Greenwashing Culture
Greenwashing Culture examines the complicity of culture with our environmental crisis. Through its own carbon footprint, the promotion of image-friendly environmental credentials for celebrities, and the mutually beneficial engagement with big industry polluters, Toby Miller argues that culture has become an enabler of environmental criminals to win over local, national, and international communities.
Topics include:
the environmental liabilities involved in digital and print technologies used by cultural institutions and their consumers;
Hollywoods green celebrities and the immense ecological impact of their jet-setting lifestyles and filmmaking itself;
high-profile sponsorship deals between museums and oil and gas companies, such as BPs sponsorship of Tate Britain;
radical environmental reform, via citizenship and public policy, illustrated by the actions of Greenpeace against Shells sponsorship of Lego.
This is a thought-provoking introduction to the harmful impact of greenwashing. It is essential reading for students of cultural studies and environmental studies, and those with an interest in environmental activism.
Toby Miller is Research Professor, University of California, Riverside; Sir Walter Murdoch Professor of Cultural Policy Studies, Murdoch University; Profesor Invitado, Escuela de Comunicacin Social, Universidad del Norte; Professor of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, Cardiff University/Prifysgol Caerdydd; and Director of the Institute for Media and Creative Industries, Loughborough University London.
Richard Maxwell, PhD and a co-author of Chapter 2, is Professor of Media Studies at the City University of New York, Queens College. His recent publications include The Routledge Companion to Labor and Media, Media and the Ecological Crisis (with Jon Raundalen and Nina Lager Vestberg), and, with Toby Miller, Greening the Media.
Greenwashing Culture
Toby Miller
First published 2018
by Routledge
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2018 Toby Miller
Introducing Culture Toby Miller, Richard Maxwell.
The rights of Toby Miller and Richard Maxwell to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Miller, Toby, author.
Title: Greenwashing culture / Toby Miller.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017012190 | ISBN 9781138962705 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781138962712 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781315659251 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Environmentalism. | Environmental sociology. | Culture.
Classification: LCC GE195 .M5497 2018 | DDC 304.2/8dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017012190
ISBN: 978-1-138-96270-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-96271-2 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-65925-1 (ebk)
Typeset in Times
by Out of House Publishing
Contents
Thanks for their support of my work on this subject to Pal Ahluwalia, Fiona Cameron, Scott Eldridge, Natalie Foster, Bob Franklin, Anthony Fung, Mike Goodman, Paul Graves-Brown, Joshua Hanan, Julie Hare, Rodney Harrison, Mark Hayward, Kitty Imbert, Marwan Kraidy, Jo Littler, Randy Martin, Richard Maxwell, Kylie Message, Brett Neilson, Lisa Parks, Angela Piccini, Jack Qiu, Nicole Starosielski, Imre Szeman, Andrew Witcomb, George Ydice, and Tulane Universitys Stone Center for Latin American Studies. Sections of this book appeared in Greenwashing Sport, The Conversation, The Routledge Companion to Art and Politics, Climate Change and Museum Futures, and The International Handbook of Museum Studies: Museum Theory.
This little book examines cultures complicity with our environmental crisis. I wrote it as a provocation, to myself as well as to you, in order to think through issues that dog attempts, through spectacle and science alike, to convince the worlds public of the reality of our ecological situation. Two introductory chapters cover basic theoretical concepts and material histories and case studies of the environment and culture. Then I address museums in order to examine the record of our principal art and historical institutions, prior to engaging citizenship, regulation, and resistance.
We are standing over an abyss. Our climate is changing in ways that imperil us, our fellow animals, other forms of life, and the very Earth itself. Past and present industrial processes have exposed the planet to potentially irrevocable harm. We have entered what the worlds scientific community declared in 2016 to be an Anthropocenean epoch characterized by major geological and ecological changes wrought by human activity (Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy, 2016). Yet despite the evidence, the contours of this abyss are far from clear to many people. How can that be? Shouldnt something so portentous, and lying directly in front of us, be pretty obvious?
Like scientists in general, climate scholars emphasize the need for patience in undertaking and understanding their work, which relies on the steady accumulation of data and progressive projections from it, based on flexible modeling. After all, climate is the average of weather. It is history (Chakrabarty, 2014).
While there is necessarily some debate over climate changeits geography, history, speed, nature, and futurethis is akin to debates over correlations between high consumption of alcohol and illness or leaping from tall buildings at a single bound and injury. In other words, the science is largely agreed, but there are always exceptions, complications, the need for additional research, and the emergence of new policy recommendations. That is how science works, through dual processes of accretion and attenuation.
In addition to the complexity of ordinary research, climate scientists confront an additional obstacle: the systematic distortion of climate science by the Anglo media. Wealthy polluters and their servants in public relations feast on occasional, entirely ordinary scholarly disagreements among climate experts, which are assiduously yet duplicitously reported as proof of a putative underlying weakness in the evidence for climate change (Maxwell and Miller, 2016; Lewandowsky et al., 2015: 2). Bourgeois public discourse is dominated by ideologues and pundits for hire who clutch at these moments and transform them into absolutes. Climate-change scientists are rarely invited to their party.
