

A Rhetorical Analysis of National Park Service and Community Leader Discourses about Night Skies at Acadia National Park
Abstract
Dark night skies are becoming increasingly scarce
as 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 forge
the 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.
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