Mind Over Matter: Social Justice, The Body, and Environmental History

Abstract

In 1983 the New York artist Barbara Kruger released a photomontage showing the face of a female model, resting on a grassy background, with her eyes closed and covered by two leaves. Kruger completed the piece by adding the statement, "We won't play nature to your culture." In many ways, this image marked a turning point in America's popular and intellectual response to the issue of the environment. Twenty-one years earlier, in 1962, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring had launched a new era in the environmentalist movement, prompting many Americans to begin associating their own physical health with that of the environment. But whereas the publication of Silent Spring and the establishment of Earth Day in 1970 contributed to a far-reaching shift in the ways both scholars and laypersons thought about the practical implications of humanity's physical engagement with nature, Kruger's statement represented yet another approach to considering this relationship.