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Ecological citizenship is presented as an example and inflection of post‐cosmopolitan citizenship. It is contrasted with environmental citizenship. The ecological footprint is presented as the ecological citizenship's version of political space, and global warming is used to exemplify the asymmetrical relations of globalising cause‐and‐effect that call forth post‐cosmopolitan obligations.

Fiscal incentives for encouraging sustainable behaviour are contrasted with citizenship approaches. The distinction between environmental and ecological citizenship and the notion of ‘post‐cosmopolitanism’ are introduced. The relationship between citizenship, democracy, and sustainability is discussed.

This chapter views Earth Day 1990 through three broad contextual lenses—the dramatic expansion of recycling and green consumerism; the media’s marginalization of the environmental justice movement; and the end of the Cold War—to understand how popular environmentalism intersected with the emotional life of capitalism. The chapter moves back and forth between The Earth Day Special, a star-studded TV program that ABC aired during primetime on the twentieth anniversary of Earth Day, and other media texts that stressed the personal and psychological dimensions of environmentalism. Indeed, what makes The Earth Day Special so telling as a cultural text is how it merged so seamlessly with the larger media extravaganza of that day. Across a wide variety of visual and cultural fields, spectators were repeatedly urged to seek both personal therapy and a sense of political empowerment through individual action. From the popular guidebooks listing what you could do to save the planet to the endorsement of green consumerism by Earth Day organizers, lifestyle decisions and the marketplace became the dominant sites of environmental activity. During this pivotal moment, mainstream depictions of the movement worked to enshrine neoliberal models of environmental citizenship.

The introduction begins with an overview of the book’s methods, sources, and argument. Rather than presenting pictures as mere illustrations, this book instead considers images as active rhetorical agents. Media images do not simply illustrate environmental politics, but also act as politics by naturalizing particular meanings of environmentalism. Following this discussion, the introduction outlines the book’s three major themes: the emotions and public life; the shifting meanings of environmental citizenship; and the limits of media representation. Often missing from other histories of environmentalism, these themes help illuminate the prospects and limits of mainstream images. The introduction also discusses some of the recurring motifs in popular environmental imagery: the focus on children as emblems of universal vulnerability; the emphasis on individual action and personal responsibility; and the neglect of power relations and structural inequities. Finally, the introduction explains the concept of slow violence and notes the representational challenges posed by the gradually-escalating problems of the environmental crisis.

This chapter considers the origins, meanings, and circulation of the most popular environmental quote to emerge during the period surrounding Earth Day 1970: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” Created by the cartoonist Walt Kelly and featured in a poster and his Pogo comic strip, the statement tapped into an important strand of U.S. environmentalism—the emphasis placed upon individual action. At the very moment that the state expanded its role to protect the citizenry from environmental danger, Pogo and other media texts imagined politics in an individualist frame by stressing the personal dimensions of environmental citizenship. Pogo helped popularize environmental guilt, making this emotion central to mainstream framings of the environmental cause. While gas masks conveyed the idea of universal vulnerability, Pogo evoked the notion of universal responsibility, a perspective that ignored the systemic causes of the environmental crisis and constrained the meanings of environmental citizenship.

This chapter examines how Japanese literature grapples with environmental pollution by focusing on two texts: Ishimure Michiko's 1969 novel Kugai jōdo: Waga Minamatabyō (Sea of suffering and the Pure Land: Our Minamata disease) and the anthology Genbakushi 181 ninshū, 1945–2007 nen (Atomic bomb poetry: Collection of 181 people, 1945–2007, 2007), edited by Nagatsu Kōzaburō, Suzuki Hisao, and Yamamoto Toshio. Sea of Suffering deals with the Minamata disease and explores some of the paradoxes of negotiating nonhuman suffering amid human anguish, whereas Atomic Bomb Poetry tells the story of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and probes the ambiguity of negotiating nonhuman regeneration amid human suffering. The two works' many references to global human and nonhuman affliction advocate what Ursula Heise has identified as eco-cosmopolitanism, or “environmental world citizenship.” They also depict people as both determined polluters and haplessly polluted, harmed, and even killed by damaged environments.

This chapter casts conscientiousness as a virtue that is concerned with monitoring one’s impacts upon the world, from attending to and seeking to minimize the embedded carbon or virtual water in consumption activities to the awareness of and concern for one’s relationships with others that share our physical environment. In this respect, to be conscientious is to seek to minimize negative impacts on the environment but also to work positively to ensure that environmental quality is maintained and accessible, and to practice a form of citizenship in working with others to do the same. It is a virtue that, as Aldo Leopold noticed, is threatened by technologies and physical distance that separate modern humans from the land and its productive capacities, but may be enhanced by disclosure and transparency efforts that are assisted by information technology, which can increase cognitive awareness of our dependence and impacts upon our environment.