Najczęściej na rzecz sprawiedliwości społecznej i środowiskowej (enivironmental justice), powstrzymania dewastacji planety, praw człowieka, szczególnie praw kobiet i rdzennych mieszkańców oraz zwierząt. Zob. np. G.A. Love Revaluing Nature.

The fear of a poisoned world is being increasingly pressed, debated, debunked, and reiterated from many disciplinary vantage points: medicine, political science, history, sociology, economics, and ethics among others. Seldom however is toxicity discussed as a discourse. This essay aims to define the forms, origins, uses, and critical implications of toxic rhetoric, conceiving it as an interlocked set of topoi whose force derives partly from the exigencies of an anxiously industrializing culture, partly from deeperrooted Western attitudes. In order to make this analysis pointed and manageable, and not to outrun the limits of my knowledge, It unsettles received assumptions about the boundaries of nature writing and environmental representation generally; it provides a striking instance of the hermeneutics of empathy and suspicion as they are pitted against each other, and the potentially high stakes at issue in that conflict; and it reopens fundamental questions about both the cultural significance and the ethics of metaphor. There seem to be at least two reasons why the discourse of toxicity has not been treated with the same attention as its chemical, medical, social, and legal aspects. One is surely the pragmatism that plays a major part in shaping all agendas of discussion. Discourse may seem a low priority when health or even property is jeopardized. Not even most humanistic intellectuals might agree with Emerson's dictum that the most abstract truth is the most practical. Also significant, though, has been the manner in which environmental issues have been framed by the likeliest potential contributors to the inquiry. Within literary and rhetorical studies, the impetus to engage environmental issues has mainly come from the so-

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