This discussion will focus on the ways in which the relationship between humans and the environment has been characterized. In order to examine this issue, I focus on two specific articles from National Geographic Magazine (NGM), one written in 1906 by Solon I. Bailey, and the other written in 2007 by Scott Wallace. The articles, published 100 years apart, both discuss the same subject, the harvesting of Amazonian resources, and so provide an ideal means to examine the ways in which discussions of a particular space have changed over the last century in NGM, and how they have remained the same. Each article takes a unique stance on the Amazon, and serves to represent the evolving story of Americans and their relationship with the earth. By analyzing the rhetorical approaches the two authors take on the Amazon, this study focuses on the rhetorical means used by NGM to render two polarized models of humans' relationship with the natural environment, and the ways in which this rendering shifted to correspond with a changing national environmental perspective. In examining the rhetorical similarities and differences between the text and images in each publication, I seek to prove that NGM utilizes a form of rhetorical dichotomy to characterize the environment as standing in opposition to man, and though a shift occurs which changes the premise of this opposition, the essential man-versus-nature dichotomy created does not alter and terms do not change, but merely the way we judge the elements of the binary.
