Mobilizing Artists: Green Patriot Posters, Visual Metaphors, and Climate Change Activism

Abstract

This essay examines the Canary Project's Green Patriot Posters campaign as activist art that collectively comments on the cultural coherence of our current relations to the environment, particularly in terms of global warming, sustainability, and the concept of linear economic growth. Aspiring to bring together artists under the eco-activist umbrella, the Canary Project relies on an old WWII-inspired frame with a narrow premise of that period's conservation efforts. Within this framework, a range of visual designs question, subvert, and promote continued economic growth and an ontology that “more” equals “better.” An analysis of the up–down orientational metaphors underscores a typology of these valuations and reveals one way to assess implications of such artistic efforts. That is, artistic expressions adapt and play with the contingent nature of metaphors, offering elaborations, extensions, and alternatives on basic structural elements and, hence, remark on how we orient ourselves and productively imagine being of/in the world anew.

Keywords:

• Visual rhetoric
• Environmental communication
• Art activism
• Metaphors
• Articulation
• Progress

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Danielle Endres for guidance throughout the project, as well as Laura Lindenfeld, the issue editors, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback.

Notes

1. The two images widely disseminated are the remains of an uplifted truck and horse, tossed into trees by the hurricane.

2. Rogers (2008) makes a similar point, noting Friedman's essay as exemplary of the masculinized rhetoric in current environmental discourses. The Green Patriot Posters book is an attempt at recontextualizing the essay, retracing its masculinized rhetoric for further dissemination. In this textual strand, the essay's function is to popularize muscular environmentalism. Also see Singer (2010) on Friedman's “Code Green” rhetoric as a neoliberal call to “green” American capitalism.

3. Benford and Hunt (1992) note how images of clenched fists directly contradict central themes of the peace activists who reject such imagery. “Sustain” indeed acts as an example of clenched, tense, armed “strength,” a ready-to-fight metaphor stemming from its WWII influence. But, in addition, the appropriation opens up an idea of “up” as rising from roots in the ground, and it is those roots, like the carrot, that are valuable, enriching, and life-sustaining. See Rogers (2008) for how the carrot can also represent effeminacy in discourses recovering hegemonic masculinity.

4. See Jensen (forthcoming), for a critique of bicycle transport: foregrounding automobility, or autonomous motion, sublimating the valuation of public transport, and reinforcing social rationalities around mobility, producing (and controlling) mobile subjects. Also see Furness (2010) for the history of bicycles as paving the way for the automobile subject and, hence, positioned as both car culture's antagonist and its ontological and ideological origin.

5. Madison (2010) describes this Marxist position well and reminds us that, while important to consider art's production – to see whether it addresses contemporary tensions – it is the relationship with an audience that reveals its force:

A radical act is a confrontation with the ‘root’ of a problem. It is to reach for causes of an issue and not simply respond to its symptoms. It is a showdown with limitations to embrace necessary excess and to disturb a state of affairs in pursuit of confronting those root causes … How radical performances become radical is certainly a matter of who asks and who answers the question[, Is this radical?]. (p. 18, emphasis in original)

6. Such discourses include nuclear promotion, with policy decisions predicated on the need for meeting energy needs and mitigating climate change (Doyle, 2011), masking the inefficiencies in subsidizing nuclear (over wind, for instance) and the disasters like those in Japan (Makhijani, 2007, foreshadowing the March 2011 catastrophe).

7. One suggestion would be to question the distinction between the source and target domain. Lakoff and Johnson (1999) explain “conflation” as how children muddy this distinction, where in adulthood, metaphors reconnect otherwise distinctive sensorimotor and subjective experiences. However, it is possible that such correlations are quite organic, and it is the material experiences of a nature–culture split that separate humans from the earth, a socialized manifestation that needlessly separate our sensorial, bodily experiences from the world we are embedded within (see Abram, 2010).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Brian Cozen

Brian Cozen is a doctoral student in the Department of Communication at the University of Utah