Mindbombs of Right and Wrong: Cycles of Contention in the Activist Campaign to Stop Canada's Seal Hunt (original) (raw)
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VISUAL IMAGES AND THE RHETORIC OF ENVIRONMENTAL ADVOCACY
This project 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 eight images taken from four separate Greenpeace image campaigns, this thesis 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. As such, 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 thesis argues that a novel understanding of Kenneth Burke’s paired concepts of identification and disidentification can show us precisely 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. To support my argument, Chapter 1 establishes a context for environmental advocacy, describing both the scientific consensus surrounding climate change issues, as well as the mixed opinions held by the public about these very same issues. Chapter 2 examines the academic literature concerning visual rhetoric and environmental advocacy, and introduces DeLuca’s image event theory and Burke’s concepts of identification and disidentification as exploratory lenses through which visual representations of extreme environmental advocacy can be studied. Chapter 3 performs a close reading and analysis of eight images from Greenpeace demonstrations, and outlines the mechanisms through which they achieve their rhetorical effects. Lastly, Chapter 4 posits that visual representations of extreme environmental activism and advocacy provide Greenpeace with a much larger mouthpiece in the world than they could ever achieve using traditional approaches to advocacy and conventional channels of public and political debate. As such, the study concludes that the visual rhetoric of environmental activists has the capacity to perform ideological critique in the process of reshaping public perceptions of climate change issues.
Sustaining Environmental Action: The Sea Shepherds, Conflict and the Politics of Communication
Environmental groups today are operating in a political climate that for many is characterised by an increasing threat to democratic values in democratic countries. At the same time, a functioning democracy is seen as the pre-requisite for environmental protection. The problems arising out of this tension for environmental action and debate are evident for example in the debate over climate change denial and the question of political funding by corporations. Within this context, this paper will discuss current conceptualisations of the cultural and political role of environmental action. The campaigning and media communications strategies practiced by Paul Watson’s Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, and of this particular form of radical environmentalism, are used as a case study to analyse the role of various forms of communicating environmental risk and conflict by various groups in putting environmental problems on the social agenda. But rather than focusing exclusively on the Sea Shepherd’s media practices, the focus in this paper will be on Paul Watson’s whole philosophy of conflict. What kind of environmental risk communication and framing of environmental issues is actually brought into being by Sea Shepherd? What kind of debates and actions actually develop out of and around the symbols produced by Sea Shepherd’s activities? What has been developing as the recognised risk or crisis within the media sphere and public debate around the Sea Shepherds is not whaling as an issue, or even the wider environmental crisis of species extinction, but a number of other political issues, such as the risk to international relations and the handling of social conflicts over environmental issues. Hence, is Sea Shepherd’s symbolic politics further polarising existing antagonisms in the conflict over whaling rather than growing environmental awareness and fostering possible action, and what would be the implications of this for the question of the current and future role of environmental action?
Eco-Images and Environmental Activism: A Sociosemiotic Analysis
"“Nature never speaks by itself,” least of all in ecological discourses, where the line between brand-marketing strategies and the protection of nature is continually blurred. Strategies employed by activists testify that the crisis of nature is being constantly represented and renegotiated by different social actors. The ever-growing number of unconventional advertising campaigns executed by environmental organizations is a clear sign of the changeable nature of discourses about the crisis of the environment. One of the most interesting and yet unexplored aspects of the mediatization of nature is the continuous evolution of visual communication strategies used by environmental movements to denounce the ecosystem crisis and to influence public opinion. In recent years, we have noted an increase in greenwashing practices: the intentional dissemination of misleading or unsubstantiated information by organizations in order to conceal their abuse of the environment, or to promote vaguely formulated “sustainable practices” and products to present a positive public image. If we focus on the “responsibility” of images in the context of green/greenwashed strategies, two elements become obvious. On the one hand, we can detect the communication strategies adopted by corporations to reassert their environmental commitment. On the other hand, we see the political use of images by ecological movements and organizations, in particular their creative re-appropriation of the visual imagery of sustainability. The imagery used here can be categorized as eco-imagery."
