ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the images and ways of seeing induced in the opening paragraph of Our Common Future (1987) and how these are called upon and put to work within the politics of sustainability. The three images discussed are: ‘a small and fragile ball dominated not by human activity and edifice but by a pattern of clouds, oceans, greenery, and soils’, ‘the Copernican revolution of the 16th century’ and ‘the human self-image’. With the help of the image theory of W.J.T. Mitchell, these images are established and understood on a continuum, through which images as graphical, optical, perceptual, mental, and verbal work together to invoke meaning and knowledge. Furthermore, seeing the images as working, rather than as ‘immutable mobiles’, allows for the descrying of the versatile and disparate differences the images make, through their material, technical, visual, and semantic dimensions. Finally, through the notion of ‘picture as paradigm’, the article discusses why the images in question did not have a stronger and more lasting effect on us, even though as claimed in the quote, that ‘[h]istorians may eventually find that this vision had a greater impact on thought than did the Copernican revolution of the 16th century’.
