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DALE D. GOBLE, PAUL HIRT, AND SUSAN J. KILGORE ON ENVIRONMENTAL CARTOONS

A political cartoon is worth looking at because it is enjoyable to stick pins into fools and villains or to watch others doing it.1 Charles Press
POLITICAL CARTOONS OFFER an exaggerated, slanted, no-holds-barred form of social criticism. Through the often wicked use of humor—be it irony, hyperbole, farce, or blackest absurdity— good political cartoons can provide flashes of insight. Like bursts of lightning, a good cartoonist freezes and illuminates political moments and personalities, and in doing so reveals their essence.	1
Cartoon animals serve particularly well as markers of political change. Animals always have occupied a special place in human imagination, and as images they become embodiments of nature that easily absorb human characteristics. Cartoonists have populated their drawings with the American eagle, the British lion, and a host of now-unfamiliar animal symbols since the earliest American political cartoons, the broadsides of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.2	2
In the post-Civil War period, however, wild animals came to occupy a new role: No longer representations of nations or politicians, they were used to address the political and cultural contests at the heart of conservation. The first of the nine images that follow is the earliest example of this new role that we have found. It is an 1874 cartoon from Thomas Nast entitled "The Last Buffalo."3 As historical artifacts, cartoons frequently focus complex moral, political, and social connections into a simple image that dramatically reveals a defining moment in the evolution of a political issue. Together these nine cartoons tell a tale of growing scientific and moral complexity. As our understanding of the world developed from natural history through specialized sciences like biology to integrated sciences like ecology, the world has been revealed to be complexly interrelated. This ex-panding understanding of our species' place in the universe complicated our ethical relationship to the rest of creation/nature/ecosystem.	3
Thomas Nast, Harper's Weekly, June 6, 1874. "Don't shoot, my good fellow! Here, take my 'robe,' save your ammunition, and let me go in peace."
The dark, gritty drawings that Thomas Nast published in Harper's Weekly in the 1870s and 1880s graphically captured the corruption of Boss Tweed and the robber barons of the Gilded Age. Although political corruption was his most common topic, Nast did produce at least one cartoon on an environmental theme. In 1874, he drew "the last buffalo" just as hide hunters began their rush to the Great Plains that resulted in near-extermination of the most abundant large mammal in North America. Nast's message is pointed: the unrestrained harvest would produce tragedy.4	. . .