Introduction

In the following chapters, I elaborate my analysis of carbon footprint metaphors through three instances of carbon footprint metaphors found within recent texts that have popular or public currency (including books, websites, and news articles). This analysis clearly does not comprise a comprehensive corpus of these metaphors, but rather features case studies of three different forms of usage of carbon footprint metaphors that each offer key insights. There are compelling reasons for focusing on the three aspects or cases of the metaphor that I highlight in the three central chapters. In focusing on carbon subjectivity in Chapter 3, I am drawing attention to the way that this metaphor shapes individuals as the locus of climate change interventions; in focusing on carbon citizenship in Chapter 4, I am foregrounding the way the metaphor shapes wider geo-political (but still particularly human) connections as the scale of action; and, in focusing on carbon vitality in Chapter 5, I am drawing attention to the instances in which carbon footprints make clear manifold connections between humans and non-humans as key to the politics of climate change. Each of these case studies could be thought of as a different story of carbon footprints that has a kind of internal coherence of its own, and a discreet theoretical support of their elaboration. When combined in a series, however, each productively troubles a singular reading of the carbon footprint.  ² An implicit chronology accompanies the analysis since each of the chapters describes a case or cases of carbon footprint metaphors that are roughly two years apart, beginning in 2008 and ending in 2012. These three have been chosen from an extensive collection because, each in turn, demonstrates how the metaphor shifts over time and in different contexts such that new associations and practices are potentially brought into view.