Ecoporn's Influence on Culture

Welling’s article on issues concerning ecoporn struck me as a rather interesting.  Unlike other theorists that we have read, Bart H. Welling took special care to help ensure that his audience understood what they were reading so that they could put his text into conversation with other related texts.  Welling specifically provides a myriad of definitions to explain words that his audience would most likely find confusing.  This explanation of writing is what theorist Walter Ong would refer to as audience construction.  In other words, Welling set out to write his piece knowing what audience he was writing for thus helping him to know which words or concepts needed further explanation.

“If the writer succeeds in writing, it is generally because he can fictionalize in his imagination an audience he has learned to know not daily life but from earlier writers who were fictional lysing in their imagination audiences they had learned to know in still earlier writers, and so on back to the dawn of written narrative.”  (Ong 11).  It is important that the concept of ecopornography was examined with a great level of detail due to its youth.  The term ecoporn has not been around for very long and the power of the word is just now being understood.

Ecopornography, according to Welling is the over sexualization of nature.  This occurs when nature is taken out of context and is forced to interact with or is manipulated by humans.  Examples of ecoporn can be found everywhere, some examples that are commonly known are Discovery Channel’s shark week, PETA commercials or even license plates with animal’s photos on them.  The purpose of the use of ecoporn is to exploit nature for the well being of humans.  Those exploiting the use of animals in such ways claim that ecoporn is doing nothing to harm the animals in any way, ironically their work is doing just the opposite.  By exploiting these animals ecoporn exploiters are desensitizing the public eye training common people to underestimate the damage that is being done to the animals natural way of living.  “it would seem that ecoporn blinds its producers as well as its consumer to the cost of visual eyes a nature of what, and where, man is not”  (Ong 60).

This exploitation goes further than simply putting animals on T.V. for cable subscribers to drool over, ecoporn has found its way into our schools.  Welling includes in his writing examples of how the distortion of how our youth views nature has a profound impact on how we treat the animals in the real world.  By exploiting nature for the purpose of educating out children we are presenting them with a false impressions of how the natural world is truly interacting with the animal kingdom. Welling specifically discusses the corruption and irony surrounding the florida panther, a rare and majestic creature that through license plate donations has gained popularity resulting in the exploitation of this majestic animal.  It excites me to see that a term like ecoporn is being discussed, with continual use of these terms we can bring ecoporn into the public sphere for additional discussion.