Constituting the Future

As I was preparing for class I was thinking about how to check in with students to determine whether they really understood the difference between the "constitutive" and "pragmatic" functions of Environmental Communication...

As a form of fun reinforcement and to see whether students really got it and remembered, I decided to Google images of "dystopia" and "utopia."  Since constitutive applications of EC "invite us to view the world this way rather than that way" (Cox, Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere; p. 21), I reasoned that a comparison of such invitations might be in order.  I decided to compare visions of the future to see what I could see...

These images from the "Sacred Text Archive" offer a great comparison of contrasting consitutive visions of the future. 

< Dystopic Invitation   The dystopian vision conjures a burning city spewing smoke.  Toxic green waters lap the barren and apparently charred lake or sea shore.  Nothing grows on the mountain in the distance.  No life is evident at all, except through the indirect indicators of fire from smokestacks and the buildings themselves.

Utopic Invitation > Blue skies, green hills, azure water.  Life as it should be, right?  The invitation to see future life as an apparently successful balance of natural and human reassures us of a possible future rich with robust natural and human business.

The invitation to see one way or the other might offer a pragmatic invitation as well.  Maybe we prefer one version to the other.  If so, maybe we're willing to work for it.  Maybe?