Smokey Bear as Exclusionary Icon

• In Event: Visual Approaches to Environmental History

Abstract

While criticism of the U.S. Forest Service’s fire suppression policy is usually advanced from an ecological perspective, this paper takes a different point of departure: Smokey Bear, the agency’s septuagenarian metonym for fire prevention. By tracing the genealogy of the male-bodied bear’s iconography, I examine his transformation from a bellicose soldier to a doting patriarch. Though it may seem that Smokey Bear’s evolving representations reflect the society in which he is embedded, I ask whose interests, more specifically, he embodies. To whom does the bear speak? What forms of environmental citizenship does he foster? What does he prescribe and proscribe beyond fire prevention?

In arguing for the exclusionary nature of Smokey Bear, this paper suggests that the icon, ostensibly fashioned for the public interest, has contributed to the erasure of race and class in U.S. environmental politics. Moreover, I make the case that the bear’s body has (re)produced a version of environmentalism aligned with the white middle class. Smokey Bear is arguably an archetypical icon of U.S. environmental activism because the “poster-bear” has been central to the longest running public ad campaign in U.S. history. As such, the bear presents a key case study in the role that images play in popularizing and universalizing particular conceptions of environmentalism.

Author

• Catherine Peters, Harvard University