number of coal mining jobs due to the increased efficiency of coal mining techniques, these circumstances have put the coal industry in Appalachia in a precarious position.

The coal industry in Appalachia has responded to these circumstances by waging a multi-front corporate advocacy campaign. This campaign combines traditional tactics such as litigating, lobbying, and backing pro-coal candidates in local and national elections. But it also involves a series of sophisticated, coordinated public relations campaigns that seek to secure the hegemony of coal both regionally and nationally. Through trade associations and advocacy organizations that produce websites, advertisements, videos, and other messages, the campaigns seek to unify a range of people who are “speaking with one voice” about coal (“One Voice”).

These campaigns and their creation of a “voice” for the coal industry are the focus of this chapter. Using theories of voice and appropriation, we argue that the coal industry’s rhetoric operates through a process that we term corporate ventriloquism. In this rhetoric, the industry appropriates elements of neoliberal and neoconservative ideology and adapts them to the cultural circumstances specific to coal in Appalachia. It then “throws” this voice through “front groups” to create the impression of broadly based support for coal. Through corporate ventriloquism, the coal industry masks its own influence over the spaces and conditions for voice and undermines the value of dissenting, textured, and independent voices in public discussions about the future of coal.

We begin the essay by putting Nick Couldry’s theory of “voice” under neoliberal regimes into conversation with rhetorical theories of appropriation to build the concept of corporate ventriloquism. We then map the complex array of organizations that enable the coal industry to speak as if it were a legitimate voice of the people. Next, we offer a two-part analysis of a “Faces of Coal” campaign, which is emblematic of the industry’s use of corporate ventriloquism and its neoliberal commitments. Our conclusion draws out several implications about corporate ventriloquism and its relationship to voice, neoliberalism, and environmental controversy.

Neoliberalism and the crisis of voice

This chapter extends discussions of appropriation by moving from existing social movement analyses of strategy, tactics, terminology, and structure to focus on the use and manipulation of “voice” as an element of appropriation. Our consideration of voice relies on the work of media and communication theorist Couldry (2010), who theorizes a “crisis of voice under neoliberalism.” Based on economic theories popularized by Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman, neoliberalism is guided by the assumption that individual and political freedoms are dependent upon a political economic system of free markets, free trade, and strong private property rights (Harvey, 2005). Couldry positions neoliberalism as a discourse and an organizing rationality. According to Couldry, the “market-driven politics” of neoliberalism has undermined the regulatory powers of government and facilitated the expansion of market rationality into nearly all aspects of public and private life. Neoliberalism has led to the deregulation of markets and industries, the privatization and “marketization” of public services, and the decline of trade unions. With regard to environmental policy and regulation, marketization is characterized by the shift from “command and control” regulatory approaches to those based on “market incentives” such as “cap and trade” (see Hajer, 1995). The hegemony of neoliberalism extends beyond government policy by producing the cultural conditions that constrain and constitute subjectivity and agency in both the social and the political realms.

By focusing on voice, Couldry demonstrates how neoliberal rationality constrains and constitutes subjectivity and agency. As such, neoliberalism limits the possibilities of what can be said, frames political controversies as primarily economic in nature, and reproduces neoliberal ideology, like the idea of a free market, as “common sense.” Couldry thus provides a normative theory of voice, which is offered as a counter-rationality to the hegemony of neoliberalism.

Couldry distinguishes two levels of voice: voice as process and voice as value. As process, voice is “the process of giving an account of one’s life and its conditions,” a chance to speak on one’s own behalf (p. 7). Eric Watts (2001) notes that in rhetorical scholarship, this notion of voice is associated with “speaking” and informs critical projects designed to enable marginalized or alienated people to “find their own voice” (p. 182). According to Couldry, neoliberal rationality excludes and undermines the process of giving voice by excluding alternative viewpoints. This takes place when institutions fail to register individual experience, when they ignore collective views, and when societies are encouraged to believe that “voice need not be taken into account, because a higher value or rationality trumps them” (Couldry, 2010, p. 10). Under these conditions, the process of finding voice, unless it expresses market rationality, is rendered mute and moot.

