'You Belong Outside': Advertising, Nature, and the SUV

Gunster, Shane.

Ethics & the Environment, Volume 9, Number 2, Fall/Winter 2004,

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Published by Indiana University Press

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 ‘YOU BELONG OUTSIDE’
ADVERTISING, NATURE, AND THE SUV

SHANE GUNSTER

And which driver is not tempted, merely by the power of his engine, to
wipe out the vermin of the street, pedestrians, children and cyclists?
—Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia

Images of nature are among the most common signifiers of utopia in com-
mercial discourse, tirelessly making the case that a certain commodity or
brand will enable an escape from the malaise and drudgery of urban exist-
ence. The invocation of natural themes has been especially prominent in
the marketing and promotion of sport utility vehicles over the past decade.
Speeding through deserts and jungles, fording raging rivers, and even scal-
ing the heights of Mt. Everest, the SUV is routinely depicted in the most
spectacular and remote natural locations. These fanciful themes now at-
tract the scorn of many who draw upon them to underscore the rather
glaring contradictions between how these vehicles are marketed and how
they are actually used: the irony of using pristine images of a hyper-pure
nature to motivate the use of a product that consumes excessive amounts
of natural resources and emits high levels of pollutants lies at the core of
the growing public backlash against the SUV. While generally sympathetic
to this critical perspective, I argue that we need to think through the role
of nature in constructing the promotional field of these vehicles in a more

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ENVIRONMENT,
rigorous fashion than is often the case. Otherwise, we risk failing to fully
understand the complexity of the SUV’s appeal; even worse, simplistic criti-
cism can have the perverse effect of reinforcing the ideological conceptions
of nature that constitute a cornerstone of that appeal. Through an exami-
nation of recent print and television advertising campaigns, I develop an
alternative account of the significance of natural imagery based upon the
dialectical relation between nature and society that dominates the SUV’s
promotional field.1 Instead of reifying the conceptual distance that divides
these two categories, we must look to how they flow into and define each
other, often blending together into a dense cluster of associations in which
the images of one connote and invoke ideas of the other.

WELCOME TO THE (NOT SO) GREAT OUTDOORS:

THE MANY FACES OF NATURE
Since the emergence of the automobile as a commodity in the early
twentieth century, natural themes and imagery have been used to attach a
utopian flavor to movement through space. From the 1920s onward, car
advertising has often invoked the fantasy of leaving behind the constraints
of a crowded, mundane, and polluted urban environment for the wide
open spaces offered by nature. In words that have guided advertisers (and
urban planners) ever since, Henry Ford once quipped, “we shall solve the
city problem by leaving the city.”2 Charting the evolution of automotive
promotional discourse, Andrew Wernick argues that the reliance upon
natural imagery intensified in the 1970s and 1980s as people grew disen-
chanted with technology (and its militaristic overtones) and expressed con-
cerns over growing traffic congestion, energy consumption, and road
construction. Among the easiest tactics for advertisers wishing to deflect
the negative associations invoked by the car was, and remains, an image-
based rearticulation of cars with nature.3 Invoking nature as the endpoint
of vehicular travel affirms one of automobility’s most precious and fiercely
guarded illusions, namely, that spatial mobility offers access to places, ex-
periences, and events that are fundamentally different from everyday life,
that one can escape to somewhere other than where one is now. Further-
more, as Martin Green explains, the use of nature to frame flight to the
countryside summons up a powerful nostalgia for the simpler times and
lives connoted by idealized scenes of rural life.4
Nevertheless, SUV marketing takes the appropriation of natural themes
and imagery to new ‘heights,’ with epic campaigns that place vehicles atop

SHANE GUNSTER ‘YOU BELONG OUTSIDE’ 5

 mountain peaks, in the midst of dense forests, or racing across vast deserts.
Leading the way in this appropriation of nature has been the Ford Motor
Company. Although its market share has suffered recently, Ford spear-
headed the promotion of the SUV in the 1990s with the Explorer which
quickly became the best selling family vehicle of the decade, producing
immense corporate profits. Guided by consumer research that showed
people wanted vehicles that made them appear bold, adventurous, and care-
free, Ford successfully positioned the SUV as an embodiment of the tradi-
tional ‘frontier’ fantasy of leaving the city for the authenticity, purity, and
freedom of the great outdoors.5 “Looking to get away from it all? Escape
the pressures of urban living?” asks one of the vehicle’s first ads. “In a new
4-door Explorer, there’s no such thing as city limits.”6 Eight years later,
virtually identical copy captions an image of a couple swimming together
in a deserted lake at sunset: “With every splash, you can feel the city wash-
ing off you.”7 In October 1999, Ford systematized this articulation of the
SUV with nature in a sweeping new campaign entitled ‘No Boundaries.’
Drawing upon a wide range of promotional strategies, it used outdoor
images, locations, and activities to reach customers whom the company
claims “have a spirit of rugged adventure.”8 Print ads, for example, showed
people engaged in wilderness activities such as hiking, kayaking, or rock-
climbing, an SUV parked nearby on a beach, rocky plateau, or forest grove.
In one sequence, geographic coordinates are used to entice readers to visit
Ford’s website to discover the identity of these pristine locations.
When the No Boundaries theme was expanded to cover all Ford ve-
hicles in March 2001, a television spot entitled ‘Discovery’ featured Will-
iam Ford Jr. reminiscing about how his grandfather invented the SUV by
taking Model Ts cross country on camping trips with various U.S. presi-
dents. As Ford speaks about his own great love of nature, images of off-
road driving are intercut with scenes of people riding mountain bikes,
snowboarding, white-water rafting, fly-fishing, and so on.9 Concordant
with a world of ‘converged’ marketing, Ford has drawn upon a variety of
initiatives in addition to advertising to position its SUVs as ideal comple-
ments to an outdoors lifestyle. At the onset of the campaign, for example,
Ford provided dealers with camping equipment to reframe them as ‘Out-
fitters’ helping consumers prepare for wilderness adventure: one dealer
even planted trees and built a river with live fish inside the showroom.10 A
travelling consumer fair entitled the ‘No Boundaries Experience’ has vis-
ited several U.S. cities, setting up off-road courses for prospective buyers

6 ETHICS & THE ENVIRONMENT, 9(2) 2004

and even offering children the opportunity to drive miniaturized fully
motorized SUVs.11 No Boundaries magazine was launched in September
2001 as a way to “spark emotion and encourage readers to explore the
natural world [by featuring] seasonal editorial coverage of outdoor-adven-
ture activities, gear and travel.”12 In the spring of 2002, Ford co-produced
the ‘No Boundaries’ reality-tv show in which contestants engaged in a
wilderness trek from Vancouver Island to the Arctic Circle. The company
regularly sponsors outdoor festivals, events, and competitions, including a
May 2002 attempt by an all-woman team to climb Mt. Everest. Ten months
later, Ford premiered its latest SUV model—the Everest—at an auto show
in Thailand.
The No Boundaries campaign may represent the best organized and
most extensive effort to unite nature and the SUV, but every automaker
has embraced similar themes at one point or another. Nature appears as a
benign, forgiving refuge from the everyday, a place in which people can
immerse themselves in soothing contemplation of the mysterious beauty
of the wild. Ads wax poetically about the quiet virtues of isolation in con-
trast to the crowded, noisy streets of the city. “I never found the compan-
ion so companionable as solitude,” notes a Chevrolet Blazer ad, approvingly
quoting the words of Henry David Thoreau.13 Appearing in magazines
such as Wired, Barron’s, Business Week, and Cigar Afficonado, a 2001
campaign showcased the H1 Hummer nestled unobtrusively in sparse yet
spectacular landscapes.14 “How did my soul get way out here?” asks one
ad, noting with Zen-like humility that “Sometimes you find yourself in the
middle of nowhere. And sometimes in the middle of nowhere you find
yourself.”15 More often than not, the landscape remains untouched as the
SUV slips through, blending into the natural environment. “Road maps?
Who the heck needs road maps?” boasts a Nissan Pathfinder ad.16 Or even
roads for that matter. “These vehicles occupy the wilderness in the same
ways animals do,” points out media scholar Robin Andersen; “within the
depiction they attain the status of a biological phenomenon. No longer
machine or the product of human endeavour, they become a natural part
of the ecosystem.”17 In a breathtaking act of myth-making, the social and
physical infrastructure required to support mass automobility, as well as
the broader ecological consequences that accompany the mass consump-
tion of these vehicles, are magically erased. Instead, the SUV is offered as a
technology for the redemption of nature, a lens through which we might
glimpse its secret aesthetics and truly experience and appreciate its sub-

