John Muir, the Hetch Hetchy Valley, and a bird: or, how I’ve spent the last forty years, and will spend the next as-long-as-I’ve-got

One spring, when I was a child, my family went to Yosemite Valley in Yosemite National Park. My family mostly tried (and failed) to teach one another bridge, and I wandered around the emerald valley. Having grown up in semi-arid southern California, the forested walks seemed to me magical, and I was enchanted. One evening, my mother took me to a campfire, hosted by a ranger, who told the story of John Muir, a California environmentalist crucial in the preservation of Yosemite National Park. The last part of the ranger’s talk was about Muir’s last political endeavor, his unsuccessful attempt to prevent the damming and flooding of the Hetch Hetchy Valley, a valley the ranger said was as beautiful as the one by which I had been entranced. The ranger presented the story as a dramatic tragedy of Good (John Muir) versus Evil (the people who wanted to dam and flood the valley), with Evil winning and Muir dying of a broken heart. I was deeply moved.

I’d like to say this story so moved me that I became active in environmentalism, but that wouldn’t really be true—I could distinguish a pigeon from a seagull, and that was about it. Muir’s story did, however, stick with me as an odd story about rhetoric. Why could someone who, according to the ranger, have been so persuasive and moving on so many points—preserving Yosemite Valley, creating the national park system, valuing the High Sierras, starting the Sierra Club–have failed to persuade people on the one point that the ranger presented as so starkly simple? Why do people with the better cases so often lose arguments? And later it came back to me.

I went to Berkeley for my undergraduate degree, and became entranced again; this time by rhetoric.

The Berkeley rhetoric department emphasized the teaching of persuasive argumentation, something which must be distinguished from what many people experience as argument. I don’t want to get into the ways that was both right and wrong, so much as point out that it taught that rhetoric is always relational, and the kind of rhetoric we teach and practice signifies, models, and reinforces the kind of relationship with have with our interlocutors. Thus, a definition of rhetoric—whether we define rhetoric as getting others to do what we want or the ability to understand disagreements—is not just a theory of discourse, how we communicate to someone else, but a theory of community. A limited conception of rhetoric leads to a limited way of interacting with others, and the limited success we get from that interaction confirms our sense that rhetoric is limited.

Until I went to college, whenever I had been taught argumentation I had been required to have a confrontational thesis which was stated in the beginning (usually after a funnel introduction), and which was supported by three reasons (which were themselves stated at the beginning of each paragraph and before any evidence). Each “proof” paragraph had one piece of evidence to support its point. In the penultimate paragraph, I was expected to summarize and then contradict (or concede, but declare as trivial) some opposition argument. The conclusion would restate my thesis, and typically end with some rousing generalizations.

It is difficult to describe how frustrating I found this form. I certainly found it unpersuasive. That isn’t to say I’d never changed my mind; even in high school I was well aware that people did change their minds, but the texts that I’d found persuasive never followed this narrow structure. For one thing, the texts that changed my mind on things were often narratives—whether a fictional narrative like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter that made me think differently about the role of gossip and identity, or a non-fiction narrative like Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem that made me think differently about loyalty and duty.

It especially bothered me that the writers whom we were taught to admire and told to emulate—such as Martin Luther King, Jr., George Orwell, Virginia Woolf–did not write the way that we were required to write (thus making the recommendations to admire and emulate them more than a little confusing). On the contrary, their conclusions tended to be after their evidence, they tended to summarize their opposition early (often as early as the introduction), their theses were generally at the end of their texts, assuming they even had a thesis stated explicitly in the text at all. The experience of reading them was completely different from reading something written in the “tell ’em what you’re gonna’ tell, tell ’em, then tell ’em what you told ’em” form that always felt to me as though I was sitting in a small chair being yelled at, while reading people like King made me feel that I was walking along with the author who was pointing things out along the way.

Although we were presented with King, Orwell, and Woolf as rhetors to be admired, and told to emulate, we were graded down if we did. In other words, the explicit rules for good rhetoric—what my teachers said I had to do—were wildly at odds with the implicit rules for good rhetoric—what the ideal writing actually did. Thus, the teachers’ explicit instructions—write this way, and write like these authors—were actually in conflict.

This conflict within our explicit instructions for students—that we give them rules that are actually contradictory—is not particular to my teachers, and is a problem within the history of teaching writing. The contradiction comes about, I’ll suggest, from universalizing about rhetorical strategies and relations, and the number of concepts muddled in the term “effective.” This is another one of the themes to which I will return: what do we praise in rhetoric, what is effective in rhetoric, what do we say people should do, and how are those three at odds with each other.

