ABSTRACT
The image is central to how we come to know the environmental. How we learn to read—and write—the image is as important to environmental education/environmental studies as is any other form of content delivery (and some might argue more important than in contemporary hyper-circulatory, digital communications systems). Since the emergence of environmental movements of the 1960s and the work of environmental studies to examine complex relationships between humans and “the environment,” the image has played a central role in how we have analyzed such relationships and how we have provided evidence about those relationships. This contribution takes up the visual facet of environmental rhetoric and how engagement with images—environmental or otherwise—requires understanding the image not as inherently authentic or accurate in its portrayal, but as always already encumbered in the politics and rhetorics of representation.