SHANE GUNSTER ‘YOU BELONG OUTSIDE’ 7

 lime majesty. Urban (and suburban) space implicitly figures as a bland
dystopia from which we all ‘naturally’ wish to escape into the rugged pu-
rity of the wild.
The promotional juggernaut behind SUVs has become literally ines-
capable in contemporary media. Automakers and their dealers spent $9
billion advertising SUVs between 1990 and 2001.18 Between January and
November 2002, media spending on the top ten models alone was well
over $500 million.19 The ubiquity of SUV ads shadows the tremendous
market success of SUVs themselves, joining personal computers, cellular
phones, and mutual funds as the most explosive new consumer commodi-
ties of the last decade. As a share of all new vehicle sales in the United
States, SUVs have risen steadily from 1.8 per cent in 1980 to more than 25
per cent in 2002, producing a remarkable transformation of the contem-
porary automotive landscape.20 The North American auto industry relied
heavily on SUV sales in its return to profitability in the 1990s: low cost of
design and production, the absence of competition from foreign automak-
ers, and high consumer demand positioned the SUV as an ideal commod-
ity. Although increased competition and supply has gradually lowered net
unit earnings, automakers continue to generate profits of 15–20 per cent
on an SUV compared to 3 per cent or less on a car.21 Attracted by this rate
of profit, Japanese and European firms have flooded into the SUV market
in recent years: between 1995 and 2002, the total number of models has
almost tripled from 28 to 75.22 In particular, the SUV has quickly come to
dominate the luxury vehicle market: the highly successful entry of expen-
sive ‘crossover’ models such as the Porsche Cayenne, Volkswagen Touareg,
and the Infiniti FX45—built upon car rather than truck frames—has made
luxury SUVs the fastest growing vehicle category in an otherwise sluggish
automotive market.23 Given the high profits at stake, automakers have a
powerful incentive to increase (and defend) the profile of their brands within
a crowded field of choices. It is a classic case of what advertising critics
Robert Goldman and Stephen Papson have suggestively called ‘sign wars’;24
and the principal semiotic territory over which this battle is fought is nature.
War, in fact, is an especially fertile metaphor through which to con-
sider the evolving promotional field around the SUV. In the last decade,
more and more advertising has forsaken Arcadian visions of natural bliss
in order to foreground the SUV’s power to confront the dangers of an
untamed wilderness. Leaving aside for a moment the explicit militariza-
tion championed by vehicles such as the Hummer, violence has become

8 ETHICS & THE ENVIRONMENT, 9(2) 2004

one of the preeminent strategies through which brands distinguish them-
selves from the competition. Occasionally this appears directly. Mimick-
ing the puerile confrontational style more at home in pickup advertising, a
2002 Chevrolet Trailblazer ad proclaims: “Our 270 horsepower engine
can beat up your . . . wait, you don’t have a 270 horsepower engine.”25 A
similar DaimlerChrysler ad asks “Why drive some pathetic excuse for an
SUV when you can wrap your hands around Dodge Durango?” bragging
that “this baby carries around chunks of those wimpy wanna-be [SUVs] in
its tail pipe.”26 More common, though, is the celebration of the SUV’s
virtues via its engagement with a wilderness that appears frightening and
dangerous, an uncompromising and hostile place that can only be mas-
tered by sufficiently aggressive technology. The comparative merits of one
model over another are dramatized by the speed and ferocity with which
nature can be subdued. The executive vice-president of PentaMark, Jeep’s
advertising firm, puts it this way: “No matter what nature throws at you
unexpectedly, you’re still protected. It takes care of you. Once you’re in a
Jeep, you’re safe and secure and you can get out of it. We try to hit on
those emotional connections.”27 And based upon the dominant tropes
within SUV ads, one of the most effective (and acceptable) means of gener-
ating ‘those emotional connections’ is to cast nature as enemy.
Print advertising, for example, almost always highlights a vehicle’s
ability to ‘conquer’ or ‘master’ the roughest terrain. Suzuki will “conquer
just about anything the landscape throws at you,”28 Isuzu “puts the world
at the mercy of your whims,”29 and Jeep invites you to “get out there and
show Mother Nature who’s boss.”30 An extensive 2002 campaign for Toyota
used images of the 4Runner SUV driving through the forbidding land-
scape at the foot of Mt. Everest to show its capacity to take on the most
dangerous and inhospitable locations. With inset photos of struggling climb-
ers, one ad reads: “Everest at 4,347 metres. Nerves fray. Muscles twitch.
Engine roars”31 while another states “Everest at –24 degrees. Jawbone
chatters. Spine shivers. Engine roars. Bitter cold and uncharted terrain wither
against the 4Runner’s available i-Force V8 engine.”32 Television commer-
cials feature images of goggled figures fighting through a blizzard and a
frayed tent being whipped about by a fierce wind, powerful visual testimo-
nial to the mountain’s harsh environment. As an SUV bounces over rocks
and splashes through rivers with Everest’s profile in the background, a
somber Edmund Hillary warns that “Everest can be a ferocious moun-
tain.”33 Toyota also teamed up with the Outdoor Life Network to produce

SHANE GUNSTER ‘YOU BELONG OUTSIDE’ 9

 a reality-TV show entitled ‘Global Extremes’ in which contestants engaged
in various wilderness challenges in competing for the chance to climb Mt.
Everest in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of Hillary’s ascent.
In ads such as these, nature takes the form of an inscrutable, unpredict-
able, and often nasty place. On the one hand, it offers an invigorating
alternative to the mundane routine of everyday life, a proving ground on
which individuals can test their mental and physical endurance en route to
the revitalization of human experience. On the other, it demands a tough,
hard ‘ready for anything’ disposition as a means of surviving the countless
dangers the world throws your way.
The most striking manifestation of this theme appears in ads which
literally enact a struggle between the SUV and nature in the form of aggres-
sive contests of strength, speed, agility and power with a variety of wild
predators. Recent television spots have featured a miniaturized Saturn VUE
deftly evading being caught by a pursuing cougar,34 a Nissan Pathfinder
playing the role of matador as it nimbly darts around an enraged bull in an
empty arena,35 and great white sharks encircling and attacking a water-
bound Ford expedition.36 Beyond fending off feral aggression, the SUV
itself often appears as a predatory creature. A new spot for Cadillac opens
with an enactment of the ‘Running of the Bulls’ in Pamplona; as the open-
ing strain of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Rock and Roll’ builds, the camera pulls back
to reveal that the bulls are themselves fleeing three black SUVs.37 Featuring
a Chevrolet Tahoe on a rocky mountain slope under stormy skies, a recent
ad explicitly offers readers the chance to turn the tables on nature: “You’ve
heard of mountain lions running loose through subdivisions. This is the
opposite.”38 “Power changes everything,” advises yet another commer-
cial, showing a pack of lions fleeing from a Nissan Pathfinder that we
eventually discover is driven by an enterprising antelope.39 A pack of croco-
diles shrink in fear from a Lexus LX470: “Let nature worry about you for
a change.”40
At one level, ads like these merely reenact conventional Enlightenment
narratives about technology: as an ad for Jeep puts it, “It’s your classic
man vs. nature struggle.”41 In survey after survey, consumers consistently
identify the perceived safety of four-wheel drive (4WD) as the main reason
for choosing SUVs.42 Obviously, the best way to represent 4WD as a safety
feature is the symbolic relocation of these vehicles from paved roads where
this technology is largely irrelevant (and actually decreases maneuverabil-
ity and braking efficiency given added weight) to an environment in which

