Separation and Rhetoric: Far-Right Political Ecology in Capitalist Crisis

Abstract

This dissertation explores the rhetoric of the urban/rural divide in Oregon to critique capitalist domination and far-right political ecology in the United States. I approach this inquiry through the lenses of rhetorical and critical theory asking how the far-right produces non-human nature for a counterrevolutionary politics of crisis. I take a mixed-method approach to study the economic and ecological context in which these discourses emerge by using the USDA Agricultural Census to show how increasing productivity and concentration of the agricultural sector ripen conditions for far-right environmental politics to become suasive responses to global economic decline. Through these tasks, the dissertation contributes to a greater understanding of the critique of political economy as a critical social theory in rhetorical studies and the growing literature on far-right political ecology.