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Summary
Examines the rhetorical role of images in communicating environmental ideas.
How do supporters of the environmental movement manipulate and promote images of “nature” to achieve support and sympathy? From the Sierra Club’s use of Ansel Adams’s stark and pristine portraits of the western United States to close-ups of plastic bottles and dead fish floating in Rust Belt waterways, visual depictions of landscapes and the degradation caused by humans have profoundly shaped popular notions of environmentalism and the environment. Despite the rhetorical power of images connected with the environmental movement over the past forty years, scholarship in environmental communication has focused almost exclusively on verbal rather than visual rhetoric. Ecosee offers a deeper and fuller understanding of the communicative strategies and power of the environmental movement by looking closely at the visual rhetorics involved in photographs, paintings, television and filmic images, video games, and other forms of image-based media.
“…Ecosee … makes major contributions to analysis of the visual rhetorics in environmental discourses.” — The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory
“By making visible just how visual communication plays a powerful role in shaping public opinions about the environment, Morey and Ecosee offer useful concepts and theories to continue studying visual rhetorics related to the environment … This collection particularly encourages us to think about research approaches that go beyond the textual and beyond the social constructionist perspective.” — JAC
“The contributors have provided thoughtful, smart essays that initiate a useful discussion for the field.” — Stuart C. Brown, coeditor of Green Culture: Environmental Rhetoric in Contemporary America
Contributors include Steve Baker, Pat Brereton, Heather Dawkins, Teresa E. P. DelfiŒn, Sidney I. Dobrin, Julie Doyle, Kathryn Ferguson, Quinn R. Gorman, M. Jimmie Killingsworth, Sean Morey, Eleanor Morgan, Simone Osthoff, Jacqueline S. Palmer, Spencer Schaffner, Tom Tyler, Bart H. Welling, and Cary Wolfe.
Sidney I. Dobrin is Associate Professor of English at the University of Florida and has written or edited many books, including (with Christopher J. Keller) Writing Environments and (with Christian R. Weisser) Natural Discourse: Toward Ecocomposition, both also published by SUNY Press. Sean Morey is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Florida.
Table of Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Ecosee: A First Glimpse Sidney I. Dobrin and Sean Morey
Part 1. How We See
1. A Rhetorical Look at Ecosee Sean Morey
2. Ecoporn: On the Limits of Visualizing the
Nonhuman Bart H. Welling
3. Ecology, Images, and Scripto-Visual Rhetoric Heather Dawkins
4. Field Guides to Birds: Images and Image/Text
Positioned as Reference Spencer Schaffner
5. Eduardo Kac: Networks as Medium and Trope Simone Osthoff
Part 2. Seeing Animals
6. From Dead Meat to Glow-in-the-Dark Bunnies:
Seeing “the Animal Question” in Contemporary Art Cary Wolfe
7. “They’re There, and That’s How We’re Seeing It”:
Olly and Suzi in the Antarctic” Steve Baker
8. Connecting with Animals: The Aquarium
and the Dreamer Fish Eleanor Morgan
Part 3. Seeing Landscapes and Seascapes
9. Farming on Irish Film: An Ecological Reading Pat Brereton
10. Postcards from the Andes:
Politics of Representation in a Reimagined Perú Teresa E. P. Delfín
11. That’s Not a Reef. Now That’s a Reef:
A Century of (Re)Placing the Great Barrier Reef Kathryn Ferguson
Part 4. Seeing in Space and Time
12. Evading Capture: The Productive Resistance
of Photography in Environmental Representation Quinn R. Gorman
13. The Test of Time: McLuhan, Space, and
the Rise of Civilization Tom Tyler
14. Seeing the Climate?: The Problematic Status
of Visual Evidence in Climate Change Campaigning Julie Doyle
15. Afterword M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline S. Palmer