10 ETHICS & THE ENVIRONMENT, 9(2) 2004

it can more plausibly be shown to enhance driver control. Beyond the
simplistic division between nature and technology sponsored by these types
of images, however, fantasies in which these vehicles literally become wild
creatures envisions a far more fluid boundary between social and natural
worlds. They offer the SUV as a mimetic form of technology which en-
ables an adaptation to the natural world by imitating and perfecting the
physical attributes (e.g., speed, power, agility, inscrutability) and simplistic
patterns of interaction (e.g., flight, conflict) of the animals one finds there
(in the idealized images of advertising). The Dodge Durango, for example,
was intentionally designed to resemble the features of a jungle cat, with
the grille representing teeth and the large fenders the bulging muscles in a
snarling jaw. “A strong animal has a big jaw, that’s why we put big fend-
ers,” explains one of the designers.43 Seductive phantasmagoria arise in
which stylized depictions of nature organize desire for social forms of tech-
nology, thereby revisioning social life itself through a natural prism. Many
of the SUV’s most potent pleasures, as defined through its promotional
field, come to depend upon the active investment of consumers in simplis-
tic natural motifs as a means of thinking through the essence of social
interaction.
While wilderness spectacles furnish ideal venues for the graphic depic-
tion of aggression, violence, and conflict, these themes also spill over into
the portrayal of social relations with other vehicles and drivers, affirming
that the rugged individualism which governs the ‘natural’ world is equally
dominant in the ‘urban jungle.’ Campaigns for full-size SUVs, for example,
commonly boast about their ability to dominate the road and intimidate
other drivers. Cadillac advertising, for example, regularly focuses upon
the Escalade’s aggressive profile. “Yield” advises a 1999 newspaper ad,
featuring a sinister close-up of the Escalade’s front end bearing down upon
the reader.44 “Mere measurements to you,” notes a 2002 ad describing the
SUV’s massive height and weight, “But persuasion to those in front of
you.”45 Yet another series portrays it as a boxer or street fighter: “And in
this corner in all black . . .”46 and “Let’s take this outside.”47 Other brands
similarly stage a menacing disposition as an index of the SUV’s appeal.
Lincoln Navigator promises to “Kick derriere.”48 Tracks atop a transport
truck fantasize about the Jeep Liberty’s ability to literally drive over things
that obstruct its passage: “Jeep Liberty Benefit #12: The power to master
all things, on and off the road.”49 A pair of ads for the Dodge Durango
advise the reader to “Tread lightly, and carry a big V-8”50 and labels the

SHANE GUNSTER ‘YOU BELONG OUTSIDE’ 11

 SUV a “Sport Brute.”51 The Chevrolet Blazer ZR2 has a “bold, aggressive
stance. (Intimidating, isn’t it?)”52 A Honda CRV emerges from a misty
swamp: “It’s like a monster in a horror movie. It keeps coming back meaner
and stronger.”53 “Now let’s see who gets sand kicked in their face at the
beach,” notes a 2002 ad foregrounding the CRV’s increased size. Recent
campaigns for Hummer and Jeep are shot from a position just below the
front bumper: the viewer is literally prostrate before the vehicles, visually
reinforcing copy such as “It only looks like this because it’s badass”54 or
“Pretty much every lane is a passing lane.”55
As many critics have noted, these are more than just empty threats.
Heavy vehicles with rigid frames and high ground clearance pose a consid-
erable safety risk to the drivers of smaller cars. While car bodies are de-
signed to crumple around drivers and thereby absorb the shock of sudden
impacts, the stiff rails used in SUV and pickup construction effectively
transfers that shock to other vehicles and their occupants. Moreover, the
height of light trucks means that in collisions with smaller vehicles they
often slide over a car’s hood or trunk and impact the passenger compart-
ment with considerable force. In his superb analysis of the ‘crash incom-
patibility’ problem, Keith Bradsher notes that the front end of a Ford F-250
Super Duty pickup truck, which it shares with the Ford Excursion SUV, is
49 inches above ground, close to the height of the roof of the Ford Taurus
passenger sedan. According to U.S. federal regulators, the lethal combina-
tion of height and stiffness in light trucks inflicts an extra 2,000 fatalities
each year.56 Casualties in traffic accidents are effectively rearranged from
light truck to car as SUV drivers literally purchase a feeling of increased
security at the cost of the safety of other drivers.57 For every Ford Explorer
driver whose life is saved in a multi-vehicle collision because they are in an
SUV rather than a large car, for example, an extra five drivers are killed in
vehicles struck by Explorers.58 In crashes with a second vehicle, full-size
SUVs kill that vehicle’s occupants at a rate of 205 per 100,000 accidents
compared to 104 for minivans and 85 for cars.59

SOCIETY AND/AS SECOND NATURE:

“EARTHQUAKES, FIRES, RIOTS: I’M READY”
In recent years, SUVs and their drivers have increasingly attracted the
contempt of those who argue that in addition to their excessive fuel con-
sumption and the danger they pose to cars, these vehicles are emblematic
of a narcissistic, avaricious disposition that privileges fantasies of techno-

12 ETHICS & THE ENVIRONMENT, 9(2) 2004

logical power at the expense of the natural and social environment. In
1998, the Sierra Club kicked off a wave of anti-SUV sentiment with a
contest to rename Ford’s mammoth Excursion; “Ford Valdez—Have you
driven a tanker lately?” was the winning slogan, driving home the blatant
discrepancy between ads for SUVs and their real ecological impact.60 Pub-
lished in 2002, Keith Bradsher’s polemic High and Mighty has attracted
considerable media attention for its thorough and well-researched critique
of SUVs, ranging from the misguided public policy that inspired their de-
velopment to the political economy that sustains their production to the
serious dangers they pose to both their own occupants and other drivers.
In November 2002, the Evangelical Environmental Network launched a
widely reported campaign entitled ‘What Would Jesus Drive?’ to encour-
age Christians to reassess their transportation choices.61 Shortly after, a
coalition of entertainment professionals led by Arianna Huffington pro-
duced a series of controversial ads that linked gas-guzzling SUVs with oil
revenues that may be funneled to terrorist organizations, an ironic com-
mentary on the current Bush administration’s campaign to link the casual
use of marijuana with the violence of drug cartels.62 Dozens of anti-SUV
websites range from the provision of critical information to recommend-
ing direct action against these vehicles and those who drive them. These
and other efforts have stirred an often fierce debate about SUVs that ranges
widely over a variety of issues including their impact on the environment,
their safety, their effect upon drivers, their cultivation of U.S. dependence
on foreign oil supplies, and so on.
Nature often plays a starring role in these debates. It has become a
cliché, for instance, to point out that few SUV drivers ever actually take
their vehicles off-road in pursuit of the wilderness adventures that figure
so heavily in SUV advertising. Similarly, few can claim ignorance of the
glaring contrast between pristine natural scenes and a vehicle that wreaks
ecological havoc because its excessive weight and poor design requires
large amounts of fuel and produces high levels of toxic emissions. As a first
step in shattering the coherence of the SUV’s promotional field by intensi-
fying the contradictions that lie at its core, these tactics have played a key
role in raising critical popular consciousness. However, they also often end
up reproducing the basic ideological separation between society and na-
ture that constitutes a cornerstone of the SUV’s promotional field. Nature
remains a rugged, spectacular, and sublime paradise, a utopian alternative
to the crowded dystopian banality of urban and suburban life. All that

SHANE GUNSTER ‘YOU BELONG OUTSIDE’ 13

 changes is the lateral transfer of the SUV from one side of the balance
sheet to the other: rather than secure entry into that paradise (as in the
ads), the SUV assumes a new identity as its most dangerous threat. Failure
to move beyond the basic dichotomy which valorizes a hyper-pure nature
while demonizing urban space perpetuates the timeworn logic through
which advertisers exploit fears of industrial technology as an incentive for
the consumption of products that magically restore a harmonious balance
between nature and society. Writing about the prevalence of these types of
narratives in advertising from the 1920s and 1930s, Roland Marchand
observes:
By raising the specter of civilization destroying the balance of nature,
[ads] gave dramatic and sometimes exaggerated expression to the un-
certainties of wider public. After this cathartic airing of anxieties, they
offered assurances, through the parable of Civilization Redeemed, that
the apparent costs of progress could be avoided. Civilization and na-
ture were not antithetic. No breaks need be applied to the wheels of
progress.63
Much of the backlash against SUVs similarly incarnates nature as a pure
Other, a potent utopian signifier that effectively short-circuits any more
systematic exploration of the complex relation between social, cultural,
and natural environments.
The ultimately anemic quality of this critical strategy reveals itself in
the ease with which it has been appropriated by auto advertisers them-
selves. Subaru, for example, reinvented its all-wheel drive Outback station
wagon as a kinder, gentler SUV in a series of 2002 television commercials
that present its drivers as the real nature lovers compared to the blunder-
ing insensitivity of those with larger vehicles. Describing its ‘when you get
it, you get it’ campaign, Subaru notes that
in ‘Deer Spotting,’ a couple quietly observes a group of deer in the
woods from the comfort of the Subaru Outback. All is well until the
tranquility is shattered by a lead-footed SUV driver racing through the
forest to catch a glimpse for himself—one who clearly doesn’t ‘get it’.
In ‘Outside the Box,’ a Forester owner covertly picks her daughter up
from school to help release the class bunny back into the wild where
he belongs.64
The failure to deconstruct nature or, more precisely, to deconstruct the
idealized status of natural signifiers within mass culture, leaves intact the
basic cultural premise of SUV advertising, namely, that the flight to nature

