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In the first portion of his article Unruly Arguments, Kevin DeLuca examines different examples of bodies as public rhetoric in the Environmental Movement. He claims that the members of Earth First! discard traditional organizational structures, conventional legislative processes, and the established forms of argumentation. The members of Earth First! reject the accepted system in order to create the most change. DeLuca argues that words are the common currency, images are becoming acceptable, but “bodies remain virtually invisible” (DeLuca 11). He outlines two specific examples of bodies communicating in the protests. One, a man buried to his neck in the middle of a busy logging road, puts a human in a compromising position with no way to defend himself. The other, a woman named Butterfly, lives atop a 1,000 year-old redwood tree in California to prevent the clear cutting of the forest. These two people, among others, put their bodies in compromising positions to communicate the inability of nature to defend itself. While the man in the road cannot feed or protect himself, he represents the soil around him. Also, his strategic placement disrupts the traffic—mostly logging equipment—that would travel that road. In the simple act of making himself vulnerable in a thought-out location, he is able to non-verbally communicate nature’s delicacy. Butterfly does the same thing atop Luna, her tree. She sways in the roaring winds, roasts in the blistering heat, and would die if the loggers decided to cut Luna down. By throwing themselves into these situations, the members of Earth First! force whoever sees them to notice the frailty of nature; this can dislodge the anthropocentric mind set, but that depends on the frames in which the bodies at peril are presented. At its center, however, Earth First!’s use of bodies in argumentation is meant to disrupt the accepted discourse and shake the anthropocentric model.
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