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The Argumentative Force of Image Networks: Greenpeace's Panmediated Global Detox Campaign, 2016
This essay engages the force of images as an important form of argumentation in the contemporary mediascape, which is being constantly transformed by flows of image networks across various social media platforms. This mediascape requires tools that move beyond verbal architectures, inspiring new concepts and practices of analysis. In response, this essay proposes concepts for engaging the argumentative force of the rush of images transforming the world, including panmediated networks, wild public screens, affective winds, and image events. An analysis of Greenpeace’s global Detox campaign elaborates on the uses of these concepts.
Spectacular Environmentalisms: Media, Knowledge and the Framing of Ecological Politics
As we move firmly into the so-called Anthropocene—an era defined by human-induced global environmental change, neoliberal, consumer capitalism and the unprecedented flow of media, knowledge and communication—how is it that we know about the environment? More specifically: how is it we know about human-environment relationships—those tension-filled, ever-present, often-obscured, but inescapable relationships that are most likely overlain by some form of capitalist social relations? How do we know about ecological destruction embedded in these current human-environment relationships? How do we know what to do about the increasingly solid spectres of climate change and irretrievable biodiversity losses as well as the ordinarily polluted cities and fields many live in but count on for survival? As we and the authors of this special issue of Environmental Communication contend, given the growing prominence of media and celebrity in environmental politics, we now increasingly know about the environment through different forms, processes and aspects of the spectacle and, in particular, the spectacular environments of a progressively diverse media-scape. Moreover—and forming the core focus of this issue—we argue that we are more and more being told about how to ‘solve’ ecological problems through spectacular environmentalisms: the spectacularised, environmentally-focused media spaces that are differentially political, normative and moralised and that traverse our everyday public and private lifeworlds.
Colonialism and Animality: Anti-Colonial Perspectives in Critical Animal Studies, 2020
This chapter looks at the conflicts between various groups engaged in the struggles for or against the commercial seal hunt in Canada over the past few decades. Together, the tensions that Indigenous peoples experience when confronting the Western animal advocacy movement, neoliberal global capitalism, settler colonialism, Eurocentric white supremacy, and reciprocal relationships with the land make up the main object of my analysis. Two main arguments are proposed. First, I argue that all efforts going towards defending wild animals and the ecological habitat they depend on will likely be rendered ineffective if settler-colonial capitalist processes of dispossessions and destructions go unchallenged. To challenge these processes would require Indigenous communities and settler solidarity to fight for Indigenous self-determination and sustainable economies, while the failure to do so involves legitimizing state powers and relying on state legitimacy to either sustain or collapse capitalist industries. Secondly, I argue that while Eurocentrism, white supremacy, and racism certainly played a significant role in the tactics that animal advocacy NGOs employed to drastically weaken the commercial seal hunt, the role that nonhuman animals (i.e. the seals themselves) played in their own resistance and struggles against capitalist industrial massacres should not be erased or downplayed.
Http Dx Doi Org 10 1080 15377857 2014 866026, 2014
The provocative debate over the Canadian seal hunt features emotional imagery, selective use of facts, a media relations battle and political lobbying. This paper explores different forms of propaganda employed in the sealing controversy by animal rights groups and by the governments of Canada and of Newfoundland. It argues that Newfoundland nationalism is a central variable. This perspective can help gauge the effects of propaganda and explain the government’s defence of a controversial policy. It concludes that propaganda, nationalism and political marketing are independent categories that bear strong similarities.
Make love, not war?: Radical environmental activism’s reconfigurative potential and pitfalls
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New radical environmental action movements are attracting large numbers of diverse actors who inevitably will take inspiration and learn from mistakes of those radical environmental organizations that precede them and continue today into middle age. The representational strategies of these established organizations are of specific interest as they enter a maturity phase that coincides with the planet experiencing an unprecedented anthropogenic moment of reckoning – a time when more broadly engaging and transformative activism is paramount to reconfiguring ecological, societal, and spatial orientations. We focus on Sea Shepherd, a global ocean protection organization founded in the same decade as many other formatively radical organizations, to examine its historic and current representations of its direct action stance; its multiple and at times conflicting positioning of cetaceans; its emphasis on celebrity and timely campaigns; and its longstanding military, war, and piracy framin...