A Sense of Urgency - by Debra Hawhee (Paperback)

About the Book

"Unchecked climate change affects nearly everything on Earth, including the way humans communicate. In A Sense of Urgency, Debra Hawhee focuses our attention on new communication strategies that are emerging around the global climate crisis. At the heart of the story Hawhee tells are the challenges that our ecological future poses to rhetoric, and how those challenges demand that we learn to privilege more than our pasts and ourselves. The challenges of imagining futures under dramatically different climate conditions, of communicating climate science, and of offsetting human privilege all expose the limits of rhetoric as conceived by ancient Greek and Roman thinkers. The most glaring limit is the prominence those thinkers granted to precedent. When it comes to the climate crisis, precedent is not up to the task of addressing the problem at hand. Climate activists, scientists, artists, and scholars are trying to overcome this limitation, and A Sense of Urgency examines four departures from rhetoric's playbook that can be helpful in this struggle. Each of these departures presents new resources and different means of intensification in response to situations with few to no precedents. For Hawhee, thinking with these departures, and the attendant rhetorical strategies, can help people fathom both what is happening and what will happen if action is not taken. In this way, A Sense of Urgency is an indispensable guide in our search for new imaginative pathways"--

Book Synopsis

A study of how the climate crisis is changing human communication from a celebrated rhetorician.

Why is it difficult to talk about climate change? Debra Hawhee argues that contemporary rhetoric relies on classical assumptions about humanity and history that cannot conceive of the present crisis. How do we talk about an unprecedented future or represent planetary interests without privileging our own species? A Sense of Urgency explores four emerging answers, their sheer novelty a record of both the devastation and possible futures of climate change. In developing the arts of magnitude, presence, witness, and feeling, A Sense of Urgency invites us to imagine new ways of thinking with our imperiled planet.

Review Quotes

"At last, here is the book that writers and teachers of environmental rhetoric and writing have been looking for--a guide for scholars and students that uncovers what climate-responsive contemporary rhetoric is now and for the foreseeable future."-- "ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment"

"A book that examines how climate change and the ways we talk about it--as, for instance, unparalleled in nature, unfathomable in scope, a source of biblical destruction--is changing rhetoric itself. The project is important, for climate change presents distinctive challenges for rhetoric. . . . The book's aim, then, is not only to help us understand the rhetorical challenges that climate change brings, but also to improve our understanding of how rhetorical innovations might help us better appreciate--and so work to 'bend back'--the devastation that climate change is bringing."-- "Metascience"

"It is that [feeling of] connectedness, that sense of relating to what you are reading, that makes this book so remarkable. It reaches out to interact with a vast ecosystem of discourse, experience, and research. This is the kind of scholarship one has come to expect from Hawhee, who skillfully deploys rhetorical theory, sourced from the past, but reformulated for the current moment. . . . A relevant and highly relatable book that scholars of rhetoric would do well to read."-- "Rhetoric Society Quarterly"

"A Sense of Urgency demonstrates through four wide-reaching examples how climate rhetors use diverse forms to convey the feeling of this moment. Scholars of environmental communication, rhetoric, and discourse alike will find this book engaging for its examination of several intriguing genres of climate change communication--commemorative ritual, congressional testimony, popular mathematics, and art installation."-- "International Journal of Communication"

"Written with crisp, compelling prose, A Sense of Urgency argues for rhetoric as an art of intensification that is itself intensifying as rhetors grapple with the urgency of rhetorical action in the face of climate change. Hawhee develops a rich suite of rhetorical concepts suited for studying rhetoric as an art of intensification, deftly deploying terms such as "magnitude, presence, and witnessing" (4) to interpret case studies such as "flattening the curve" public health campaigns, public art installations, and Congressional hearings led by BIPOC youth activists."-- "Rhetoric Society of America"

"A Sense of Urgency presents four detailed analyses of emerging rhetorical responses to the impact of climate change. . . . But the introduction and conclusion go beyond the case studies by arguing that contemporary environmental concerns now exert pressure on rhetorical scholarship itself."-- "Inside Higher Ed"

"A Sense of Urgency compels us to acknowledge that the magnitude of climate change courses through everything--including facts and feelings, information and sensations. Hawhee demonstrates just how intense rhetoric must become to meet these unprecedented challenges. Working with an extinct glacier, youth activists, a multisensory art installation, and more, Hawhee helps us once again consider an approach to rhetoric that we could not before fathom, but now must."--Casey Boyle, University of Texas at Austin

"The unfolding climate crisis poses unprecedented challenges that require not only new scientific diagnostics but also a new social imaginary that reassesses dominant values, ways of knowing, and collective aspirations. One can hope we are all ready to heed this book's call to reimagine communication--and the world."--Phaedra C. Pezzullo, University of Colorado Boulder

"With inimitable creativity, Hawhee shows that climate change is not immune to comprehension but rather open to wildly curious rhetorical fashioning. She provides a fully embodied account of rhetoric and climate, time and temperature, showing that such supposed abstractions are actually glimmering sensations that blend feeling and knowing in the most intimate ways. This book is a gift."--John Durham Peters, Yale University

About the Author

Debra Hawhee is the McCourtney Professor of Civic Deliberation and professor of English and communication arts and sciences at Pennsylvania State University. She is the author or editor of four books, including Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw: Animals, Language, Sensation, also published by the University of Chicago Press.