The wolf at Yellowstone's door: Extending and applying the cultural approach to risk communication to an endangered species recovery plan controversy
Abstract
Plans to reintroduce the gray wolf into Yellowstone National Park spark a heated "not in my backyard" (NIMBY) response from many residents of Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho. This dissertation uses this controversy as a case study to further explore how framing an issue or proposal as an "unacceptable risk" introduces an issues management argumentative dynamic, procedural tactics, and ideological themes that might be characterized as a "rhetoric of risk." A rhetoric of risk drives the protestors' loci of available arguments through essentially three levels or dimensions: the scientific/technical or substantive where the discussion centers on assessing the nature of the risk event; the political or procedural where concerns about the fairness of the decision-making process and the effectiveness of risk controls dominate; and the larger sociocultural where deep-seated recurring societal value conflicts over relationships between humans and nature, the government and the governed--and questions over distributional fairness, social justice, and science--provide the debate's context. Within the larger theoretical framework of this study, wolf recovery and the nuclear plants or toxic waste facilities usually associated with the NIMBY syndrome actually have a great deal in common as both essentially land use issues and "trans-scientific" public policy--areas where scientific or technical expertise appear to formulate the problems but the answers are ultimately debated as matters of conflicting societal values. This study applies Kenneth Burke's dramatistic method to analyze how the discourse of those who shout "no wolves, no way, nowhere" culturally construct a risk assessment of wolves as multi-dimensional threats to life itself, to resource-bound livelihoods, and to a traditional way of life. By using the ideological themes and slogans of the so-called "wise use" movement, the protestors transform the wolf from a predatory criminal to the even more frightening "spotted owl of the Rockies" whose mere presence will further the environmentalists/federal government conspiracy's hidden "land lock-up" agenda aimed at closing the West to resource development.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Trachtman, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Mass media|Environmental science|Political science|Public administration
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