Enviropop: Studies in Environmental Rhetoric and Popular Culture

Although much scholarly and critical attention has been paid to the relationship between rhetoric and environmental issues, media and environmental issues, and politics and environmental issues, no book has yet focused on the relationship between popular culture and environmental issues. This collection of essays provides a rigorous and multifaceted rhetorical and critical perspective on the ways in which the language and imagery of nature is incorporated strategically into various popular culture texts―ranging from greeting cards to advertisements to supermarket tabloids. As a distinguished group of scholars reveals, our notions about the environment and environmentalism are both reflected in and shaped by our popular culture in fascinating ways never previously examined in an academic context.

The consumptive vision of nature presented in these texts represents a wholly American view, one promoting leisure and comfort, and nature as the place to experience them. This good life attitude toward the environment often serves to commodify it, to render it little more than space in which to pursue conventional notions of the American dream. As such, the volume represents a bold and striking vision both of popular culture and of popular notions of an environment that can be either protected or just simply consumed.

MARK MEISTER is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at North Dakota State University.

PHYLLIS M. JAPP is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communications at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.