The Unheard Voices of Environmental Justice: An Analysis of Dear Future Generations: Sorry.

Public advocacy regarding climate change continues to seek novel approaches and messengers to convey the urgency of the climate threat and the importance of decisive action. On one level, this has been accomplished by the rise of a new generation of youth climate activists who offer bold challenges to those in power. On another, advocacy techniques such as visual rhetoric and performance have attempted to break the impasse wherein appeals to scientific consensus and logical/rational argument appear no longer to be changing public perception of the urgency of warming. Finally, the variety of outlets on which such advocacy can be enacted, including YouTube and other social media, potentially challenges the gatekeeping function that previously enabled only a finite set of credentialed voices to be heard. This essay explores the viral YouTube hit Dear Future Generations: Sorry in its attempts to broaden awareness for the environmental justice community and call future generations into power. This video employs each of the aforementioned strategies (youth activism, visual rhetoric and performance, and YouTube) while drawing on the critical approach offered by Kenneth Burke's idea of perspective by incongruity to demand change. The article investigates how Prince Ea's verbal and visual rhetoric of "generations," consistently referenced throughout the narrative, is utilized to allow for the voices of future generations to be heard while holding those in power accountable for their actions so that we might have a better future while also insisting on fixing the present, especially for those most disproportionately impacted by climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]