Extended Abstract: Articulating Environmental & Human Health in the Rust Belt

The Rust Belt region comprises states in the northeastern and Midwest that were once marked by heavy manufacturing. States like Ohio and Pennsylvania, which once harbored now shuttered steel mills, now offer opportunities for new extractive manufacturing such as high volume hydraulic fracturing (HVHF). Because of the layered nature of industrial use, both historical and current, stakeholders or public participants, such as residents who live near and who are impacted by past and current industrial sites, often struggle with communicating environmental risks about continued industrial practices which often do not take into account additional risks such as climate change. This research proposes to compare the technical communication practices of three non-profit environmental groups that attempt to offer environmental justice communication tools to public stakeholders who are seeking to understand and enact praxis in terms of environmental risks that can impact environmental and human health. Discourse analysis tools will be applied to communications published by the Southwest PA Environmental Health Project, FracTracker, and the Center for Coalfield Justice. This analysis will seek linguistic patterns that can help public participants with language that can “reframe” the Rust Belt from a simple narrative as an industrial hub to a richer understanding of how the future of this area might be reimagined and re-enacted.