14 ETHICS & THE ENVIRONMENT, 9(2) 2004

is a normal, indeed inevitable, human response to urban civilization.65
Consequently, we fail to see how the ideological ‘work’ performed by natural
signifiers is far more complex than simply caricaturing nature as a utopian
alternative to urban space. However unwittingly, this type of criticism re-
inforces the logic that has helped establish cross-over vehicles as the fastest
growing segment of the auto industry. Smaller SUVs are now marketed as
a commodity through which people can express their distaste for large,
truck-based models as despoilers of the natural environment while simul-
taneously preserving the fantasy of periodically sampling nature’s plea-
sures. Simply because they are not full-size models, smaller vehicles can be
represented as existing in harmony with the natural environment. Con-
versely, this trend is also exploited to portray full-size SUVs and pick-ups
as ‘genuine’ off-road vehicles to a (masculine) demographic that has the
opportunity of defining itself in opposition to the ‘soft,’ ‘feminine’ charac-
ter of luxury SUVs.
Less common but equally significant, natural tropes assume the bur-
den of explaining the psychological appeal of the SUV. Recent debate over
these vehicles often moves beyond their social and ecological implications
to the ‘natural’ characteristics of their drivers. In a much discussed part of
High and Mighty, for instance, Bradsher explores the attributes of SUV
owners through the atavistic consumer psychology of Clotaire Rapaille,
a French anthropologist who has played an important consulting role in
the design and marketing of SUVs. People’s reactions to commodities, ar-
gues Rapaille, can be divided according to a crude schematic of brain ac-
tivity: intellect, emotion, and a primitive desire for survival and reproduction
he terms ‘reptilian.’ SUVs are “the most reptilian vehicles of all because
their imposing, even menacing appearance appeals to people’s deep-seated
desires for ‘survival and reproduction.’”66 As the fear of crime, however
irrational, has risen in lockstep with the intensification of violence in the
mass media, the SUV offers itself as an ideal technology for armoring the
self against the perceived dangers that lurk outside. “I think we’re going
back to medieval times,” Rapaille observes, “and you can see that in that
we live in ghettos with gates and private armies. SUVs are exactly that,
they are armored cars for the battlefield.”67 At one level, this testimony is
fascinating and offers key insights into how nature is deliberately mobi-
lized in advertising as a barely veiled metaphor for perceived dangers within
society. Yet Rapaille’s simplistic description of aggressive technology as a
‘natural’ response of the ‘reptilian’ component of the brain to the percep-

SHANE GUNSTER ‘YOU BELONG OUTSIDE’ 15

 tion of increasing social danger participates in a mythic naturalization (and
mystification) of social and historical phenomena.
Bradsher recognizes the “slick but extremely cynical” manipulation
performed by expensive advertising campaigns in this regard, but never
challenges the basic premise that the SUV’s appeal is, at some level, en-
tirely ‘natural.’68 Instead, he confirms this sentiment by citing extensive
consumer research that defines SUV drivers as “people who are insecure
and vain. . . . frequently nervous about their marriages and uncomfortable
about parenthood. . . . Above all, they are apt to be self-centered and self-
absorbed, with little interest in their neighbors or communities.”69 SUV
vehicle designs, he claims, “appeal to the darkest shadows of human na-
ture.”70 Much ink has subsequently been spilled in newspaper editorials
attacking or defending the personal character of drivers, producing a highly
individualized explanation of the SUV.71 And once again, it confirms a
core element of many SUV ads: these vehicles activate something primitive
deep within us, offering a shortcut to dimensions of experience normally
repressed, for better or worse, by the conventions of everyday life. A 1995
ad for the Isuzu Rodeo calls it “the psychological equivalent of a three day
beard . . . a welcome departure from this buttoned-up, starched-collared
world of ours”;72 three years later the Rodeo becomes a “205 horsepower
primal scream,” a form of ‘therapy’ that “encourages you to scream long
and hard and loud.”73 A pair of mid-1990s pieces in Forbes and Fortune
serve up equivalent rhetoric as they rhapsodize about the experience of
driving the Hummer H1: “One can’t help but hear the faint call of the wild
when performing the most mundane chores in a Hummer”74 or “Deep
inside the brain of every male is the Godzilla Gland, a tiny organ that
makes men obnoxious, aggressive, and loud. It can be tamed with dark
suits and neckties, but it won’t go away. And in a massive truck that can go
almost anywhere, the gland goes haywire.”75 A great deal of contempo-
rary anti-SUV criticism does little more than switch the valence of these
sentiments from good to bad, leaving untouched the idea that the SUV
allows or encourages people to tap deeply into their inner ‘nature’ and
release—for better or worse—emotions that are normally kept tightly un-
der control.
As an alternative framework of explanation, I think much of the ap-
peal (and significance) of nature in SUV advertising can and must be traced
to the resonance these images have with how people experience a world in
which abstract institutions, structures, and processes beyond democratic

16 ETHICS & THE ENVIRONMENT, 9(2) 2004

regulation govern more and more spheres of social life. Natural imagery
furnishes an ideal set of signifiers through which to express and conceptu-
alize in mythic form the erosion of human autonomy at the hands of forces
that seemingly lie beyond human regulation or control. In his brilliant
analysis of nineteenth-century Paris, Walter Benjamin identifies natural
metaphors as a preeminent strategy of popular French authors for expressing
the way in which commodification and industrialization was affecting
people’s perception and experience of urban space. Alexandre Dumas, Vic-
tor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, and Honoré Balzac all relied heavily upon
‘primitive’ imagery to describe the dominant ‘structure of feeling.’ “The
poetry of terror,” wrote Balzac, “that pervades the American woods, with
their clashes between tribes on the warpath—this poetry which stood
[Fenimore] Cooper in such good stead attaches in the same way to the
smallest details of Parisian life.”76 The most successful and popular liter-
ary styles were those that expressed the experience of urban capitalism
through the metaphors of an untamed wilderness. Nature appeared as a
fertile allegory for locating oneself within a set of social processes that had
grown inscrutable, unpredictable, and dangerous as they became reified,
acquiring a life and logic seemingly independent of collective human regu-
lation.77
Society, in other words, takes on the form of a ‘second nature’ as people
conceptualize and interact with it as a fixed and unchanging entity, beyond
our understanding and control. In the Economic and Philosophical Manu-
scripts, Marx argues that one of the defining qualities of life under capital-
ism is the alienation of workers from their activities and the products of
their activity. “The alienation of the worker in his [sic] product means not
only that his labour becomes an object, assumes an external existence, but
that it exists independently, outside himself, and alien to him, and that it
stands opposed to him as an autonomous power. The life which he has
given to the object sets itself against him as an alien and hostile force.”78
The mediation of human activity through the commodity form produces a
strange, phantasmagorical world which its authors can no longer control
or even recognize as their own creation. “Our emancipated technology,”
writes Benjamin, “stands beside contemporary society as a second nature
and indeed, as economic crises and wars show, as a no less elemental na-
ture than that confronted by primitive societies.”79 Instrumental reason
and associated forms of capitalist industrialization predicated upon the
mastery of nature generate a profound alienation of human beings from

