Debra Hawhee's Sense of Urgency:

A Rhetorical Framework

Feb 3, 2026

Rhetoric of urgency

Deba Hawhee: At base, A Sense of Urgency considers how one intensifier (climate) is altering another kind of intensifier (rhetoric).

Unprecedented

Deba Hawhee: To frame climate change—its pace, its magnitude, its measurable conditions—as “unprecedented” is to place it (and us) on a kind of precipice. The word carries portents of, at best, a radically uncertain future.23 Rhetorically, the word “unprecedented” can put people on edge, because neverbefore-known conditions stymie preparation. Protocols do not exist; they must be created in the moment.

Deba Hawhee: The absence of precedent is the kind of limitation that scholars, climate activists, scientists, and artists are trying to overcome with novel, genre-expanding approaches, mixed and felt temporalities, borrowing rhetorical resources (a familiar slogan, an image) from another unprecedented situation, and finding sensuous presence through public art. Finding presence, for particular groups in particular places, means finding new, imaginative pathways to futures and in places both close and far.

Imagination

Deba Hawhee: Whyte presents kinship time as a way of noting shifts in relations and therefore taking on the responsibility those relations entail. Kinship time, as elaborated by Whyte and as lived in the Anishinaabe and Mishipizhu traditions upon which he draws, presses us to augment rhetoric’s “art of making things matter” with questions such as: matter for whom and with what consequences, what harms?

Deba Hawhee: Grasping the magnitude and complexity of climate change means attending to time as felt, and felt differently, by different communities and individuals. What is needed here is first to hold open and then to connect multiple conceptions of time, tasks that call on all available imaginative resources, including—and especially, I argue—those of rhetoric.

Witnessing

Deba Hawhee: When combined, these scholarly frameworks provide insights on witnessing that are further elaborated in this book: 1) it foregrounds justice and morality; 2) it slides back and forth in time; and 3) it relies on material presence.

Deba Hawhee: This pull to action is what couples past with future. The whole point of witnessing, traditionally conceived, is to bring the past to the now, ostensibly to improve conditions for current and future generations, in many cases even “speaking,” as Vivian puts it, “for the ears of the future.”

Presence

Deba Hawhee: In the context of witnessing, presence is figured as a kind of bodily, material presence, what the rhetoric and environmental justice scholar Phaedra Pezzullo frames as the tangible, the sensible, the being there or having been there.

Deba Hawhee: To conceive of elements and their composites as witnesses...is to acknowledge both the material and poetic force of their presence. These entities need to be heeded in ways that include but also exceed the culling of scientific evidence, or worse, extraction for industrial use. More than sources of proxy data, mountains, trees, water, and stones can work as proxy witnesses. To heed them as such is to activate a poetics of witnessing that moves closer to what environmental scholars and activists call “coexistence.”

Presence

Deba Hawhee: Calling forests “embedded witnesses,” that is, acknowledges their presence, their lives, their forms of “telling.” This move may tilt toward the figurative sense of witnessing, but it is one that nevertheless works materially, and, as most all witnesses do, by proxy. Elemental witnessing therefore calls forth multisensory listening, moving listening into the more profound, more action-oriented responsibility of heeding.

Deba Hawhee: Presence, then, intensifies by bringing forth the vital matters of accessibility, proximity, and (and through) sense-ability. Given that so much of the climate crisis seems too distant, too difficult to imagine, its unfolding too slow for non-scientists to register, presence takes on even greater importance, and its techniques are reaching deeper into sensuous resources of words, images, art, ceremony, and yes, elements.

Magnitude

Deba Hawhee: Working through the senses to convey importance, magnitude is a term of both quantity and quality. As a rhetorical principle, magnitude endows things with size and weight. It can also easily overwhelm.

Deba Hawhee: The word magnitude tilts in the directions of both sensible greatness (i.e., sheer size) and abstract greatness (honor or gravity). It gathers feeling on multiple registers—it is, in short, a term of intensification. Like witnessing, it carries overtones of severity and even harm such that it can shift according to experience and place, therefore resisting the universalizing tendencies of scale.

Tying it all together

Deba Hawhee: What is happening is this: efforts to imagine futures bring to the fore the rhetorical feature of magnitude, winding magnitude with information in order to enlarge the crisis. Such efforts give the climate crisis presence, another rhetorical concept this book draws out with a new stress on its sensory and material qualities. Arts and acts of witnessing, fortified with the clarifying power of insistence that they gathered over the course of the last century, are expanding to include nonhumans as well as humans, their temporalities unspooling from past, to present, and even to future, and not necessarily in that order. These means of intensification—magnitude, presence, and witnessing—show more precisely how feeling entwines with facts to close the geographic and temporal distances that often work as obstacles to action, particularly for settler descendants in the so-called Global North.

Tying it all together

Deba Hawhee: The account of rhetoric this book brings forth is therefore deeply sensuous. Familiar concepts, considered in the context of the climate crisis, are changing; their intensifying work is becoming more palpable. More than attention or awareness, the quality of attention and awareness takes on new significance...This book presents a *felt rhetoric.