At Berkeley, in the rhetoric classes, there was not as much conflict between the explicit and implicit rules for writing. The papers we wrote were supposed to be written for an intelligent and informed opposition (not at or about them) and were supposed to be structured in a movement from what we had identified as common ground with that opposition through our evidence to the conclusion.
But, this kind of writing is hard, and, one day, tired and frustrated with a paper assignment, I found myself walking by a coastal lagoon in an area far to the north of Berkeley. I had driven along the Northern California coast for days, and parked near the marshy water in order to give myself a chance to wander. But as I moved through the high grass, I startled something that took off with a surprising splash and whoof of sweeping wings. It was an elegant blue grey bird the color of the sky on an overcast day with a neck that seemed to me as long and majestic as a flamingo’s. What impressed me most was the grace, beauty, and power of the sweeping stroke of its wings as it flew over me and out of sight. I discovered I had been holding my breath.

I had never before been much impressed by birds.

I tried to find some places closer to Berkeley where I might watch birds like these. With high hopes, I went to a place called “Shorebird Park” only to discover that it had a neatly mown lawn, picnic tables, and dogs. While it was a friendly and inviting place for people, even able to accommodate large groups at picnic areas, it was useless for most shorebirds. The carefully tended lawns and rampaging dogs precluded any nesting habitat for birds; the ubiquitousness of garbage attracted seagulls who chased away any other species. I didn’t go back there. After some exploring, I discovered a marsh near a freeway, and another at the end of an access road near the airport, each of which provided habitat for egrets, red winged blackbirds, avocets, and stilts. There was something charming in watching the different birds–the way the avocets skittered, the red winged blackbirds flashed a ruby spot when they flew, the egrets endlessly looked gracefully ungainly. I was disturbed to discover that both of these marshy habitats were proposed for development.

I decided to try to use my experience seeing the grey bird (called a Great Blue Heron) as the common ground in order to move my audience toward the conclusion that the marshes I had visited and other like them should not all be turned into hotels or industrial parks, nor made into parks as sanitized and bereft of wildlife as the unintentionally ironically named “Shorebird Park.” Instead, at least some should remain wilderness areas in the middle of an urban environment so that everyone could have the breath-taking experience I did of seeing a Great Blue Heron.

I began with a description of seeing the heron, and then moved to bemoaning the tragedy of people in the city not having access to wildlife areas close to home. My instructor characterized the resulting paper as “an impressive effort, but unsuccessful” because it would not persuade an intelligent and informed opposition audience. That is, my common ground was not shared with my opposition (who were unlikely to see the flight of the heron as terribly important), and I had not really effectively incorporated or answered the kinds of concerns they were likely to have (such as the potential economic benefits of developing wetlands). Most important for the instructor was that the logic of my argument that preserving wilderness in urban areas would benefit people because it would provide them with opportunities to see a wider variety of wildlife was subtly circular.

There is a lot of disagreement in rhetoric as to what we should call that kind of discourse, and it is often called “epideictic,” from Aristotle’s tri-partite division of rhetoric. I have not found Aristotle’s taxonomy very useful, for various reasons. Here I simply want to mention that this kind of rhetoric—that looks as though it is persuading an opposition, but is actually confirming those who already agree—can happen anywhere, in political assemblies, schools, public areas, books, movies.

There are advantages to this kind of rhetoric, but one problem with it is that we don’t always recognize it when we see it. That is, we often use the word “persuasive” to mean “I like it” and describe a text as “persuasive” or “effective” when we mean that it confirmed beliefs we already have, rather than that it changed our views. This will be, perhaps, the most consistent theme in these lectures—the tremendous difficulty we have in describing the impact of rhetoric, both individual texts, sets of texts, and even a realm of texts.
For instance, in regard to the paper about the birds, I had shared the paper with fellow tutors at the Writing Center, with friends, with classmates, and with just about anyone I could persuade to read it, and all had praised it highly. It had seemed persuasive to them.

The teacher was right, of course—I hope that is clear—but none of us could see what she did because we, granting the premise that experiencing non-urban wildlife is valuable, could not imagine anyone not granting it. We could not shift our perspective to someone who disagreed.

Rhetoric, then, is a cognitive process, a way of thinking.

Or, at least, persuasive rhetoric is.

So, at this point, the question for me became whether I would find an enthymeme that would work with people who did not value the environment, and that led me back to John Muir and the Hetch Hetchy debate. Was there something he could or should have done that would have produced a different outcome? Could Muir, a man whose writing many still find persuasive, have found a rhetorical strategy that would have worked with his audience? Was Muir’s failure to prevent the damming and flooding of the Hetch Hetchy Valley a rhetorical failure? Is there something he should have done?

I decided I would write my senior thesis on this topic, and I could figure out what he should have done. I didn’t. So I decided I would get an MA, and figure it out. Then I thought I needed a PhD to solve this problem, so I decided to get one. (But I wasn’t going to be a professor.) And what I found was that, when people disagree about the environment, it’s because we disagree about God. So, how do you disagree productively about policies that affect a lot of us when you don’t share premises? I spent 40 years working on that problem.

I intend to spend my retirement working on it. I’ll get it this time.

And it all goes back to John Muir, a ranger who knew how to tell a story, and the way my soul still sings when I see a Great Blue Heron.