SHANE GUNSTER ‘YOU BELONG OUTSIDE’ 17

 both the natural and social world. “As its final result,” note Theodor Adorno
and Max Horkheimer, “civilization leads back to the terrors of nature.”80
Both appear and are experienced as hostile, threatening environments and,
in an endless tautology, each is taken as evidence for the normality and
inevitability of the other. On the one hand, narrow visions of rugged indi-
vidualism and hyper-competitive Darwinism are projected upon an an-
thropomorphized nature; on the other, these virtues feature prominently
in cultural representations of nature: ‘discovering’ them there is subse-
quently used to justify their presence within human societies as an inescap-
able fact of ‘human nature.’
Over the last three decades, the globalization of corporate power, the
dominance of neo-liberal politics, and the extension of capitalist social
relations have created a cultural, political, and economic environment in
which people are regularly assailed with the message (and the prevailing
experience of helplessness to back it up) that they have no choice but to
submit and adapt to the dictates of transnational markets, the unpredict-
able chaos of global politics or, more recently, the bureaucratic fascism of
the ‘war on terror.’ In this context, nature provides an ideal marketing
signifier because it expresses the utopian desire to escape this environment
into an Edenic paradise but simultaneously gives voice to the dystopian
fear that retreat into a defensive shell is the only option left for comfort-
able survival. Desire and fear, utopia and dystopia: natural imagery spon-
sors the blending of these disparate emotions and ideals into a fluid, if
schizophrenic, promotional field that accommodates the affective mobil-
ity of consumers as they shift back and forth from one pole to the other.
This conceptual blurring of the natural and the social is itself routinely
inscribed within the metaphor laden discourse of SUV advertising. Acura
crowns its MDX “lord of the jungle (concrete or otherwise)”81 and Subaru
lauds the Outback as perfect “for all those perilous journeys through the
wilds of the asphalt jungle.”82 Phantasmagoric animal spirits arise out of
the mist on city streets as a Ford Escape passes by, constructing a magical
vision of the wild that lies hidden in the heart of the city.83 At one level,
such ads provide a kind of ironic commentary on the absurdity of using
SUVs for urban transport; but at another, they legitimate and enforce the
analogy between social and natural dangers. Using metaphor to blend im-
ages of urban space and wilderness, ads such as these explicitly invite read-
ers to use nature as a concept to express, reflect upon, and engage with key
dimensions of social experience.

18 ETHICS & THE ENVIRONMENT, 9(2) 2004

 As noted above, violence is the preeminent trope through which the
conflation of nature and society is engineered and, without question, this
strategy has achieved its highest profile in the evolving promotional field
around the Hummer brand. Introduced in 1979, the HumVee is a military
transport and assault vehicle used by the U.S. military that has featured
prominently in news coverage of wars in the Middle East, especially the
‘Desert Storm’ operation of 1991. Fearful of declining military demand
following the end of the Cold War (and motivated by the incessant lobby-
ing of Arnold Schwarzenegger), AM General started producing the $100,000
Hummer for the civilian market in 1992. As Leigh Glover explains, early
print advertising emphasized the vehicle’s violent mastery of the natural
environment: “premeditated and deliberate aggression, violence, and the
deployment of weaponry against nature are endorsed by the manufacturer.
. . . Nature has become an assault course, its geomorphology reduced to
measured contours and gradients of technological challenge.”84 The truck
quickly acquired a sizable media profile, however the company failed to
sell enough units to generate much profit. In 1999, GM acquired the rights
to the Hummer, hoping to transform it into an aspirational flagship sym-
bol for the corporation given the brand’s enormous popularity with younger
Americans.85 The casual brutalization of nature deployed in the earlier ads
was displaced by a more sinister articulation of nature and society in which
the truck’s off-road prowess implicitly figured as a means of protecting
oneself against social dangers. In a shameless yet highly instructive capi-
talization upon public fear, GM used Schwarzenegger to unveil the new
H2 in downtown Manhattan on the three-month anniversary of the Sep-
tember 11th attacks. Print advertising for the H2 reproduces the aesthetic
of Desert Storm with the vehicles featured under a scorching sun in an
empty desert landscape with taglines such as “when the asteroid hits and
civilization crumbles, you’ll be ready.”86 The New York Times reports that
“dealers will be required to build new showrooms that resemble military
barracks with plenty of brushed steel and exposed bolts inside.”87 For their
part, automotive journalists have eagerly celebrated the truck’s military
pedigree with gushing reviews: an early Toronto Star piece, for example,
opened by asking readers if they were “Tired of getting pushed around on
the Don Valley Parkway?”88 while a later review in the National Post re-
view half-seriously opened, “We thought we were Navy SEALs. The Florida
rain beat down like a sonuvabitch and we were perched on the Hummer’s
truck bed, ready to leap out and help citizens in need.”89 Most telling is the

SHANE GUNSTER ‘YOU BELONG OUTSIDE’ 19

 response of a Los Angeles Hummer driver when asked why he bought the
truck: “I call this my urban escape vehicle,” he answered. “Fires, earth-
quakes, riots. I’m ready.”90
Fires, earthquakes, and riots: natural disaster effortlessly flows into
social chaos, constructing a fierce tableau in which one has little choice but
to brace oneself against the perils of a hostile world. As Mike Davis bril-
liantly chronicles in Ecology of Fear, these events have become one and the
same in a city in which upper- and middle-class fear of a largely nonwhite
underclass is so often articulated via the motif of natural catastrophe. It is
surely no coincidence that Hummer sales are strongest in Los Angeles,
Miami, and Texas, urban locations in which steady immigration has vis-
ibly changed the racial complexion of city streets.91 The unpredictability
and ferocity of natural forces, whose impact upon human societies is ac-
centuated by a consistent failure to integrate ecological awareness into
urban planning and development, is invoked as emblematic of an increas-
ingly harsh social environment. Not only is it a jungle out there, it’s also a
war: in the promotional field of the SUV the two flow into one another
and become one and the same. Writing about the fear of cougars that
episodically grips suburban Los Angeles, Davis observes:
Too often, wildness is equated with urban disorder, and wild animals
end up as the symbolic equivalents of street criminals; or conversely,
they acquire all the psychopathic connotations of sentimentalized pets
or surrogate people. The Otherness of wild animals is the gestalt which
we are constantly refashioning in the image of our own urban confu-
sion and alienation. Where nature is most opaquely unknowable, as
in the “character” of animals, we intensely crave the comfort of an-
thropomorphic definition and categorization. And where it is the hu-
man world that threatens, this impulse is mirrored in our desire to
give our fears shape: as beasts.92

The use of nature in SUV ads and elsewhere creates a cultural space in
which social anxieties are at once expressed and mystified as the represen-
tation and resolution of social contradictions takes on an imaginary natu-
ral form. Multi-million dollar advertising campaigns do not invent the
desire for these vehicles out of thin air; rather, they offer (wealthy) con-
sumers a potent ideological framework with which to (mis)recognize and
(mis)conceptualize ‘urban confusion and alienation’ via a mythical, poly-
semic, natural landscape that nourishes escapist fantasy of an Arcadian
paradise while invoking the challenges of an untamed frontier and sum-
moning the fear of unknown dangers.

20 ETHICS & THE ENVIRONMENT, 9(2) 2004

 INSIDE-OUT: NATURE AND THE
NEO-LIBERAL SUBJECT
At its core, the imaginary resolution of social contradictions proceeds
via the material and semiotic reinscription of the binary divisions between
inside and outside, self and other, known and unknown in a fluid, mobile
fashion that matches the nomadic sensibilities of post-modernity. After all,
the explosive growth in the popularity of these vehicles was not based on
the sudden invention of the off-road capabilities of four-wheel drive. In-
stead, it was the combination of these capabilities with a quiet, comfort-
able, expansive, and well-appointed interior. As the market for luxury SUVs
has grown—Mercedes, BMW, Porsche, and Lexus all have sport-utility
models—the promotion of opulent driving environments has reached a
fever pitch. Range Rover, for instance, claims that “the special alchemy
of its luxurious waterfall-lit wood and leather interior . . . indulges the
soul.”93 Lexus boasts of the “cavernous interior” of its LX470, “there to
grace you and seven other pampered occupants with yards of hand-fitted
leather, burled walnut trim, and the auditory pleasures of a Mark Levinson
premium sound system.”94 Indeed, its designers seek
true luxury in the most amazing places imaginable. They fly first class
to the Côte d’Azur. They immerse themselves in that oasis of opu-
lence, the sovereign state of Monaco. And they stay in the presidential
suite of the finest five-star hotels. By experiencing all the best that the
world has to offer, our designers can see, feel, touch and even smell
those elusive elements of true luxury.95

Although few ads can match this calculated hyperbole, most foreground
the disjuncture between the ample comforts of a well-equipped cabin and
the harsh, unforgiving environment that lies outside. Auto advertising has
a long history of fixating upon interior luxury and many car ads embrace
similar themes. Yet the SUV is unique in how it combines, in the words of
one ad, a “sophisticated balance of personalized luxury and rugged util-
ity.”96
In addition to the comfort of heated, powered, leather seats and the
handcrafted aesthetic of exotic tropical woods, SUV interiors now bristle
with an exhaustive array of information technology. Global positioning
systems, voice-activated navigation consoles, DVD screens, MP3 players,
and push button executive assistance telecommunications networks are
the latest luxury features to feature prominently in SUV ads. John Urry
and Mimi Sheller speculate that the integration of these technologies into

