The Ethos Behind the Modern Environmental Poster

The premise of the modern environmental poster is that polar ice caps are disappearing and will soon disappear altogether, only to be seen as ice cube souvenirs. The poster is meant to alarm, even annoy its audience with its morbid satiric assumption that polar ice caps are screwed. However, the poster is only effective if people give a crap about the polar ice caps. I personally have never seen a polar ice cap. A very valid response to the poster is, “Who cares?” But that’s not at typical response. Along with countless logical arguments of the importance of polar ice caps in regulating global temperatures and providing a unique habitat for various eco systems, there are powerful appeals to ethos that make people feel that they should and do care about the polar ice caps and the environment as a whole. I would like to point out two of the many ethical arguments for caring about the environment used in the polar ice cap degradation issue and thus related to the poster.

The first, very common argument is the “Save the animals” argument. Everyone has seen the picture of a polar bear desolate in the midst of a melting sheet of ice. It's already been posted in this blog, and it has been everywhere in social media. Again, I personally have never seen a polar bear and I probably would not want to encounter one unless I was far far away or in some type of protective cage. Most people are probably on the same boat. And yet, we love polar bears. We all have this implicit love for animals that manifests itself as a feeling of moral responsibility to do what we can to prevent the extinction of animals that most of us know little to nothing about and will never encounter. And so, in order to protect the polar bears, we  must prevent global warming so that the polar ice caps don’t melt so that the polar bears can frolic once more on solid, white ground.

The main argument of the modern environmental poster is the argument that we have a moral responsibility to preserve the environment for our children and their children and so on. This very common argument basically states that the environment has been around for billions of years and has been enjoyed by people for thousands upon thousands of generations before us. Basically, we don’t want to be the ones to mess everything up, when things have been going well for so long. Our ancestors left it intact before us, and we have a responsibility to do that same for our descendants. Again, I will say that I have never seen a polar ice cap, and I may very well never see one through the course of my life. But I still feel morally invested to give my children access to the possibility of enjoying polar ice caps should they want to. This is obviously an oversimplification of the argument for polar ice cap preservation, but it helps elucidate a part of why this poster would alarm its audience when implying that polar ice caps will soon become a memory only preserved in souvenirs and photographs.