A practical hermeneutic for civic environmental discourse: Re-reading polarization as tension in Columbia River salmon deliberations (Washington, Oregon)

Contemporary environmental discourse often emphasizes oppositions. This dissertation develops a tensional approach to civic environmental deliberation that interprets oppositions as interdependent and mutually transformative. From the philosophies of Eric Voegelin and Mikhail Bakhtin, I develop four premises of a tensionally-sensitive way of understanding civic environmental discourse: being-in-relation, being-in-communication, the transformative interdependence of opposites and the fundamental immanence-transcendence tension.; I apply this tensional hermeneutic to three “turns of talk” in contemporary public discourse concerning dwindling numbers of Pacific salmon in the Columbia River basin. I examine a public process initiated by the Federal Caucus, a joint effort of nine federal agencies to create a comprehensive approach to salmon recovery. The Caucus' 1999 draft conceptual recovery plan, transcripts of public hearings held in early 2000, and the Caucus' December 2000 final recovery strategy form these three turns.; I find that public hearing testimony emphasized opposition between advocates for and against breaching dams and between nature-centered and human-centered orientations. While the testimony was dominated by the discourse of immanence, participants also described life experiences in which the transcendent emerged. The government constructed a largely detached and dispassionate identity in relation to the public, and it also demonstrated sensitivity to some experiences of nature as transcendent in the 2000 final recovery strategy. A tensional reading of this discourse illuminates how each pole in an opposition is transformed when it is understood in relation with the other.; I conclude with reflections on how a tensional praxis is manifest in an other-oriented approach to communication, which foregrounds a stance of listening in contrast to a more typical stance of advocacy. This tensional praxis emphasizes relationality among adversaries, openness to multiple forms of knowledge, the relocation of positionality within rather than at the forefront of deliberative contact, and sensitivity to the immanence-transcendence tension in human-human and human-nature experience.