SHANE GUNSTER ‘YOU BELONG OUTSIDE’ 21

 automobiles might shift the political economy of auto production toward
smaller vehicles: technological sophistication could replace size as a pri-
mary determinant of profit.97 While this logic may hold true for European
and Japanese consumers who have largely resisted the lure of SUVs and
pickups, luxury and technology have largely been positioned as comple-
mentary to size within the North American market. While SUVs have at-
tracted a very high media profile, the market share of full-size pick-up
trucks—even more dangerous to other drivers than SUVs—has quietly
exploded, in large part because of how this technology has been used to
outfit spacious ‘crew-cabs’ as family vehicles.98 More to the point, navi-
gation systems and digital assistance networks are ideal technologies to
supplement mercenary fantasies of armored nomads roaming a dangerous
environment. While information technologies have assumed increasing
significance in the promotional field around vehicles, their representation
tends to confirm urban experience as fundamentally reified in ways that
mimic the role of nature. “The alienated city,” observes Frederic Jameson,
“is above all space in which people are unable to map (in their minds)
either their own position or the urban totality.”99 In contrast to broader
social or political projects of ‘cognitive mapping,’ information technolo-
gies are marketed as a privatized, commodified ‘solution’ to this crisis by
drawing upon the same kind of emotional sentiments used to sell 4WD as
a safety feature: the world out there is hazardous and difficult to negotiate
and one’s security requires specialized technology. An Infiniti QX4 ad in
which the SUV emerges from a massive concrete maze expresses this senti-
ment beautifully: “A network of 24 highly calibrated global-positioning
satellites to guide you. 3 million miles of US roadways to explore. This
way to the future.”100 Owning the vehicle provides one with privileged
(and necessary) access to networks of global expertise and power. A profu-
sion of entertainment technologies similarly enhance the vehicle’s aura as a
secure, self-sufficient place, replicating the comforts of home, minimizing
the need for even visual interaction with what lies outside.
Since the seventeenth century, modern notions and practices of sover-
eignty have established the role of the state as guaranteeing civil order
within its borders and protecting its citizens from the chaos that suppos-
edly lies outside them. But as this system has slowly been broken down by
the flows and mobilities enabled by globalization processes of all kinds,
the state has grown both less willing and less able to impose and secure a
predictable and homogeneous social landscape. Instead, many of these func-

22 ETHICS & THE ENVIRONMENT, 9(2) 2004

tions, especially within North America, have either disappeared or been
privatized. Fragmented microcosms of control—‘gated communities’ be-
ing but the most obvious example—have emerged to reproduce security
and order by reconstituting the division between those on the inside and
those on the outside.101 The HumVee, like its predecessor the Jeep, was
originally produced to protect the American empire from those who threat-
ened it from afar. But in a world that now has, as Ford uncannily puts it,
no boundaries, the misery, violence, and disorder that was once so success-
fully contained to other places now appears in the First World. Large cities
in the U.S., notes Davis, “have become the domestic equivalent of an insol-
vent, criminalized Third World country whose only road to redemption is
a combination of militarization and privatization.”102 In this ‘climate,’
marketing a civilian Hummer to a wealthy, urban, upper-class is but one
facet of the ongoing privatization and commodification of military, sur-
veillance, and security technology. As this technology and its aesthetic be-
come pervasive, it creates spiraling cycles of fear and consumption that
ultimately serve only to reinforce each other. Criticizing ‘Fortress L.A.,’
Davis explains how “the neo-military syntax of contemporary architec-
ture insinuates violence and conjures imaginary dangers.”103 The design
and marketing of SUVs as ‘armored cars for the battlefield’ is perfectly
adapted to the hostile semiotics of these kinds of urban topographies. “A
little bit of security,” assures a Chevrolet Blazer campaign, “in an insecure
world.”104 Yet this is hardly a return to the primeval reptilian psychology
that Rapaille sees lying at the core of human nature. Instead, it involves a
very particular response to a social environment (or more precisely to the
cultural representation of that environment) that is deeply mediated by the
ideological structures of neo-liberalism and the consumptive practices of
consumer capitalism.
Incessant celebrations of a luxurious interior defended by an armored
shell champion the mobile and aggressive privatization of public space in
which those with wealth and resources can use and enjoy the commons
while maintaining complete control over their own personal environment.
In political terms, it both inspires and complements a neo-liberal subject
that grounds its well-being, security, and happiness in access to personal-
ized technologies of power that create enclosed spaces of work, leisure,
and transportation that are relatively protected from the broader social
environment. Social space becomes something one moves through—a spec-
tacular environment to be loved or feared, enjoyed or ignored—but rarely

SHANE GUNSTER ‘YOU BELONG OUTSIDE’ 23

 (if ever) something to be created or changed by collective design. The face
one turns to the outside world is powerful and menacing in order to secure
and protect the comfort and civility of the interior. A new television spot
for the Mitsubishi Endeavor, for example, opens with a rapid montage of
a black SUV racing through various urban scenes accompanied by an ag-
gressive, hard rock soundtrack. As the camera passes through the tinted
windows, the music abruptly dissolves into the theme song for SpongeBob
Squarepants, a cartoon playing on the Endeavor’s built-in DVD. Parents
smile contentedly at the happy children in the back seat. “It’s perfect for
families,” notes the narrator, “but who needs to know,” as the camera
passes back through the windshield and the rock soundtrack returns.105
Characteristically, Rapaille relies upon a crude biological conception of
patriarchy to explain these sorts of divisions: “Men are for outside and
women are for inside, that’s just life; to reproduce men have to take some-
thing outside and the women take something inside.”106 The menacing
exterior fits the (male) reptilian instinct for survival while the soft ‘womb-
like’ interior matches the (female) reptilian instinct for reproduction. Again,
nature is offered as both an explanation and a justification for the local-
ized inscription of an ideological form of sovereignty, that is, a relation of
power between self and other that has its origins in specific social and
historical conditions.
Enacting nomadic allegories that pit individuals against a rugged, beau-
tiful, and often dangerous natural environment glorifies the ‘survivalist
chic’ of entrepreneurial self-reliance that constitutes one of the cornerstones
of neo-liberal ideology. “You are. It is.” announces an ad for the Infiniti
FX 45, dissolving the borders between individual and car into a stylish
cyborg identity by listing the attributes common to both: “renegade fear-
less unexpected bold true spontaneous curious intriguing unwavering rare
brash provocative intuitive genuine daring uncommon irreverent brazen
dynamic dreamer.”107 Conversely, a companion ad articulates precisely what
the FX 45 and its drivers are not: “sign up go with the flow join the com-
mittee be one of us be one of the guys be a team player be a company man
get on board keep in step follow the crowd run with the pack conform
follow the leader settle down settle in blend in get comfortable adjust we
need a consensus join the club fit in adapt.”108 Ads such as these interpel-
late SUV drivers as neo-liberal subjects, summoning fantasies of autonomy
and independence predicated upon the reduction and even elimination of
relations with larger communities and social networks. Globalization, for

24 ETHICS & THE ENVIRONMENT, 9(2) 2004

example, figures strongly in SUV advertising that uses stylized portraits of
exotic locations and cultures to hail potential buyers as savvy, cosmopoli-
tan, and ready for anything, members of a transnational elite for whom
world travel has become a requisite element of both business and leisure.
National boundaries wither before dreams of capitalist deterritorialization
in which expanding networks of communication and transportation re-
constitute the alien geographies and cultures of all people as privileged
sites for an experiential tourism that offers welcome relief (for a lucky few)
from the boredom and routine of everyday life. “From the grand avenues
of Monaco to the deserts of Dubai, it’s never out of place” notes a recent
Land Rover ad.109 Recent television spots position the Land Rover in a
bustling Asian market, being ferried across a South American river on a
primitive wooden raft, and racing down sand dunes past appreciative
Bedouin nomads. As these narratives of rugged individualism unfold in
magazines, newspapers, film and television screens, there is little place for
notions of the public good or recognition of the cooperative social rela-
tions that actually make life possible. Instead, self-sufficiency and tough-
ness take center stage as the celebrated virtues of human existence. And
natural signifiers are the privileged cultural strategy in this regard, regu-
larly pressed into service to reframe exile from a shrinking public com-
mons and the accompanying retreat into the safety of privatized enclaves
not merely as natural and inevitable, but as an exciting and invigorating
opportunity for adventure.

