As climate change contracts our environment, bringing human and nonhuman communities into increased contact and conflict over scarce resources, advocacy rhetoric is making a related shift, from raising human awareness of problems “out there” to renegotiating the very boundaries between human and nonhuman communities. This shift—along with the advent of online media, which similarly blurs traditional urban versus rural boundaries between communities—invites us to update classic studies of advocacy rhetoric from the 1990s and early 2000s. Accordingly, this study addresses advocates’ use of online media in the Mexican Gray Wolf Reintroduction Project. I reconstruct wildlife advocates’ attitudes toward the Project, as expressed online in press releases and blog posts, by using a combination of topology—a method that looks at patterns of topoi (shared beliefs, values, and norms) that a community expresses in a given rhetorical situation—and Kenneth Burke’s theories of attitudes and identification. I then compare advocates’ attitudes with the attitudes of project administrators and landowners in the reintroduction area, reconstructed in earlier work. I conclude that advocates amplify their identification with allies (chiefly wolves and supportive sectors of “the public”) and their alienation from competitors (chiefly public-land ranchers and project administrators) via the creation of “straw attitudes” for these communities that conflict both with their own attitude and with the documented attitudes of these communities. This rhetorical strategy creates a zero-sum political scenario for communication in the Project and recapitulates old political divisions in the southwestern United States. I finish by recommending rhetorical strategies aimed to increase identification, rather than alienation, in the Project and by showing what online advocacy rhetoric can teach us about the structure of Burkean theories of identification.

中文翻译：

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零和政治鉴定：对墨西哥灰狼再引入项目中的野生动植物修辞的拓扑分析

随着气候变化使我们的环境收缩，使人类和非人类社区之间因稀缺资源而增加了接触和冲突，倡导言论正在发生着相关的转变，从提高人们对“外部”问题的认识到重新协商人类与非人类社区之间的界限。这种转变以及在线媒体的出现，同样模糊了社区之间传统的城市和乡村界限，邀请我们更新1990年代和2000年代早期的经典辩护言论研究。因此，本研究解决了墨西哥灰狼再引进项目中倡导者对在线媒体的使用。我在新闻稿和博客文章中在线表达了野生动植物倡导者对项目的态度，通过使用拓扑（一种查看社区在给定的修辞情境中表达的拓扑（共享的信念，价值观和规范）的模式的方法）与肯尼思·伯克的态度和认同理论的组合。然后，我将倡导者的态度与重新引入地区的项目管理者和土地所有者的态度进行了比较，这是在早期工作中重建的。我得出的结论是，拥护者通过为这些相互冲突的社区建立“稻草态度”，扩大与同盟（主要是“狼群”和“公众”的支持部门）的认同，并与竞争对手（主要是公共土地牧场主和项目管理员）疏远。以他们自己的态度以及这些社区记录在案的态度。这种修辞策略为项目中的交流创造了一个零和政治场景，并概括了美国西南部的旧政治分歧。最后，我通过推荐旨在提高项目识别度而不是疏远度的修辞策略，并展示在线倡导修辞学可以教给我们有关Burkean识别理论的结构的内容。