Lawrence Prelli, a professor of communication at the University of New Hampshire, presented a lecture titled "Visualizing Facts and Metaphors in the U.S.-Canada Gulf of Maine Boundary Case," on Feb. 22 in the Kirner-Johnson Auditorium.
The U.S-Canada Gulf of Maine case occurred in 1984 when a chamber of the World Court divided United States and Canadian jurisdiction over commercial fisheries in the Gulf of Maine. The original jurisdiction prior to 1984, according to Prelli, was to keep Europeans away from opening up an "economic bonanza in the region." Unfortunately, these zones overlapped and were unclear, leading to a legal dispute over the boundaries. Fisheries are a politically volatile and economically lucrative business, he explained, making the case particularly important.
Prelli described the history and explained both sides of the case. He presented the U.S. political rationale for taking the case to court; the United States advocated for the then-unprecedented "resource conservation" argument. The United States argued that legal boundaries should follow natural boundaries. As a result of this particular strategy, the case, according to Prelli, was a "war of visual persuasion;" maps and other visual aides helped create the overall political strategy as well as shape the courts' attitudes regarding the case.
The resource conservation argument as advocated by the United States "advanced the principle that management of living resources could be improved if international legal boundaries corresponded with natural boundaries that divided discrete ecological systems." For example, the United States argued that the geometric positioning of the coastline "naturally" dictated that the George's Bank be under United States jurisdiction. Also, the positioning of an underwater channel further reinforced the natural boundaries of the gulf, and gave authority to the United States.
This idea, or metaphor as Prelli explained was drawn on ideas of connectedness and inclusion; as U.S. lawyers showed maps and other visual aids showing how the United States was geographically connected to the area, Georges Bank should be controlled by the U.S.
The Canadian approach was rather different, citing the area as an underwater island, thus detaching the area from both the United States and Canada; an island, as Prelli explained, could be divided. Thus, Canadian lawyers advocated that the island and thus jurisdiction could be given to both the United States and Canada. The U.S. did not agree with this idea; their objections did not rise from a geological standpoint but rather from an economic standing. The U.S. wanted to conserve the economic structure of the Gulf; bilateral management of the area, according to U.S. lawyers, simply would not work.
Prelli contrasted the various maps and other visual aides used in the case by the U.S. and Canada, showing how changing map scales or including or excluding boundaries and wind and water movements drastically enhanced one argument or the other in the Gulf case.
"Visual structures rhetorically constituted this perspective so that metaphorically generated associations about boundaries were seen as factual attributes of the Gulf's marine environment," he explained. Prelli then explained in-depth the different metaphors used by both side in the case, and how they were conveyed visually.
Prelli ultimately concluded the use of graphics, maps and other visual aids in any case, "enact a visual rhetoric that subtly constitutes boundaries between facts and fictions, between evidential grounds and metaphors."
The lecture was sponsored by the Office of the Vice President for Academic Affairs in conjunction with the Sophomore Seminar "Rhetoric, Science, and the Environment."
-- by Emily Lemanczyk '05
