Spreading awareness isn’t restricted to printed images, of course. Some of the most striking initiatives shown in the book utilize interactive visual components across a range of advanced media. The climate science gallery at London’s Science Museum developed a FarmVille-style game that allows visitors to manipulate the carbon cycle and watch the effects. To facilitate growing awareness of the impact we can each have on reducing carbon in the real world and incite action, the iPhone app ECOCHALLENGE makes a game out of encouraging its users to adopt more sustainable routines. It also imparts helpful tips with stylish infographics that are way more fun to study than the pie charts of yore. Such efforts at arousing participation would appear to depend on the widely-held notion that fostering engagement with environmental issues and drawing concrete linkages to the activities of daily life is a far more effective strategy than rattling off abstract ideas and remote statistics.

As the ad men on Madison Avenue have long known (together with the propagandists of business and government), the ability to change attitudes and common desires is a complicated art. In 1928, Edward Bernays, the famous manipulator of public opinion, observed that the “consistent, enduring effort” of propaganda was as powerful a tool as any and “virtually no important undertaking is now carried on without it.” Though these words sound downright Orwellian, expressed at a time before Orwellian was a word, they’re also quite practical.