Carbon Footprints as Cultural-Ecological Metaphors

<p>Through an examination of carbon footprint metaphors this books demonstrates the ways in which climate change and other ecological issues are culturally and materially constituted through metaphor.</p><p>The carbon footprint metaphor has achieved a ubiquitous presence in Anglo-North American public contexts since the turn of the millennium yet this metaphor remains under-examined as a crucial mediator of political responses to the urgent crisis of climate change. Existing books and articles on the carbon footprint typically treat this metaphor as a quantifying metric with little attention to the shifting mediations and practices of the carbon footprint as a metaphor. This gap echoes a wider gap in understanding metaphors as key figures in mediating more-than-human relations at a time when such relations profoundly matter. As a timely intervention this book addresses this gap by using insights from environmental humanities and political ecology to discuss carbon footprint metaphors in popular and public texts. </p><p>This book will be of great interest to researchers and students of environmental humanities political ecology environmental communication and metaphor studies.</p>