Visual images and the rhetoric of environmental advocacy

This analysis investigates the visually-oriented staged acts of protest employed by the environmental organization Greenpeace in their international campaigning to stop climate change. This research supports the notion that these demonstrations draw attention to climate change while having the rhetorical capacity to challenge dominant cultural values that have enabled climate changing human activities to continue despite an increasing frequency of natural and manmade disasters. This critical textual analysis focuses on eight images taken from four separate Greenpeace climate change campaigns from 2007 to the present. These images were selected because they are reproduced by multiple news agencies, are the most visually striking, and most clearly challenge dominant discourses of industrialism, nature, and progress. The image sets were analyzed using Kevin DeLuca\u27s image event, a theory which posits that some visual demonstrations are designed to attract mass media attention in order to advocate a larger audience. Kenneth Burke\u27s paired concepts of identification and disidentification were also used to describe the power of images to reveal hegemonic value systems, separate their audience from these systems, and highlight alternative perspectives. After examining all of the selected photographs, conclusions indicated that Greenpeace does construct their demonstrations to attract media attention. They also rely on their visual rhetoric to have persuasive capabilities that exceed the group\u27s ability to influence public and political spheres using more traditional advocacy methods. It was also found that appealing to human interest is a warrant used by Greenpeace to champion climate change response in addition to revealing the limit of a discourse, the logic of which DeLuca solely accounts for this persuasive effect. The expansion of the electronic public-sphere and values of industrialism suggest that the rhetorical capabilities of image events to give ideological critique and reshape public consciousness function in other Westernized countries and perhaps with greater effect