This is why, for Couldry, voice means more than a chance to speak and be heard. It is not enough to give an account of one’s life if the only rhetorical situations available are constrained by market rationality and its identities and values. Couldry’s second level of voice is therefore voice as value. As a value, voice is “the act of valuing, and choosing to value, those frameworks for organizing human life and resources that themselves value voice [as a process]” (p. 2). Here Couldry is concerned with the way in which neoliberalism exerts influence over the conditions for voice. Neoliberal rationality, for Couldry, “provides principles for organizing action (in workplace, public services, fields of competition, public discussion) which are internalized as norms and values” (p. 12). Key among these norms and values are the association of freedom with the “entrepreneurial” self—the individual as a free and independent agent in a free market—and the devaluing and dismissal of forms of social solidarity such as trade unions.

Neoliberalism establishes paradoxical terms for voice, in other words. According to Couldry, neoliberalism seems to permit the apparent expansion of voice (say, through ever-expanding consumer choice), while voice is in fact limited to market expression. Individuals are offered ample opportunities to “voice” their opinion in the marketplace or using economic logic. Yet opportunities to express ideological commitments outside of market logics are increasingly scarce. At stake, then, is not only the creation of more opportunities for giving “an account of one’s life,” but also the types of “values [that can be] articulated through such voices” (p. 137).

In the remainder of this chapter, we explore this paradoxical nature of “neoliberal voice” by investigating how the corporate advocacy campaigns of the coal industry celebrate the process of voice—multiple, individual expressions of “self”—while simultaneously muting and dismissing those voices that articulate values counter to neoliberal ideology. This case study is, then, an extension of Couldry’s (2010) project in that it attempts to uncover the neoliberal processes that obstruct the means of valuing voice. Rhetorical theories of appropriation can aid this extension by further unpacking the paradoxes of neoliberal voice.

Appropriation and corporate ventriloquism

Communication scholarship on coal industry information campaigns is limited. Some sociologists, however, have analyzed how the coal industry uses these campaigns to shape cultural understandings of coal mining and the coal industry within Appalachia. Bell and York (2010) note that “when there is a large scale-reduction in jobs, and employment no longer connects an industry to the community it pollutes,” economic rationality cannot fully explain why communities continue to support that industry (p. 116).² In situations like this, they argue, other kinds of ideologies must bolster economic rationales, enabling companies to maintain their cultural and political dominance in the region. Similarly, Rebecca Scott (2010) discusses the way that coalfield residents “are constructed and construct themselves as coalfield residents and how the discursive structuring of their subjectivity shapes their environmental politics” (p. 17). Noting that “social analyses of mining are usually limited to economic and political fields,” she argues that coal mining—and MTR in particular—is a “deeply cultural act, and the complex environmental politics of coal mining are, in part, struggles over the meaning of the practice,” and that these meanings are further “enmeshed in networks of material signification” (p. 17).

These networks of material signification, which include ideas about private property, land ownership, gender, race and class commitments, and national identity, are an important rhetorical resource for the coal industry as it attempts to address its material decline (Scott, 2010, pp. 17–18). Another rhetorical resource utilized by natural resource industries facing organized opposition has been to modify their public persona as a means of popularizing their industry (e.g., Smerecnik & Renegar, 2010). One such approach has been to tap networks of signification by appropriating the powerful structures and/or discourses of other organizations in order to obtain, co-opt, or counter their influence or identity. Environmental communication scholars have identified four primary means of appropriation seen in environmental controversies: lateral appropriation, greenwashing, astroturf campaigns, and aggressive mimicry. To that list we add corporate ventriloquism.

The most benevolent of the four means of co-optation is lateral appropriation. Anspach, Coe, and Thurlow (2007) define lateral appropriation as “any instance in which means commonly associated with and/or perceived as belonging to one marginalized group are used by another marginalized group to further its own ends” (p. 100; see also Peeples, 2011). Lateral appropriation is an important tactic for groups who have limited material and symbolic resources (Anspach, Coe, & Thurlow, 2007). It is also used by powerful organizations, like corporations, to adapt hegemonic discourses to new circumstances. Unlike the other forms of co-optation, lateral appropriation does not attempt to challenge or undermine the discourse it appropriates. Rather, it extends it into new discursive fields.

The second form of appropriation is greenwashing, which Cox defines as “the act of misleading consumers regarding the environmental practices of a company or the environmental benefits of a product or service” (2010, p. 345; see also Shapiro (2004)). Pezzullo adds that greenwashing also includes “the deliberate disavowal of environmental effects” (2003, p. 246). As with whitewashing, the appropriation of environmental discourse is cosmetic, leaving the product, production, organizational structure, and/or corporate agenda intact. Cox (2010) describes three purposes of greenwashing: (1) product promotion, (2) organizational image enhancement, and (3) organizational image repair. The company name or logo is often the focal point, as the purpose of greenwashing is for the organization (at least superficially) to alter its public image.

