The Right to Float: Rhetoric Employed in ‘Legal Rights for Lake Erie?’
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Over the last decade, courts and legislatures around the world have ruled to grant our rivers, mountains, and forests certain unalienable rights, such as life, liberty, and the ability to exist in their natural state, free from pollution or human encroachment. On February 26, 2019, voters in Toledo, Ohio will vote on the proposed ‘Lake Erie Bill of Rights,’ which would afford the Great Lake similar legal status and grant citizens the ability to sue on it’s behalf, as reported by the New York Times’ Timothy Williams, in ‘Legal Rights for Lake Erie? Voters in Ohio City Will Decide.’
Though the lake could not be reached for comment, Williams neutrally addresses the issue with stately judiciousness, and an even hand to all human parties involved. Free of hysterics or pearl-clutching, Williams is able to succinctly present both major parties to the issue, educate a national audience about a regional predicament, and provide (oftentimes quite more than) adequate historical and legal context to a decades-old legislative conundrum.
Williams dives into his subject straightaway, quickly building up an assortment of plain-spoken and well-contextualized musings about the status of the lake. He resists the urge to overwhelm the reader with technical jargon and complicated explanations, noting simply, “… this special election is not merely symbolic. It is legal strategy: If the lake gets legal rights, the theory goes, people can sue polluters on its behalf.” Williams is singing to the nosebleeds here, eschewing any attempt at a pedantic, lecturing tone. When he discusses the relevant legal precedence, the votes and rulings are helpfully hyperlinked to their pertinent natural bodies. Indeed, Williams’ plain, accessible language and studious fact-finding are present throughout the article, even while he discusses the complex issue at hand.
Paraphrasing Thomas Linzey, of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, who helped to draft the measure appearing on Toledo’s special election ballot, Williams is, again, to-the-point, saying this law will assure, “that rivers have a right to flow, forests have a right to thrive and lakes have a right to be clean.”
While the accumulation of facts, data, and outside citations, is an obvious application of logos, the decision to present his findings, which could have easily become laden with unrepeatable regional anecdotes and stuffy academic language, is a both intentional and effective use of ethos. By crafting his article using syntax and vocabulary that any lay man could parse, Williams is making a purposeful choice to “lower” the tone of his presentation of the facts and figures, preventing any potential proponent or skeptic from abstaining in a decision for lack of understanding. By boiling down his arguments to their barest details, and their simplest forms, it becomes impossible for the reader to simply shrug off the very real challenges being faced in Northern Ohio, and creates a more engaging and thoughtful narrative for his choice.
Simple, even prosaic, language allows Williams to speak directly to the everyman, and, in doing so, elevates his subject to a national level, creating a compelling argument, and building his credibility as a peer to the reader, rather than as the enlightened dispensing wisdom, from on high, to the starving and illiterate masses.
Further bolstering his ethos, Williams relies heavily on primary sources and quotes throughout his article. In accordance with his, presumably journalistic, ethics, both sides are permitted their comments and perspectives, free from any narrative railroading from the author. Yvonne Lesicko, of the Ohio Farm Bureau, is permitted to state her case in full. In the article, she acknowledges that farms bear some responsibility for the lake’s dwindling health, but argues that the proposed bill won’t solve such a complex and multi-faceted problem. She calls the initiative “counterproductive” and, when taking into account the cost Toledo will face defending the law in court, should it even pass, she is adamant that, “… This is not a solution… This is going to lead to lots of lawsuits and stress.” Stress for whom? According to Williams, it will be the voters and taxpayers of Toledo.
Of the scant uses of pathos present in ‘Legal Rights for Lake Erie?’, Williams is careful to save the bulk for his interviewed sources, for from their mouths, the impact is much stronger. Nick Komives, of the Toledo City Council, is hesitant to voice support for the bill, fretting, both over the constitutionality of the bill, and for dwindling city resources, much of which might be spent on protecting and enforcing the laws after the fact. Williams himself makes no comment as to these potential pitfalls, he simply allows concerned citizens to voice their own worries.
Smartly, the New York-based Williams seems to recognize that flamboyant and emotionally-charged language, coming from him, would de-legitimize his position, and come across as needlessly hyperbolic. From the mouths of locals, however, these sentiments are poignant, even moving, as they come from a place of genuine involvement and personal risk. He keeps his commentary limited to factual and unbiased assessments of the positions all players occupy, offering up, simply, “The issue has also put Toledo’s elected officials in an unenviable position. They say that if they oppose the measure, they fear they will appear to support polluting the lake.” Indeed, not a situation anyone would envy.
He’s careful to remain neutral and unbiased, but all this is not to say, however, that Williams sidesteps the severity of the challenges faced by Toledo citizens, aquatic or otherwise. In fact, Williams is blunt about the impact locals have had on their primary source of drinking water, citing a 2014 crisis, wherein the city was deprived of clean water when phosphorus runoff from nearby farms made water so toxic and befouled that it was unfit for anything but the flushing of waste.
He quotes Crystal Jankowski, who was delivering her daughter at a local hospital while these events transpired. She was only twenty-seven at the time, and says the city of Toledo “shut down” during those three long days. Frighteningly, she says, “They were having to cancel surgeries because they couldn’t sterilize equipment.” Only by speaking from her own experience would these words have such weight, and play so directly into the audience’s hearts and imaginations. These pathos-based arguments are best left to those who know them most intimately, and Williams is smart to recognize this.
Williams presents a well-balanced and thoroughly-researched assessment of both sides of a contentious issue, drafting a concise and informative voters’ guide for those who are unable to vote in the Toledo Special Election. His extensive use of primary sources and relevant legal citations are the pillars of his ethos- and logos-rich writing, but the pathos lent to his argument by his interviewed sources is what truly rounds it out. Without any one of these components, Williams would be unable to convincingly make his case, but his adept and straightforward usage of all three, and each in their own turn, creates a blended and complete narrative, which succeeds in its ease of comprehension and simplicity of tone.
Update: The Erie Bill of Rights has passed with 61.37%f of the vote, with a lower-than-usual voter turnout of 8.9%.
Williams, Timothy. “Legal Rights for Lake Erie? Voters in Ohio City Will Decide.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 17 Feb. 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/02/17/us/lake-erie-legal-rights.html.
