This paper uses a familiar literary example to address concepts of agency and community in the context

of environmental activism. My focus is the social and political responses to climate change in suburban

and rural communities in southwest Ohio that voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump in the 2016

presidential election, yet had shown considerable support for Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential

election. A rhetorical and narrative analysis of these voters’ responses to environmental concerns about

climate change are revealing: 1) Increased awareness about climate change and its causes is not shifting

an entrenched group of “doubters.” Their doubt has changed from questioning whether climate change

exists to questioning if anything can (or should) be done about it. 2) The failure of environmental

activism to sway this large numbers of voters continues to be a communal narrative problem (in part).

The persistence of “climate doubt” can be explained by the semiotic problem of a “footprint in the

sand” that Robinson Crusoe finds as a castaway on an island where he thinks he is the only inhabitant.

For Crusoe, the footprint is a sign without a signifier, and as such, Crusoe responds with doubt,

confusion and inaction. When he finally connects the footprint to the arrival of cannibals on his island,

he acts by attacking them and freeing their captive, Friday. Yet the communal narrative problem here is

not only the interpretive dilemma that the footprint poses for Crusoe, but rather the misreading it

triggers in the book’s readers. As Umberto Eco points out, most readers believe the footprint to be

Friday’s, which is a temporal impossibility in the narrative. In imposing cohesion to crucial signs with

weak signification, the reader makes false connections. This mirrors the Ohio voter’s substitution of a

cohesive narrative concerning climate change that the Trump campaign provided. My study examines

polling data, qualitative data, interviews, and narrative frameworks developed by Umberto Eco, Thomas

Seboek, Wolfgang Iser, and Susan Lanser.