Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age

314 Pages·2018·3.18 MB·English

by  Nicole Seymour

bad environmentalism
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BAD
ENVIRONMENTALISM
Irony and Irreverence
in the Ecological Age
Nicole Seymour
university of minnesota press
minneapolis | london
Excerpts from Wendell Berry, “The Vacation,” in New Collected Poems
(Berkeley, Calif.: Counterpoint, 2012), copyright 2012 by Wendell Berry, are
reprinted by permission of Counterpoint Press. Excerpts from Bourgeois &
Maurice, “Apocalypso,” copyright 2013 by Bourgeois & Maurice, are
reprinted by permission. Excerpts from “Poof the Tragic Drag Queen,”
copyright 2005 by Eggplant Faerie Players; “Big Girl,” copyright 1996 by
TomFoolery; and “Culture Thieves,” copyright 1995 by Eggplant Faerie
Players, are reprinted by permission. Excerpts from LaTasha N. Nevada
Diggs, “My First Black Nature Poem™,” copyright 2011 by LaTasha N.
Nevada Diggs, are reprinted by permission of the author. Excerpts from
Sherman Alexie, “Fire as Verb and Noun” and “How to Write the Great
American Novel,” in The Summer of Black Widows (Brooklyn: Hanging Loose
Press, 1996), and from “The Fight or Flight Response,” “Size Matters,”
“In the Matter of Human v. Bee,” “Avian Nights,” and “When Asked What
I Think about Indian Reservations, I Remember a Deer Story,” in Face
(Brooklyn: Hanging Loose Press, 2009), are reprinted by permission of
Hanging Loose Press.
Portions of chapter 1 were previously published in “Irony and Contemporary
Ecocinema: Theorizing a New Affective Paradigm,” in Moving Environments:
Affect, Emotion, Ecology, and Film, edited by Alexa Weik von Mossner
(Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2014).
Copyright 2018 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401- 2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
ISBN 978-1-5179-0388-6 (hc)
ISBN 978-1-5179-0389-3 (pb)
A Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the Library
of Congress.
Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer.
UMP BmB 2018
contents
introduction 1
1. “I’m No Botanist, But . . .”: Irony, Ecocinema, and 39
the Problem of Expert Knowledge
2. “So Much to See, So Little to Learn”: Perverting 73
Nature/Wildlife Programming
3. Climate Change Is a Drag and Camping Can 111
Be Campy: On Queer Environmental Performance
4. Animatronic Indians and Black Folk Who Don’t: 149
Rewriting Racialized Environmental Affect
5. Gas- Guzzling, Beer- Chugging Tree Huggers: 189
Toward Trashy Environmentalisms
conclusion 225
acknowledgments 235
notes 239
bibliography 261
index 293
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introduction
You just can’t out- gloom an environmentalist.
— Jonah Goldberg, “Inhospitable Earth”
We should treat all trivial things very seriously, and all the
serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality.
— Oscar Wilde, in a letter to Robert Ross regarding
The Importance of Being Earnest
We live in troubling times. In addition to staggering income inequal-
ity, the resurgence of white nationalism, religious radicalization, and
other widespread global problems, we face environmental problems such
as drinking water contamination, oil spills, air pollution, drought, habi-
tat destruction, mass species extinction, plastic pollution, overfishing,
sea level rise, ocean acidification, and the behemoth of them all, climate
change. Moreover, as activists and scholars have shown, sociopolitical
problems are not necessarily separate from environmental problems, and
in fact often compound one another.1
But these times, especially for those of us living in the Western
world, are also rather peculiar ones, defined by ironies and riddled with
absurdities. To begin with a few examples: The U.S. Senate—n oticeably
late to climate action in general, compared to its counterparts elsewhere
in the world— approved a resolution in early 2015 declaring that “climate
change is real and not a hoax”; fifteen minutes later, they rejected a second
resolution stating that “climate change is real and caused by humans”
(Goldenberg 2015). Meanwhile, scientists overwhelmingly agree that
climate change is anthropogenic, and historic heat waves, storms, and
blizzards continuously plague regions across the planet.2 Environmental
activists and documentarians such as Al Gore and Judith Helfand have
dedicated themselves to educating the public about climate change, but
1
2 | Introduction
sociologists such as Kari Norgaard (2011) have recently found that
information overload on such topics leads to emotional paralysis— thus,
in many cases, the more one knows about climate change, the less likely
one is to act.
On top of all this, public animosity toward environmentalism runs
