Carbon Footprints as Cultural-Ecological Metaphors

Anita Girvan is a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Global Studies and teaches in the School of Environmental Studies at the University of Victoria in Canada.

• List of figuresAcknowledgmentsIntroduction – How Big is Yours?PART I Cultural-Material Resonances of ‘Carbon’ and ‘Footprint’ and the Emergence of a new Compound Metaphor Mise-en-Scene: Metaphor, Affect, Politics, EcologyPART II – A Tale of Three Footprints Carbon Subjectivity Carbon Citizenship Carbon VitalityCONCLUSION - Fostering Critical Eco-Aesthetic Literacies

"Few ecological tropes have achieved as much cultural currency as the carbon footprint. Girvan undertakes to explain why as she traces carbon footprint metaphors through a series of case studies captivatingly posed as "tales". This book does crucial work recalling that footprints are metaphors with profound material and political stakes. As Girvan shows, struggles over the power of metaphor will help determine the ecological futures of humans and non-humans in a time of global climate change." — Nicole Shukin, author of Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times, and Associate Professor of English, the University of Victoria"There is an urgent need to review the economy of metaphor in this time of heightened climatic and ecological instability, particularly as we seek to better attune to cultural and material meanings for they consequentially shape nuanced approaches to climate change. The carbon footprint and its affective mediation is innovatively linked to the behaviour of carbon subjects and the geopolitics of energy development in this study’s unique contribution to a newly climatic understanding of the materiality of cultural inscription." — Tom Bristow, Department of English Studies, Durham University