Ecosee: Image, Rhetoric, Nature

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. DelfiÅ’n, 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.