rampant. A study from the University of Toronto, titled “The Ironic
Impact of Activists: Negative Stereotypes Reduce Social Change Influ-
ence,” observed the following:
Researchers have previously attempted to understand . . . resistance to
social change by examining individuals’ perceptions of social issues and
social change. We instead examined the possibility that individuals resist
social change because they have negative stereotypes of activists, the
agents of social change. Participants had negative stereotypes of activists
(feminists and environmentalists), regardless of the domain of activ-
ism, viewing them as eccentric and militant. (Bashir et al. 2013, 614,
emphasis added)
Reporting on the latter study, one journalist’s headline concluded,
“Everyone hates environmentalists and feminists” (Jacobs 2013). But
most of us did not need sociological research to know that; environmen-
talists (and feminists) have long been the butt of cultural jokes in the
West— skewered, sometimes rightfully so, for their sanctimony and sin-
cerity.3 The cultural revulsion toward environmentalists is ironic in and
of itself, in at least two ways: the public hates the very people poised to
address the problems we fear,4 and, as the Toronto study’s title suggests,
people’s very efforts to make a difference may actually prevent them from
doing so. Not to mention the fact that environmentalism is perceived
as demanding, difficult, and exacting, even by those sympathetic to the
cause— as evidenced by the titles of recent popular nonfiction books
such as Mark Watson’s Crap at the Environment: A Year in the Life of One
Man Trying to Save the Planet (2008) and Sara Gilbert’s The Imperfect
Environmentalist: A Practical Guide to Clearing Your Body, Detoxing Your
Home, and Saving the Earth (without Losing Your Mind) (2013).
Affect, in all senses of the term— emotional pull, visceral reaction,
comportment— plays a central role in this current reality. In addition to
the negative public emotions stoked by environmentalists, environmen-
tal degradation itself engenders great emotional distress, especially for
Introduction | 3
those who experience it firsthand. For example, in looking at two Aus-
tralian regions impacted by mining and severe drought, environmental
philosopher Glenn Albrecht and his coauthors found that “in both
cases, people exposed to environmental change experienced negative
affect that is exacerbated by a sense of powerlessness or lack of control
over the unfolding change process” (2007, 95). Albrecht’s team sub-
sequently coined the neologism “solastalgia” to describe this type of
distress (96). And even those who do not experience environmental deg-
radation directly may suffer emotionally or even physiologically; when
surveying Australian children, a research team led by psychologist Joe
Tucci found that “just over four in ten (44%) are nervous about the
future impact of climate change and 43% of children are worried about
air and water pollution” (2007, 7)—m ore than 10 percent higher than
the rates of concern over terrorism. We should also note that those on
the front lines of environmental science research, not just the receiving
end, are themselves affected; conservation biologists and climate sci-
entists have reported high rates of depression, burnout, posttraumatic
stress disorder, and even something one scientist termed “pretraumatic
stress” (Richardson 2015, emphasis added; see also Thomas 2014). Per-
haps we need look no further than the derisive phrase “gloom and doom,”
so often lobbed at reportage on environmental problems by audiences
of all political stripes, to understand the role of affect.5
Some activists and scholars have begun to pursue more hopeful
avenues in response to this gloomy paradigm, launching initiatives such
as the social media project Ocean Optimism and bringing terms such as
“resilience” to the forefront of environmental discussions.6 In a Rachel
Carson Center Perspectives journal issue titled “Beyond Doom and Gloom:
An Exploration through Letters,” for example, the writer, educator, and
issue editor Elin Kelsey catalogs instances of nature bouncing back:
“Bikini Atoll, home to the world’s biggest nuclear explosion[,] is now a
scuba divers’ paradise. The Chernobyl Power Plant disaster site turns
out to be the best place in Europe for wolf conservation” (2014, 68).
However, as I suggested in my own contribution to this issue, optimism
about the environment can be easily co-o pted, even used to license fur-
ther destruction (Seymour 2014a, 41). Indeed, I propose that despair and
hope, gloom/doom and optimism are often merely different sides of the
same coin, a coin that represents humans’ desire for certainty and neat