Jennifer Schell

Polluting and Perverting Nature: The Vengeful Animals of Frogs

Throughout the 1960s and the 1970s, the United States experienced numerous anthropogenic environmental catastrophes, which generated widespread fears about ecocide, apocalypse and extinction. In her highly influential book Silent Spring (1962), Rachel Carson warned that agriculturalists using synthetic pesticides such as DDT were spreading ‘elixirs of death’ across the country (p. 15). As she explained, these chemicals washed into riversheds and entered food chains, wreaking havoc on the reproductive capacities of various species of birds, including the bald eagle. With unsparing, blunt prose, she warned that this raptor, this prominent and powerful national symbol, was ‘on the verge of extinction’ (p. 118).

The Dangers of Driving the Dalton: The Paradoxical Industrial and Environmental Aesthetics of Ice Road Truckers

This essay argues that the third season of Ice Road Truckers employs a hyperbolic language of fear and death in order to endorse seemingly paradoxical industrial and environmental aesthetics The former makes use of a set of ideas about the technological sublime, while the latter makes use of certain theories about the natural sublime. Presenting viewers with a constant barrage of mechanical images and technical terms, IRT glorifies the development of the North Slopes oil fields, the building of the Haul Road, and the construction of the Trans-Alaskan Pipeline, all of which are cast as marvels of human engineering and examples of the technological sublime. Using the narration and its talk of death and destruction to evoke the natural sublime, Ice Road Truckers shows viewers spectacular aerial footage of the icy, snow-covered mountains of the Brooks Range and the bleak, wind-swept tundra of the North Slope. In the end, this television program effectively sutures these two seemingly irreconcilable versions of the sublime and presents viewers with a vision of the Alaskan wilderness in which the technological and the natural comfortably coexist. By doing so, IRT is able to endorse the industrial development of the Arctic and champion the wildness of nature.