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"Environmentalism in Popular Culture: Gender, Race, Sexuality, and the Politics of the Natural" examines social inqequity through the lens of a feminist environmentalist.

In her new book, Noël Sturgeon illustrates the myriad ways in which American popular culture depicts social inequities as "natural" and how our images of "nature" interfere with creating solutions to environmental problems that are just and fair for all.

Why is it, Sturgeon wonders, that environmentalist messages in popular culture so often "naturalize" themes of heroic male violence, suburban nuclear family structures, and U.S. dominance in the world?

And what do these patterns of thought mean for how we envision environmental solutions, like "green" businesses, recycling programs and the protection of threatened species?

Although other books have been published that examine questions of culture and environment, "Environmentalism in Popular Culture: Gender, Race, Sexuality, and the Politics of the Natural" is the first book to employ a global feminist environmental justice analysis to focus on how racial inequality, gendered patterns of work and heteronormative ideas about the family relate to environmental questions.

Beginning in the late 1980s and moving to the present day, Sturgeon – a professor of women's studies at Washington State University – unpacks a variety of cultural tropes, including ideas about Mother Nature, the purity of the natural and the allegedly close relationships of indigenous people with the natural world.

She investigates the persistence of the "myth of the frontier" and its extension to the frontier of space exploration. She ponders the popularity and occasional controversy of penguins and penguin family values and questions assumptions about human warfare as "natural."

The book is intended to provoke debates among college and university students, professors, environmental activists and all citizens who are concerned about issues related to environmental quality and social equality.