How Naked People and Polar Bears Made Climate Change Newsworthy

• In Event: Environmental Campaigns: Effects, Rhetoric, and Mobilization

Abstract

This paper investigates visual representations of staged environmental protests that are produced and distributed by the environmental-activist organization Greenpeace, and broadcast through international news media. By examining images taken from Greenpeace campaigns, this paper shows how these demonstrations generally, and images of them more specifically, draw attention to climate change issues through their rhetorical capacity to challenge dominant cultural values that have enabled climate-changing human activities to persist. The rhetorical capacity of these images further demonstrates Kevin DeLuca’s image event theory, which suggests how visual demonstrations can be designed to attract mass media attention that then leads to public advocacy and adherence. More specifically, this paper argues that Kenneth Burke’s concepts of identification and disidentification can show us how Greenpeace’s rhetorical agenda unfolds, how their visual representations of extreme environmental activism and advocacy challenge cultural values that support environmentally damaging industrializing practices and the subordination of nature to human progress.

Author

• Collin Jacob Syfert, University of Washington