ABSTRACT
In 2009, the conservation organizations Birdlife International and Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) partnered to produce a digital text called the Atlas of the Patagonian Sea: Species and Spaces. The Atlas was created to aid in policy decisions related to fisheries management and the designation of transportation routes within the Patagonian Sea, which ranges from southern Brazil to southern Chile, and is increasingly threatened by development and overfishing. Significantly, the Atlas is also the first-ever such work created largely by tracking the movements of seabirds, marine mammals, and sea turtles in the area. These marine species were outfitted with remote tracking devices for a ten-year period, and the resulting satellite data was then used to compile the Atlas. In this chapter, I analyze the Atlas and, in doing so, advocate for an approach to environmental rhetoric that is located at the intersections of animal studies, 1 critical cartography, 2 and what I call visual-material rhetorics, an approach to visual rhetoric attuned not only to the persuasive components of visual artifacts but also to the ways in which considerations of space, bodies, and materiality specifically influence the rhetorical analysis of the visual (Propen). I explore the intersections of these fields by considering how cartographic practice, when understood as a rhetorical knowledge-making endeavor, can help advocate for nonhuman animal bodies residing in the spaces represented through the map. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s theory of heterotopias and Carole Blair’s theory of material rhetoric, I first situate rhetorical objects as not merely textual but also as visual and material—as spatial. I then analyze the Atlas to show how, as an object of visual-material rhetoric, it advocates for species conservation and, in the process, illuminates questions about the use and value of the nonhuman animals who both contributed to the Atlas’s creation and are represented through it.
