Abstract

Visual representations of animals by environmental activist groups such as World Wildlife Fund help shape audiences’ perceptions of nature. These images participate in not only creating emotional and logical rhetorical appeals that spur viewers to action, but they also have potential to reify conceptions of nature. These conceptions foment what Plumwood has identified as a “logic of colonisation,” thus helping to fuel common Western tropes of humankind’s dominion over nature such as resourcism, conservationism, and scientism, which undergird material practices that are part of the environmental crisis (1993, p. 41). This discussion will use a visual rhetorical framework employed by Buchanan (2001) and Kress and Van Leeuwen (2005) to examine the ways in which environmental groups represent animals such as polar bears as dedicated and affectionate mothers. This positioning is a rhetorical strategy that, ecofeminists contend, creates discursive connections between women, nature, and others that can perpetuate logics of colonization. Through the example of the positioning of predators as mothers, this paper will demonstrate how the visual and discursive practices of environmental groups have potential to generate unintended consequences of perpetuating colonization rhetorics. The presenters will conclude with suggestions for repositioning imagistic representations of nature in an ecofeminist ethic.