The issue of environmental awareness is one that has plagued our country for centuries and, despite growing awareness for the cause, will continue to plague our country without the implementation of drastic operational and individual changes. Continued obstinacy towards environmental awareness cannot, however, be solely attributed to the maintenance of current environmental conditions, but rather the perpetuation of environmental degradation as a whole. In their controversial ad “Before It’s Too Late”, the World Wildlife Fund, or WWF, delineates this exigent nature of environmental awareness through the propositional illustration of detrimental repercussions accompanying the circumvention of environmental awareness. That is, in order to effectively advocate the importance of action in regard to the resolution of environmental degradation, WWF elicits an emotive response in the viewer through the depiction of these detrimental repercussions by inducing elaborative thinking and in depth-processing. It is the WWF’s transmutation of a forest into an arboreal pair of lungs that allows them to emotively captivate the viewer through a metonymic representation of health that engenders a sense of interdependence between the viewer’s individual well-being and the environment’s. This newfound interdependence transforms the issue of environmental awareness within the viewer’s mind from irrelevant to significant as the viewer begins to associate the arboreal lungs with own health,
