ABSTRACT
This chapter calls for ecocritics and environmental communication specialists to collaborate and develop critical reading practices for the grey literature of green governance—for the documents, that is, which permeate and make possible the environmental planning and decision-making process. Over the course of two sections, the entangled histories and legacies of grey literature and green governance in the United States are explored, respectively, as the former arose out of the postwar problematization of scientific communication and as the latter emerged out of a desire to preserve a vaguely defined yet narrow understanding of America’s national heritage. Both, the chapter demonstrates, are intimately bound to matters of national security, economic expansion, and to defining the normative parameters of environmental knowledge and practice. Reflecting on the relation between the grey literature of green governance and more traditional forms of nature writing, the chapter’s conclusion argues that ecocritics and environmental communication specialists are in a unique position to denaturalize the dominant modes in which environmental information is produced, communicated, and received.
