John Muir, Yosemite, and the sublime response: A study in the rhetoric of preservationism

When Whales “Speak for Themselves”: Communication as a Mediating force in Wildlife Tourism

“…First, some participants situated silences as particularly meaningful, as connoting both collective and individual senses of meaningful nature relations or experience and as allowing for such meaningfulness to remain internally whole, or emergent. This emergent, unspoken meaningfulness is somewhat analogous to what Oravec (1981), in her generative environmental communication essay on John Muir's writings, termed the ''sublime response,'' in which one experiences apprehension in the immediacy of a vast natural place, a sense of overwhelming comparative personal insignificance akin to awe, and ultimately a feeling of spiritual exaltation. Included in this sublime response is an attunement to ''the natural eloquence of the environment'' in which Muir's mountaineers, for instance, knew the mountains' ''thousand voices, like the leaves of a book' ' (p. 252).…”

Communicating a “New” Environmental Vernacular: A Sense of Relations-in-Place

“…We argue those few participants who did describe what could be interpreted as sublime responses focused on Oravec's (1981Oravec's ( , 1996 points of spiritual exhalation and realizations of personal insignificance akin to awe, yet eschewed notions of solitude, a separate nature out there, senses of apprehension, or the insignificance of the human realm. In contrast, sublime responses centered on the significance and centrality of human social relations within and with nature.…”

“…Oravec (1981) identifies the sublime response, typified in John Muir's writings, as a profound moment in nature involving an attunement with ''the natural eloquence of the environment'' (p. 252). In vast natural places, like New Mexico's mountains or desert, Oravec describes sublime response as evoking senses of apprehension, comparative personal insignificance akin to awe, and spiritual exhalation.…”

“…In one regard, Oravec's (1981) sublime response depends on a solitude and a cultureÁ nature binary often central to the telling of such experiences in mainstream Western environmental depictions, an isolated and often adventurous departing from the human realm frequently brought to life by the lone white male in the ''wilderness,'' such as in Edward Abby's US Southwest environmental classic Desert Solitaire (1971). In another regard, the sublime can allow for the realization that one's own significance as a human is dwarfed within nature.…”

Environmental communication

“…Research in environmental communication was pioneered by a handful of scholars who employed existing perspectives of rhetorical criticism (Oravec, 1981(Oravec, ,1982(Oravec, ,1984Peterson, 1986Peterson, , 1990Peterson, , 1991Lange, 1990), organizational communication (Bullis & Tompkins, 1989), individual and social cognition research , public relations (Grunig, 1989), risk communication (Renz, 1992), and media studies (Greenberg, et al, 1989) in their work. Beginning in Salt Lake City in 1991, a series of biennial conferences on communication and our environment produced published proceedings (Oravec & Cantrill, 1992;Cantrill & Killingsworth, 1994;Sachsman, etai, 1996) and sparked a surge of scholarly interest in the area.…”