A rhetorical analysis of National Park Service and community leader discourses about night skies at Acadia National Park

Derrien, Monika; Stokowski, Patricia; Manning, Robert

From official abstract: "Dark night skies are becoming increasingly scarce human populations increase and development continues to sprawl. Light pollution, and its ecological, social, and cultural impacts are transboundary, multi-jurisdictional issues that require planning and management involving multiple actors on multiple scales. This study examines management of dark night skies at Acadia National Park, where the park and community have worked to keep the night skies relatively dark. Park service managers and community leaders were interviewed, and qualitative methods were used to better understand how each group discursively made the case for the meaning and management of dark night skies at Acadia. In addition to analyzing the explicit content of interviews, enthymemes--arguments with implicit claims--were also evaluated.The rhetorical analysis also focused on the stylistic techniques that supported enthymematic claims; these included establishing legitimacy and credibility,positioning leaders relative to others, and ambiguity. This study showed that NPS arguments tended to frame the role of the community as "buying in" to NPS's efforts to uphold its new night sky-inclusive management policies, while community leaders argued that the night sky was an economic asset, discursively retaining their autonomous interests. Rhetorical discourses functioned to forget he semblance of agreement and the appearance of a "win-win" situation for both groups, even though the underlying premises of their arguments were often conflictual, relating to political or ideological understandings of the resource and the goals of its management. Other research has found that contested meanings can lead to substantial conflict over resource management, but in this case, contested meanings seemed to represent a case of adjustment and shared responsibility."