Care and Constraints in the Climate Crisis: An Intersectional Rhetorical Analysis of News Comments about the El Dorado Fire

AbstractIn September 2020, a gender reveal party started the El Dorado Fire in southern California. We analyzed comments on news coverage of the fire from two outlets with different political leanings to evaluate how the rhetorical process of assigning guilt is influenced by interlocking systems of power, making an intersectional lens useful for analyzing responses to environmental crises. Some comments evoked scapegoat ecology, which is a response to guilt that narrows the scope of climate change to the igniters of the wildfire. Other comments evoked what we call ecological transcendence, which replaces scapegoating with attention to systems-level concerns. In analyzing ecological transcendence, we outline differences between collective action mobilized by inclusive care and seemingly unifying discourses of selective care that foster marginalization and oppression. We contribute to environmental rhetoric and feminist studies by emphasizing the importance of attending to intersectionality in analyzing rhetorics of guilt in ecological contexts and through our proposal of ecological transcendence as an alternative to scapegoat ecology.Keywords: Guilthegemonic masculinityscapegoat ecologyintersectionalityenvironmental rhetoric AcknowledgmentsThe authors thank the editor, the paper’s anonymous reviewers, Nick Paliewicz, Paul Elliott Johnson, James Wynn, and attendees to their panel at the 2021 National Communication Association annual convention for the valuable feedback they provided on the paper.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 While these parties are commonly referred to as “gender” reveal parties, it is more accurate to say that they announce the sex the child is assigned at birth using the binary of male-female. Some comments on the news coverage of the wildfire made note of this discrepancy. For example, one commenter wrote, “It’s a sex reveal party. If and when the kid is good and ready they will reveal their gender” (Morales & Waller, Citation2020).2 The New York Times is consistently in the top five newspapers for national circulation and has won the most Pulitzer awards for journalistic excellence (Augustyn, Citationn.d.; Cision, Citation2019). The newspaper tends to be more liberal leaning, whereas Breitbart is more conservative and a news outlet symbolic of the populist rhetoric resurgence during the presidency of Donald Trump.3 To preserve anonymity, commenters will not be referenced by name but will be identified by the article where their comment appeared. Five New York Times articles in the corpus did not have a comments section, leaving two, cited here, that make up the bulk of the analysis (Arango et al., Citation2020; Morales & Waller, Citation2020).4 New York Times subscribers are disproportionately White (71%), are 51% male and 49% female, most (63%) are under the age of 50, 72% have at least an undergraduate degree, and 38% earn more than $75,000 a year (Djordjevic, Citation2021).5 These statements are inaccurate reversals of crime statistics. The League of United Latin American Citizens (Citation2017) reports that Latinos in the United States are prosecuted at higher rates than White individuals for the same crimes and that more than half of Latinos (56%) have had contact with the criminal justice system themselves or through family members.6 One does not need to have a womb to be a woman nor a mother, but the context of these comments largely indicated this generalized notion of sex differences.