Climatic Sentiment: Quantifying And Examining the Affect Of Environmental Nonfiction in Relation To Public Feelings
Date
2021-05
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Since 1962, when the publication of Rachel Carson’s inflammatory pesticide exposé Silent Springcreated a wave of public concern that led to a ban on DDT, environmental authors have tried to replicate that success by employing affective language in their own writing. Since the emergence of climate change as a popular issue, the vast majority of environmental writing, and the affect it employs, has been channeled into combatting it. Despite this shared cause, the genre’s affect has fluctuated over the decades -strengthening, weakening, and shifting altogether. To determine the factors that instigate these changes, the affect of nine texts, published between 1962 and 2020, is compared with contemporaneous public feelings: sentiments that occupy the public sphere. First, texts are analyzed through a novel quantitative analysis of their affect signals, as well as traditional close reading. Broad trends within the affect of climate writing are illustrated by dividing the past 60 years into three eras, based on affective features that are shared between texts: 1960-1989, 1989-2009, and 2009-present. With data produced by the quantitative analysis, it is shown that in the 1960s, texts employed overwhelmingly negative affect at a high rate, decreased both the negativity and frequency of their affect from 1989-2009, and, since 2010, have again increased their rates of negative affect and affect in general. These trends are shown to correlate with public feelings, which are depicted with a combination of public opinion data and historical analysis. Ultimately, it is shown that the most significant distinguishing factor in determining the affective features of a given climate text is the set of public sentiments which it reflects and responds to.
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Keywords
Environmental writing, Climate writing, Public feelings