In this thesis, I am concerned with environmental rhetoric and its peculiar methodological predicament. Most scholarship on environmental rhetoric builds rhetoric via textual interpretation of things produced by individuals and groups and scholars have been all too comfortable to study texts in isolation as the foundations of environmental rhetoric. While the method of rhetorical analysis is valid in producing a certain kind of knowledge, it is limited in that it sees texts as the central locus of the rhetorical situation. This thesis proposes a way of examining environmental rhetoric to where what we know as green rhetoric or green knowledge becomes more complex by tracing textual production via practices in a network. This is a work of rhetorical theory. It is a contribution that occurs twofold: (1) a method as a means of building a rhetoric and (2) an emergent rhetoric of sustainability. With these two deliverables, I am primarily assembling a careful look of how sustainability is practiced in a particular locale, thus this project can best be seen as a working model derived from practice as it occurs at Michigan State University's Office of Campus Sustainability. This thesis differs from other work on environmental rhetoric because it develops theory from practices leading to claims about a rhetoric rather than claims arising from the arbitrary interpretation of texts.