Image Politics: The New Rhetoric of Environmental Activism

From Greenpeace protesters confronting whaling ships to Earth First! activists occupying trees to stop logging, radical environmentalists increasingly rely upon attracting mass media coverage to gain visibility and public support. This book examines the use of "image events" as a rhetorical tactic, one that often supplants written or spoken arguments. Widely televised environmentalist actions are analyzed in depth to illustrate how the image event fulfills fundamental rhetorical functions in constructing and transforming identities, discourses, communities, cultures, and world views. Beyond the rhetorical power of image events, DeLuca also shows how they create opportunities for a politics that does not rely on centralized leadership or universal metanarratives. Illuminating the new political possibilities currently being enacted by radical environmental groups, the book lays out a rhetoric of the visual for our mediated age.

Kevin Michael DeLuca, PhD, has taught at the University of Virginia and the Pennsylvania State University and is currently an assistant professor of Speech Communication at the University of Georgia. His major area of interest is how industrial cultures relate to the natural world and construct visions of "nature." He has published articles on environmental politics, technology, the media, and postmodernism.