CONCLUSION
In recent years, critics have made considerable progress in raising con-
sciousness about the contradictions between the images of nature used to
promote SUVs and the devastating impact these vehicles actually have on
the natural environment. However, very little attention has been directed
to the impact these advertising campaigns have upon how people under-
stand and conceptualize the urban environment. Beyond nurturing uto-
pian fantasies of a pristine frontier, natural imagery offers a powerful set
of cultural tools through which one’s relationship with urban and subur-
ban space can be envisaged as an encounter with a hostile and inscrutable
otherness. In the first place, this ideological process offers a seductive (if
simplistic) means of thinking about a world in which abstract structures
and processes increasingly govern all spheres of social life. More impor-
tantly, though, it gives individuals the opportunity to actively embrace this

SHANE GUNSTER ‘YOU BELONG OUTSIDE’ 25

 fate by inserting themselves into dreamworlds of nature in which the (tech-
nological) cultivation of independence, adaptability, self-sufficiency, and
toughness is routinely romanticized and glorified. As armored nomads,
one confronts urban alienation, crumbling infrastructure, and the erosion
of community as the incarnation of a new ‘uncivilized’ frontier in which
one (seemingly) has little choice but to carve out mobile zones of comfort
and security. De facto, using natural imagery to express these types of
narratives marginalizes democratic political responses to these kinds of
social issues. Cities, argues Davis, have an incredible capacity to manage
the relationship between human beings and their physical environment in
innovative and efficient ways. “Above all, they have the potential to
counterpose public affluence (great libraries, parks, museums, and so on)
as a real alternative to privatized consumerism, and thus cut through the
apparent contradiction between improving standards of living and accept-
ing the limits imposed by ecosystems and finite natural resources.”110 Fro-
zen into a second nature, though, urban space loses this flexibility and
radical potential: it becomes something to protect oneself against rather
than something to participate within and actively construct.
Against the backdrop of a spectacular yet foreboding natural environ-
ment, the revisioning of human social relations as fierce, competitive, and
atavistic proceeds as a compelling and seductive exploration of the primal
depths of human nature. As city streets and suburban neighborhoods give
way to the rugged, epic, and timeless beauty of a wilderness untouched by
humanity, the social conventions and values of everyday life are similarly
displaced. “Leave the city behind. Leave everything behind,” an Infiniti
QX4 ad breathlessly intones.111 Again and again, we are invited to partake
in the mythic fantasy of (re)discovering who we ‘really’ are by stripping
away the veneer of civilization. Fleeing the city in response to an ancient
‘call of the wild,’ the journey from urban to natural space symbolically
enacts an escape from ideology into the territory of the real, a ‘state of
nature’ in which we are called upon to confirm certain eternal truths about
the essence of human interaction. The tough, rugged individual—a seduc-
tive combination of self-sufficiency, competitive acumen, and hard-headed
realism—appears not only as an idealized subject-position in which to
maximize one’s chances for fun and survival in the post-industrial land-
scape of the ‘New World Order,’ but also as emblematic of a social Dar-
winism championed by many as serving up certain indisputable if unpleasant
‘facts’ about human nature. Yet if, as I have argued, nature does not dis-

26 ETHICS & THE ENVIRONMENT, 9(2) 2004

place the social so much as provide a metaphor through which reified so-
cial relations may be at once affirmed and denied, then a similar logic is at
work in the vision of subjectivity offered by SUV advertising. The retreat
to the wild enacts an intensely ideological vision of social reality in which
the alienation, boredom, and fear produced by capitalist urban space can
be both expressed and resolved in a mystified form, sanctifying the prin-
ciples of privatized, individualistic consumption as the only possible re-
sponse we can imagine to contemporary crises in our social environment.
Attending to the manipulative use of natural imagery to promote an eco-
logically disastrous form of technology has been and remains a pressing
task. Equally important, though, is an investigation into how the promo-
tional images of nature function as a cultural strategy for (mis)understanding
the petrified urban environments of postmodern capital. For a simplistic
division between a pure, real nature on the one hand, and a decadent, arti-
ficial city on the other—a semiotic tactic mobilized in both the glorification
and the demonization of the SUV—lays the conceptual and affective foun-
dations for embracing a frontier individualism that fits perfectly into the
weltanschaung of neoliberal politics, an individualism that makes it virtu-
ally impossible to assemble the democratic inertia necessary to construct
new urban imaginaries along the lines suggested by critics like Davis.

NOTES
I would like to thank Adrienne Cossom and Christine Harold for their helpful
comments on earlier drafts of this paper. I am grateful to the librarians at the
Metro Toronto Reference Library for providing valuable assistance in my re-
view of print advertising in various magazines. Finally, I would like to ac-
knowledge the generous support provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada.
1. For this study, print advertisements were systematically gathered from several
publications: Canadian Geographic (January 1990 to August 2003); Gentle-
men’s Quarterly (January 1998 to August 2003); Wired (October 1999 to
August 2003); Motor Trend (every March, November and December between
1990 and 1996; every March, October and November between 1997 and 1999;
January, February, April, March, October, November and December 2000;
March, April, October and November 2001; every issue between January 2002
and August 2003) and Maclean’s (every issue in March and November be-
tween 1998 and 2001; every issue between January 2002 and August 2003).
This yielded a collection of 583 original ads (i.e., this figure does not include
the substantive duplication of ads across periodicals). Television ads were gath-
ered from a periodic survey of Canadian network and cable television between

SHANE GUNSTER ‘YOU BELONG OUTSIDE’ 27

 2001 and 2003, as well as a 2001 review of the ads contained in Adcritic.com
(which has been subsequently closed to the public), producing roughly 100
original television spots. Instead of using traditional methods of qualitative
research to code and categorize these ads, I adopt a more flexible hermeneutic
approach that explores the core themes which emerge when they are analyzed
as a more or less coherent ‘promotional field’ around the SUV.
2. Cited in James Flink, The Automobile Age (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), p.
139.
3. Wernick, Promotional Culture: Advertising, Ideology and Symbolic Expres-
sion (Newbury Park: Sage 1991), pp. 77–79.
4. Martin Green, “Some Versions of the Pastoral: Myth in Advertising; Advertis-
ing as Myth,” Advertising and Culture: Theoretical Perspectives, Ed. Mary
Cross (Westport: Prager, 1996).
5. See the discussion in Keith Bradsher, High and Mighty: SUVs —The World’s
Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got That Way (New York: Public
Affairs, 2002), ch. 4.
6. Ad from Canadian Geographic, August 1990.
7. Ad from Canadian Geographic, July 1998.
8. Ford press release, 19 August 1999. From http://media.ford.com/, accessed on
30 September 2003.
9. See http://media.ford.com/ for an archived version of the ad in addition to a
press release describing the associated campaign.
10. Jeff Green, “Ford Dealers Take ‘Outfitters’ to Next Level, via Sponsorships
Freebies,” Brandweek 41 (3 January 2000), p. 9.
11. Ford press release, 2 April 2001. Accessed on http://media.ford.com, 30 Sep-
tember 2003.
12. Ford Press Release, 23 July 2001. Accessed on http://media.ford.com website,
30 September 2003.
13. Ad from Motor Trend, December 1996.
14. Jean Halliday, “Of Hummers and Zen: ‘Rugged Individualists’ are Target of
Campaign for GM Luxury SUV,” Advertising Age 72.32 (6 August 2001), p. 29.
15. Ad from Wired, October 2001.
16. Ad from Motor Trend, October 1998.
17. Robin Andersen, “Road to Ruin: the Cultural Mythology of SUVs,” Critical
Studies in Media Commercialism, Eds. Robin Andersen and Lance Strate (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 160.
18. Bradsher, High and Mighty, p. 112.
19. “Endeavor joins glut of SUVs,” Advertising Age 74.10 (10 March 2003), p. 6.
20. Keith Bradsher, High and Mighty, p. 41; Anil Ananthaswamy, “Crunch Time
for the SUV,” New Scientist (8 March 2003) 177.2385, p. 12.
21. Michael Flynn, Director of the University of Michigan Office for the Study of
Automotive Transportation, cited in John Cloud et al., “Why the SUV is all the
Rage,” Time (24 February 2003) 161.8, p. 40.

