Empire's ecological tyreprints 1

This article explores contemporary car advertising in order to suggest that the practices which generate environmental degradation are intimately bound up both materially and symbolically with the reproduction of and transformations within the contemporary global political order. The article argues that this order can be understood as increasingly imperial in character, that such an imperial politics is connected closely to the politics of cars, and that the specific character(s) of an emerging ‘empire’ can thus be interpreted through the symbolisms in the ways in which cars are currently being marketed.