Images and imagination in 20th-century environmentalism: from the Sierras to the Poles

Recent claims that the environmentalist thinking and politics that dominated the last years of the past century were based on outmoded, ‘Modernist’ categories jibe with academic criticism of dualistic thinking about ‘culture’ and ‘nature’, and with attempts to acknowledge the roles of nonhuman agency in the coconstruction of social worlds. While acknowledging the salience of these arguments, the author claims that examination of pictorial images that have shaped and promoted modern environmentalism complicate them. Pictorial images are less prone to dualistic interpretation than scientific and theoretical argument, and the affective responses they generate are complex. An examination of iconic images of key 20th-century environmental crises—wilderness preservation, soil erosion, urban sprawl, nuclear testing, and global environmental change—reveals both continuities in image making and presentation, and the evolving roles of physical nature itself in shaping their composition and meanings. Globalization of environmental concerns and images has shifted nature’s icons from landscape towards living species, and from a temperate to a tropical and polar geography.