Regarding fires: Some keys to think the visuality of environmental issues in the contemporary world

Abstract

Fires are not something new in natural and human history, y et the burning of Amazonian forest in August 2019 became a global public issue in the agenda of media, social media, and websites. At a local scale, fires occurred in Parana´s Delta in 2022 also got into the agenda of national media. The quantity, extension and intensity of fires as well as their temporal concentration has been visually displayed with apocalyptic images. Aerial photographs, satellite images and maps, usually considered as scientific images, were widely used to introduce the extension of burnings to audiences far away from the affected regions. People, even if they do not inhabit those regions or they have not visit those areas, was able to identify those territories and the environmental problem through the satellite images used. By looking at the images displayed by the media, we propose to analyze different visualities of environmental issues and some of its implications in the construction of an environmental agenda.