This essay examines how toxins are visually represented in news and popular media. More specifically, it analyzes the function of visual narratives, identity, place, and uncertainty in the construction of the controversial toxicant Agent Orange, a defoliant used by the US military during the Vietnam War to reduce jungle cover and destroy cropland causing devastating health and environmental effects. Toxins present an interesting challenge for visual construction in that they are often invisible and banal in their esthetics. The essay concludes with five observations for understanding the relationship between images and toxins.
Since the first Earth Day in 1970, as Phil Brick explained, "The U.S. environmental movement has enjoyed high levels of public support, fighting for tougher laws to protect the nation's air, water, and natural resources" (1995, p. 17). By the early 1980s, the discourse of the environmental movement with its earth icon, naturescapes, recycle symbol, and pro-nature slogans was firmly embedded into the consciousness and conscience of most Americans. Seven percent of Americans described themselves as being "environmentally active," 55% said they were "sympathetic with the aims of the movement," and 45% felt that protecting the environment was "so important that requirements and standards [could not] be too high and continuing environmental improvements [should] be made regardless of cost" (Sale, 1993, p. 44). The movement's legislative focus brought it into direct conflict with natural resource industries, outdoor recreation groups, and landowners who felt that environmental laws were violating their interests. Surprisingly, not until the formation of the Wise Use movement in the 1980s did these counterenvironmental entities begin to work as a successful coalition to fight environmental regulation. As Wise Use leader Ron Arnold proudly boasted in The New York Times, "No one was aware that environmentalism was a problem until we came along" (Egan, 1995, p. A18).
The Trump Administration has adopted "energy dominance" as its guiding ideology for energy policy, marking a notable shift from decades of "energy security" rhetoric. This paper analyzes how Secretary of Interior Ryan Zinke, one of the administration's key spokespeople for energy dominance, uses "energy covenant renewal" to frame the importance of energy dominance for the conservative base. Covenant renewal is a modified form of the jeremiad; Zinke uses it to unite conservative identities around energy politics and policies. Energy dominance thus invites those who feel aggrieved under Obama administration regulatory policy and the multicultural identity politics of the left to renew their commitment to fossil fuels, American exceptionalism, and a restored social order and privilege.
The WTO protests in Seattle witnessed the emergence of an international citizens' movement for democratic globalization. With the tactical exploitation of television, the internet, and other technologies, Seattle also witnessed the enactment of forms of activism adapted to a wired society. In the wake of Seattle, this essay introduces the "public screen" as a necessary supplement to the metaphor of the public sphere for understanding today's political scene. While a public sphere orientation inevitably finds contemporary discourse wanting, viewing such discourse through the prism of the public screen provokes a consideration of new forms of participatory democracy. In comparison to the public sphere's privileging of rationality, embodied conversations, consensus, and civility, the public screen highlights dissemination, images, hypermediacy, publicity, distraction, and dissent. Using the Seattle WTO protests as a case study and focusing on the dynamic of violence and the media, we argue that the public screen accounts for technological and cultural changes while enabling a charting of the new conditions for rhetoric, politics, and activism.
The WTO protests in Seattle witnessed the emergence of an international citizens' movement for democratic globalization. With the tactical exploitation of television, the internet, and other technologies, Seattle also witnessed the enactment of forms of activism adapted to a wired society. In the wake of Seattle, this essay introduces the "public screen" as a necessary supplement to the metaphor of the public sphere for understanding today's political scene. While a public sphere orientation inevitably finds contemporary discourse wanting, viewing such discourse through the prism of the public screen provokes a consideration of new forms of participatory democracy. In comparison to the public sphere's privileging of rationality, embodied conversations, consensus, and civility, the public screen highlights dissemination, images, hypermediacy, publicity, distraction, and dissent. Using the Seattle WTO protests as a case study and focusing on the dynamic of violence and the media, we argue that the public screen accounts for technological and cultural changes while enabling a charting of the new conditions for rhetoric, politics, and activism
The WTO protests in Seattle witnessed the emergence of an international citizens' movement for democratic globalization. With the tactical exploitation of television, the internet, and other technologies, Seattle also witnessed the enactment of forms of activism adapted to a wired society. In the wake of Seattle, this essay introduces the "public screen" as a necessary supplement to the metaphor of the public sphere for understanding today's political scene. While a public sphere orientation inevitably finds contemporary discourse wanting, viewing such discourse through the prism of the public screen provokes a consideration of new forms of participatory democracy. In comparison to the public sphere's privileging of rationality, embodied conversations, consensus, and civility, the public screen highlights dissemination, images, hypermediacy, publicity, distraction, and dissent. Using the Seattle WTO protests as a case study and focusing on the dynamic of violence and the media, we argue that the public screen accounts for technological and cultural changes while enabling a charting of the new conditions for rhetoric, politics, and activism.
"Voice and Environmental Communication explores how people give voice to, and listen to the voices of, the environment. As anxieties around degrading environments increase, so too do the number and volume of voices vying for the opportunity to express their experiences, beliefs, anxieties, knowledge and proposals for meaningful change. Nature itself speaks through, and perhaps to, individuals who advocate on behalf of the environment. This collection includes nine original essays organized into three sections: Voice and Environmental Advocacy, Voice and Consumption, and Listening to Non-human Voices. Four notable scholars reflect on these chapters, and provide both an audience to the scholars as well as a forum for extending their own understanding of voice and the environment. This foundational book introduces the relationship between these two fundamental aspects of human existence and extends our knowledge of the role of voice in the study of environmental communication. "--
If citizens have heard anything about the upheaval in the U.S. coal industry, it is probably the insistence that President Obama and the EPA have waged a "war on coal." This phrase is written into President-elect Donald Trump's energy platform, which promises to "end the war on coal."
The Last Mountain is a 2011 Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) film. It examines an aggressive form of strip mining in West Virginia known as mountaintop removal (MTR). The Last Mountain was the first of more than 40 MTR films to be distributed nationally and, as such, marks the entry of the issue onto the political scene in the USA. This essay analyses the film's use of environmental melodrama to define the problems related to MTR and create identification between victims of MTR and viewers. However, the latter portion of the film attempts to scale up from the melodramatic depiction of MTR to advocacy on broader issues regarding renewable energy and global climate change. In doing so, the film breaks with melodramatic form, draining its emotional power, foreclosing systemic political action, and limiting its overall effectiveness as a sustainability narrative.
