SEEING GREEN: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images. By Finis Dunaway. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 2015.Historians of environmentalism have often overlooked visual culture, focusing instead on policy and grassroots politics. But, as Finis Dunaway shows in this excellent book, scholars interested in environmentalism ignore the role of green imagery (photography, documentaries, Hollywood movies, cartoons, television news broadcasts, and other media representations) at considerable peril. Environmental visual culture, he argues, did not simply reflect the environmental crises of the last fifty years, but also subtly and powerfully shaped and delimited environmental politics.Dunaway starts by reminding us of the importance of images in early- and midtwentieth-century American conservation (the subject of his superb first book) and introducing us to the outsized role that visual culture played in the environmental politics of the 1960s. The rest of the book is divided into three sections. Section one looks at the early 1970s and representations of the Santa Barbara oil spill, Earth Day, anti-littering imagery (including the infamous crying Indian advertisement), and the recycling logo. Section two brings us into the mid and late 1970s and the circulation of imagery related to energy: Associated Press photos of cars lined up at gas stations, Ad Council spots blasting fuelishness, the Hollywood blockbuster The China Syndrome, ominous visual representations of the Three Mile Island cooling towers, and efforts by President Carter to frame the energy crisis on television. The last section brings us up to the 1980s and beyond, and analyzes media representations of toxic contamination, the New York garbage barge, the Alar scare, the Exxon Valdez disaster, and Earth Day 1990. Dunaway also offers us a novel reading of Al Gore's documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.Dunaway argues that during the last half century, mainstream environmental imagery has done significant ideological work. The dominant visual culture painted all Americans (typically represented by white children and their mothers) as universally vulnerable and in so doing obscured the fact that some communities were far more exposed to environmental hazards than others. The reigning green iconography tended to absolve the state and corporations of environmental responsibility and placed blame at the doorstep of consumers, who were told that they could save the environment by buying, conserving, and recycling. …