1 Belinda Smaill Monash University Smaill, Belinda. “Emotion, Argumentation and Documentary Traditions: Darwin’s Nightmare and The Cove.” Moving Environments: Affect, Emotion, Ecology and Film. Alexa Weik von Mossner (Ed.). Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2014. 103-120. Emotion, Argumentation and Documentary Traditions: Darwin’s Nightmare and The Cove Media attention to the acceleration and consequences of environmental degradation has been increasing over the two decades. However, the influence of environmentally focused documentary was cemented with the success of An Inconvenient Truth in 2006. 1 The cluster of films concerned with environmental advocacy has grown exponentially since this time. Often referred to as “eco-documentaries” in the popular press, this category includes examples exploring a broad range of issues such as food industries, climate change and habitat endangerment, water supply and allocation, sea level rise, diminishing fish stocks and the oil industry. 2 These films consistently investigate and publicize the corporate control of natural resources and the impact of industry practices on the environment and/or wildlife and, at times, on the consumer. This cluster of documentaries has emerged in tandem with the resurgent popularity of feature length documentary and the growing mainstream interest in environmental issues. 3 At first glance, this cluster, with its strong focus on critiquing commercial interests and government inaction, shares much with films that are couched in traditions of radical leftist documentary filmmaking. For Jane Gaines, mimetic technologies, such as documentary, “have the power to explosively reproduce, to reproduce the world before us as well as to reproduce its intensities onscreen, and to reproduce them most strategically in the bodies and hearts and minds of viewers.” 4 It is this aim to politicize, in an “explosive” manner, which motivates a history of political filmmaking. Documentary is unique within