These days, exhuming the intellectual corpse of media theorist Marshall McLuhan has become a cottage industry in publishing. As the patron saint of Wired magazine and the self-described mentor of numerous media pundits, McLuhan has himself – in a piece of savage irony – become an oral meme that is gossiped about around the global village. Everybody has heard of him and his ideas, even if they don’t quite understand them.

As Ottawa writer Stephen Dale adroitly points out, this is precisely the dilemma faced by Greenpeace, the world’s hugest and most successful environmental organization. In McLuhan’s Children, Dale explains Greenpeace’s astonishing success by pointing to its instinctual grasp of modern media, the central political tool of today. Greenpeace has thrived because of its ability to structure campaigns designed to provide the micro-narrative and vivid images necessary to newspapers and, more importantly, to television.

Founded by media-savvy hippies in the 1970s, Greenpeace’s growth parallels the explosive growth of modern media. It took those television-soaked youth to invent the “mind bomb” – a single, unforgettable media image, such as a whale exploding in blood as it gets harpooned by Russian whaling ships.

As Dale evokes in dozens of in-depth interviews with founding members, the early Greenpeace activists didn’t necessarily understand how McLuhan’s global village operated. But it didn’t matter: born and weaned on America’s nascent television culture, they grasped media instinctively, and as a result helped give birth to modern, image-driven politics.

Which is where things, as Dale notes, have begun to fall apart. As Greenpeace matures and tries to tackle increasingly complex environmental issues, it’s finding television is rarely nuanced enough. It’s easy to create a mind bomb about whaling, but what about sustainable development? This is the downside of global culture that McLuhan also predicted: as people come into closer and closer contact with the rest of the world, they go numb, in the same way a hand gets rubbed raw after hours of using the same tool.

As an ideas book, McLuhan’s Children succeeds nicely in exploring a test case of McLuhan’s ideas in real life. But the life is never quite real enough because, stylistically, the book never gets us into the lives of the Greenpeace media warriors. Dale goes from interview to interview, sitting down with Greenpeace notables and fleshing out the issues, but the overall effect is disturbingly like Pamela Wallin Live – loads and loads of talking heads, and not much else. It would have been quite interesting to see Dale closely follow a Greenpeace media campaign from start to finish, and build up a solid story for us to follow – particularly given the richly narrative adventures of these eco-activists, so successful in a peculiarly modern way.