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Can a poster save the burning planet? Amid the polemics, politics, and the deluge of climate change data, can a remarkable piece of visual art break through the noise and inspire action?

An illuminating exhibition at New York City’s Poster House offers a nuanced, if inconclusive, exploration about the utility (or futility) of printed propaganda in tackling the worsening environmental crisis. “Every poster in this exhibition is a failure—not in the sense that they failed in their graphic intent of communicating a message, but rather that they failed to successfully modify behavior,” writes curator Tim Medland to introduce We Tried to Warn You! Environmental Crisis Posters, 1970–2020 (on view until Feb. 25, 2024). “Nevertheless, these impactful images have shaped the bounds of public debate on environmental issues, drawing attention to distinct and particular concerns.”

A graphic history of activism

Curiously, the most influential “climate poster” in history isn’t a poster at all, but a photograph. Taken aboard Apollo 8 by NASA astronaut Bill Anders in 1968, the first color image of Earth showed the fragility and a beautiful blue planet in deep space. “Earthrise,” as the photo is known, sparked environmental movements and became a recurring motif in environmental posters, including two in the exhibition: Milton Glaser’s “Give Earth A Chance” (1970) Environmental Action Coalition and Gunter Rambow’s “All the Earth Speaks Up” (1983) created for Germany’s Green Party. (NASA has since released several versions of “Earthrise” over the years.)

Before we glimpsed a snapshot of our profound interconnectedness, conservation efforts were localized; tactical rather than existential. Prior to 1968, posters about the natural world took the form of travel vignettes, such as M. Pallandre’s romanticized 1890s rendering of the thermal baths of the Pyrenees, or charming silk screened preserve-our-forest appeals created during the US Works Progress Administration in the 1930s. And in the 1940s and 1950s, the U.S. Forest Service disseminated many posters featuring Smokey Bear, America’s most enduring wildfire prevention poster child, a bear. 

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