Toxic Discourse

For this week's blog entry, I will be looking at an example of toxic discourse as I was not able to attend the lecture last night.
In an excerpt from his book, Writing for an Endangered World, Lawrence Buell introduces his concept of toxic discourse, which he defines as, "expressed anxiety arising from perceived threat of environmental hazard due to chemical modification by human agency" (30-31). Buell argues that toxic discourse has not been given enough attention mainly because of two reasons. The first being that certain other issues, such as health or property, are considered higher priorities in society. The second is what Buell calls a "more "tribal" factor" and deals with the way in which the issues have been presented to the public by the people who are engaging in the discussion. Buell goes on to say that this discourse comes from social and individual panic. The anxiety is always intense and is magnified by what he calls "unsettling events."
Hurricane Katrina is a prime example of an "unsettling event" that had a huge impact on the American society and put the country in a state of panic. It's strange to me that five years have already gone by since the hurricane. I feel like it happened only last year for some reason. This might be in part because the situation was handled so incredibly poorly that it was talked about on the news almost daily for what? Six months or even longer than that after it occurred. I could be wrong on that but all I remember is constantly hearing about how little the government was helping the less privileged section of New Orleans get back on its feet and how much FEMA sucked at life. Anyhow, I think this event really made people realize that hey, maybe those scientist dudes aren't totally full of crap, maybe we actually could have some of our cities under water in however many years. I think the most important/terrifying thing we came to realize is that when stuff like that happens, our government might not be there to help as much as we think it will. This is just another enormous reason why we have to start making big changes; we don't really know if anyone's going to be there to help when things like Katrina happen. Beyond Katrina, we are seeing more and more of these intense natural disasters occurring. That tsumani in 2004, the earthquake in Haiti, the flooding in Pakistan are a few that come to mind and hey! we even had one last week with that big tornado that ripped the high school apart (obviously that's not on the same scale as the first three, but you get the point). All these things that are happening make it harder and harder to brush the environmental crisis to the side. It looks like toxic discourse is going to slowly gain more attention as people start to panic more and more frequently. Here's to hoping the next climate conference isn't as much of a bust as the last one.