Astroturfing, the third type of appropriation, refers to the “the controversial tactic of creating the illusion of a largely spontaneous grassroots protest that has in fact been organised by corporate-backed groups” (Murray, 2009).³ Tactics can range from “public” letter-writing campaigns that are organized, paid for, and even written by companies, to establishing community organizations and NGOs, “front groups” that are directly or indirectly funded and managed by corporations. The purpose of this appropriation is to persuade potential constituents or decision-makers that the message comes from citizens who have vested interests in the outcome, as opposed to corporate beneficiaries who have difficulty engendering either the level of empathy or the rights that are given to “the people.”

The final strategy of appropriation, aggressive mimicry, is similar to astroturfing, but takes appropriation one step further. An entity engaging in aggressive mimicry co-opts an opposing organization’s structure and discourse in order to sow doubts about their opponent’s identity, with the intended effect of distracting or destroying the opponent (Peeples, 2005). For Wise Use, a 1980s anti-environmental movement, it was claiming to be the “true environmentalists” (Peeples, 2005). Co-opting organizations are at times unable to make great legislative and political strides as they can be seen as inauthentic or false. But their power lies in forcing their opponent to defend its discourse, structure, and identity, thereby diverting time and limited resources from the mimicked movement’s goals (Peeples, 2005).

Our analysis extends this discussion of co-optation by describing how the coal industry uses strategies of appropriation in ways that contribute to “the crisis of voice” identified by Couldry. Informed by the theories outlined above, we identify a practice that we have termed “corporate ventriloquism,” which we define as the rhetorical process of corporations transmitting their voice through seemingly less powerful entities in ways that advance the interests of those corporations and undermine the value of voice in democratic processes. In the case of the Appalachian coal industry, corporate ventriloquism relies upon astroturfing to generate an alternative persona from which to speak. But it also laterally appropriates neoliberal market rationality, drawing on neoconservative discourses of family values and national security, to constitute a regional Appalachian identity and a national American identity that are dependent on coal.⁴ In the same move, the neoliberal discourse calls into question any voice that opposes the hegemonic coal doctrine as “anti-American” or against Appalachian prosperity, thereby silencing any expression other than the one appropriated and approved voice of coal. Rather than merely decrying astroturf groups as fake or inauthentic, we advance the notion of corporate ventriloquism in order to help critics observe the ideological work accomplished by that process.

Astroturf: Mapping the friends, FACES, and voice of coal

Several industry-affiliated organizations promote the interests of coal in Appalachia. They frequently work together to organize rallies and protests, disseminate talking points via press releases and lobbying, and produce media messages and educational materials to advance industry positions. The most prominent of these organizations are the National Mining Association (NMA), a national trade organization whose primary mission is lobbying in Washington, DC, and the West Virginia Coal Association (WVCA), which coordinates pro-mining lobbying efforts at the state and regional level. These umbrella organizations also fund, or share funding with, a number of affiliate organizations, including Coal Mining Our Future, the Coalition for Mountaintop Mining, Citizens for Coal, the American Coalition for Clean Coal Energy, and Friends of America.

The two most visible campaigns of the WVCA are Friends of Coal (FOC), which launched in 2002, and Faces of Coal (FACES), which launched in 2009. According to the corporate watchdog website SourceWatch, the WVCA funds FOC, whose emphasis is primarily on improving the public relations and marketing environment for coal mining in Appalachia (SourceWatch, 2011). In turn, FOC funds the group FACES (Federation for American Coal, Energy and Security), which also serves as the home of the “Faces of Coal” group/campaign, whose mission is to underscore the economic and social dependence Appalachians have on coal mining (SourceWatch, 2009). While both groups address their campaigns to the Appalachian region, the FACES organization also addresses its campaigns to national audiences.

Both FOC and FACES represent themselves as grassroots groups. FOC claims to be run by volunteers; the FACES website states that it is made up of “an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Voice and the Environment—Critical Perspectives
• Section I: Voice and Environmental Advocacy
• Section II: Voice and Consumption
• Section III: Listening to Nonhuman Voices
• Index