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  • Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images by Finis Dunaway
  • Colin Fisher
SEEING GREEN: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images. By Finis Dunaway. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 2015.

Historians of environmentalism have often overlooked visual culture, focusing instead on policy and grassroots politics. But, as Finis Dunaway shows in this excellent book, scholars interested in environmentalism ignore the role of green imagery (photography, documentaries, Hollywood movies, cartoons, television news broadcasts, and other media representations) at considerable peril. Environmental visual culture, he argues, did not simply reflect the environmental crises of the last fifty years, but also subtly and powerfully shaped and delimited environmental politics.

Dunaway starts by reminding us of the importance of images in early- and mid-twentieth-century American conservation (the subject of his superb first book) and introducing us to the outsized role that visual culture played in the environmental politics of the 1960s. The rest of the book is divided into three sections. Section one looks at the [End Page 166] early 1970s and representations of the Santa Barbara oil spill, Earth Day, anti-littering imagery (including the infamous “crying Indian” advertisement), and the recycling logo. Section two brings us into the mid and late 1970s and the circulation of imagery related to energy: Associated Press photos of cars lined up at gas stations, Ad Council spots blasting “fuelishness,” the Hollywood blockbuster The China Syndrome, ominous visual representations of the Three Mile Island cooling towers, and efforts by President Carter to frame the energy crisis on television. The last section brings us up to the 1980s and beyond, and analyzes media representations of toxic contamination, the New York garbage barge, the Alar scare, the Exxon Valdez disaster, and Earth Day 1990. Dunaway also offers us a novel reading of Al Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.

Dunaway argues that during the last half century, mainstream environmental imagery has done significant ideological work. The dominant visual culture painted all Americans (typically represented by white children and their mothers) as universally vulnerable and in so doing obscured the fact that some communities were far more exposed to environmental hazards than others. The reigning green iconography tended to absolve the state and corporations of environmental responsibility and placed blame at the doorstep of consumers, who were told that they could save the environment by buying, conserving, and recycling. At the same time, by giving intense attention to moments of sensational crisis, the media diverted attention away from systemic problems as well as slow-motion ecological train wrecks, such as climate change.

While Dunaway shows that dominant green iconography had a surprisingly powerful role in shaping the American environmental agenda, he does not see this role as total. Throughout he shows how both radical environmentalists and conservatives contested evolving mainstream green culture. Dunaway’s attention to these alternative voices helps us understand the power and limits of hegemonic environmental iconography. But one wishes that the frame were broadened even more. Scholars of the so-called American culture of nature are far more critical than an earlier generation of American Studies scholars, who saw representations of nature as key to unlocking America’s distinctive identity. But scholars continue to paint the culture of nature as white and affluent. There is little attention to the fact that the United States was and is home to multiple, overlapping, and unequally privileged cultures of nature, some with their own rich visual culture (take a look for instance at the murals in San Diego’s Chicano Park). We get a glimpse of something larger in Dunaway’s fascinating accounts of Black Survival’s theatrical interventions at the first Earth Day, First People’s re-conquest of Alcatraz Island, and labor leaders’ involvement in Sun Day. But overall, marginalized communities (both here and abroad) are depicted as largely passive environmental victims. The book would be even stronger with greater attention to subaltern cultural production and a nod to the fact that alternative cultures of nature cannot be reduced to a mere reaction to the dominant green culture.

None of this should detract from Dunaway’s considerable achievement. This is a smart, highly readable book that will prompt...

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