28 ETHICS & THE ENVIRONMENT, 9(2) 2004

22. Peter Brieger, “Porsche, Luxury Peers Flood into SUV Market: New models
Making Debut Next Week,” National Post (4 January 2002); “Endeavor Joins
Glut of SUVs,” Advertising Age (10 March 2003) 74.10, p. 6.
23. From 50,000 units in 1997, luxury SUV sales increased by six fold in 2002 to
300,000 and this figure could double by 2005. See “Endeavor Joins Glut of
SUVs,” Advertising Age 74.10 (10 March 2003), p. 6.
24. See Robert Goldman and Stephen Papson, Sign Wars: The Cluttered Land-
scape of Advertising (New York: Guildord Press, 1996).
25. Ad from Motor Trend, January 2002.
26. Ad from Gentlemen’s Quarterly, August 2000.
27. Cited in Bill Dunlap, “Going For A Drive,” Shoot 42.37 (14 September 2001),
p. 19.
28. Ad from Motor Trend, November 1995.
29. Ad from Gentlemen’s Quarterly, April 1998.
30. Ad from Canadian Geographic, September 1998.
31. Ad from Maclean’s, 12 September 2002.
32. Ad from Maclean’s, 25 November 2002.
33. Personal ad capture. Created by Saatchi and Saatchi, Los Angeles, for Toyota.
34. Personal ad capture. Created by Publicis Groupe’s Publicis and Hal Riney for
General Motors.
35. Personal ad capture. Created by TBWA/Chiat Day.
36. Ann-Christine Diaz, “How’d they do that spot?” Creativity 10.6 (July/August
2002), p. 51.
37. Ad from http://www.cadillac.com/cadillacjsp/models/video.jsp?model=escalade.
Viewed on 1 October 2003.
38. Ad from Motor Trend, March 2003.
39. “Nissan-pathfinder-lion-chase” from Adcritic.com. Produced by TBWA/Chiat
Day, Toronto.
40. Cited by Keith Bradsher, High and Mighty, p. 111.
41. Cited by Keith Bradsher, High and Mighty, p. 127.
42. Jerry Edgerton, “I Want My SUV,” Money 28.10 (October 1999).
43. Cited by Bradsher, High and Mighty, p. 99.
44. Cited by Bradsher, High and Mighty, p. xix.
45. Ad from Maclean’s, 23 September 2002.
46. Ad from Wired, December 2002.
47. Ad from Gentlemen’s Quarterly, July 2003.
48. Ad from Gentlemen’s Quarterly, January 1999.
49. Ad from Motor Trend, March 2002.
50. Ad from Motor Trend, March 1998.
51. Ad from Maclean’s, 9 March 1998.
52. Ad from Motor Trend, October 1997.
53. Ad from Motor Trend, December 2001.
54. Ad from Motor Trend, September 2002.

SHANE GUNSTER ‘YOU BELONG OUTSIDE’ 29

 55. Ad from Globe and Mail, 2 December 2003.
56. Bradsher, High and Mighty, p. 170.
57. Given the heightened susceptibility of SUVs to rollovers—the type of accident
with the highest proportion of fatalities—this ‘feeling’ of security is ultimately
illusory.
58. Bradsher, High and Mighty, p. 198.
59. Danny Hakim, “Big and Fancy, More Pickups Displace Cars,” New York
Times.com (31 July 2003). Accessed on 6 October 2003.
60. Not surprisingly, the Sierra Club’s latest target is the Hummer. See www.
hummerdinger.com.
61. See www.whatwouldjesusdrive.org. On this website, the Evangelical Environ-
mental Network estimates that its campaign has been featured prominently in
over 4,000 media stories.
62. See www.detroitproject.com.
63. Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Moder-
nity, 1920–1940, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 226.
64. The ‘When You Get It, You Get It’ campaign was produced by Temerlin McClain,
Dallas. See http://www.autointell-news.com/News-2002/June-2002/June-2002-
1/June-05-02-p4.htm. Viewed October 3, 2003.
65. For a cogent analysis of this tendency in social criticism based upon an ecologi-
cal or conservationist sensibility, see Andrew Ross, The Chicago Gangster
Theory of Life: Nature’s Debt to Society (New York: Verso, 1994).
66. Bradsher, High and Mighty, p. 95.
67. Cited in Bradsher, High and Mighty, p. 97.
68. Bradsher, High and Mighty, p. 101.
69. Bradsher, High and Mighty, p. 101.
70. Bradsher, High and Mighty, p. 426.
71. See, for example, an editorial in the Wall Street Journal in which David Brooks
(falsely) argues that the main charge against SUVs boils down to the claim that
their drivers are “moral savages.” Brooks goes on to criticize the attack on
SUVs as “a classic geek assault on jock culture.” See David Brooks, “The Scar-
let SUV,” Wall Street Journal (21 January 2003), p. A18. While Brooks clearly
misrepresents the nature of Bradsher’s critique, the latter’s discussion of the
‘innate’ characteristics of SUV drivers enables these kinds of simplistic yet highly
effective forms of rebuttal.
72. Ad from Motor Trend, March 1995.
73. Ad from Motor Trend, November 1998.
74. Daniel Wattenberg, “Humvee!,” Forbes 153.10 (9 May 1994), p. 116.
75. Brian O’Reilly and Nathan Muhrvold, “What in the World is That Thing?
Why it’s a Hummer,” Fortune 132.7 (October 1995), p. 146.
76. Cited in Benjamin, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” Selected
Writings: Volume 4: 1938–1940, Eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings,

30 ETHICS & THE ENVIRONMENT, 9(2) 2004

 Trans. Edmund Jephcott and Others (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 2003), p. 22.
77. For a more thorough exploration of these ideas in the context of critical theory,
see my Capitalizing on Culture: Critical Theory for Cultural Studies (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2004), especially chapter two.
78. Karl Marx, “Alienated Labour,” Karl Marx: Early Writings, Trans. and Ed.
T.B. Bottomore (Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1964), pp. 122–23.
79. Cited by Michael Jennings in Dialectical Images: Walter Benjamin’s Theory of
Literary Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), p. 75.
80. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philo-
sophical Fragments, Ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, Trans. Edmund Jephcott
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 89.
81. Ad from Maclean’s, 5 March 2001.
82. Ad from Canadian Geographic, September 1996.
83. Personal ad capture. Created by J. Walter Thompson for Ford Motor Com-
pany.
84. Leigh Glover, “Driving Under the Influence: The Nature of Selling Sport Utility
Vehicles,” Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society 20.5 (October 2000), p.
364.
85. In a 1999 marketing survey of teenagers, the Hummer was the most popular
automotive brand among both boys and girls. Bradsher, High and Mighty, p.
367.
86. Ad from Wired, November 2002.
87. Danny Hakim, “Detroit’s Hottest Item Is Its Biggest Gas Guzzler,” New York
Times (2 November 2002), p. C1.
88. Jim Kenzie, “The Baddest 4x4 Behaves in Polite Company,” Toronto Star (26
November 1994), p. L9.
89. Neil Dunlop, “Nothing Ho-hum about a Hummer: King of the Road,” Na-
tional Post (20 January 2001), p. E8.
90. Cited in Brian O’Reilly et al., “What in the World is That Thing?”
91. Hakim, “Detroit’s Hottest Item Is Its Biggest Gas Guzzler.”
92. Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster
(New York: Vintage Books, 1998), p. 267.
93. Ad from Wired, February 2003.
94. Ad from Canadian Geographic, September 1999.
95. Ad from Canadian Business, 25 November 2002.
96. Ad from Canadian Geographic, September 2000.
97. Mimi Sheller and John Urry, “The City and the Car,” International Journal of
Urban and Regional Research 24.4 (December 2000), pp. 752–754.
98. Danny Hakim, “Big and Fancy, More Pickups Displace Cars.”
99. Cited in Peter Freund and George Martin, The Ecology of the Automobile
(Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1993), p. 107.

SHANE GUNSTER ‘YOU BELONG OUTSIDE’ 31

 100. Ad from Motor Trend, December 2001.
101. For an interesting discussion of these phenomena, see Elizabeth Seaton, “The
Commodification of Fear,” Topia 5 (2001).
102. Mike Davis, Dead Cities and Other Tales (New York: The New Press, 2002),
p. 245.
103. Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New
York: Verso, 1990), p. 226.
104. Ad from Canadian Geographic, July 1997.
105. Personal ad capture. Created by Deutsch LA for Mitsubishi Motors North
America.
106. Bradsher, High and Mighty, p. 100.
107. Ad from Gentlemen’s Quarterly, April 2003.
108. Ad from Motor Trend, May 2003.
109. Ad from Maclean’s, 10 June 2002.
110. Davis, Cities and Other Tales, p. 101.
111. Personal ad capture. Created by TBWA/Chiat Day for Nissan.

32 ETHICS & THE ENVIRONMENT, 9(2) 2004