Read Online Environmentalism in Popular Culture Gender Race Sexuality and the Politics of the Natural Noël Sturgeon 9780816525812 Books

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In this thoughtful and highly readable book, Noël Sturgeon illustrates the myriad and insidious ways in which American popular culture depicts social inequities as “natural” and how our images of “nature” interfere with creating solutions to environmental problems that are just and fair for all. Why is it, she wonders, that environmentalist messages in popular culture so often “naturalize” themes of heroic male violence, suburban nuclear family structures, and U.S. dominance in the world? And what do these patterns of thought mean for how we envision environmental solutions, like “green” businesses, recycling programs, and the protection of threatened species?

Although there are other books that examine questions of culture and environment, this is the first book to employ a global feminist environmental justice analysis to focus on how racial inequality, gendered patterns of work, and heteronormative ideas about the family relate to environmental questions. Beginning in the late 1980s and moving to the present day, Sturgeon unpacks a variety of cultural tropes, including ideas about Mother Nature, the purity of the natural, and the allegedly close relationships of indigenous people with the natural world. She investigates the persistence of the “myth of the frontier” and its extension to the frontier of space exploration. She ponders the popularity (and occasional controversy) of penguins (and penguin family values) and questions assumptions about human warfare as “natural.”

The book is intended to provoke debates—among college students and graduate students, among their professors, among environmental activists, and among all citizens who are concerned with issues of environmental quality and social equality.

Read Online Environmentalism in Popular Culture Gender Race Sexuality and the Politics of the Natural Noël Sturgeon 9780816525812 Books

"This book blew my mind. READ IT."

Product details Paperback 240 pages Publisher University of Arizona Press; 1 edition (December 12, 2008) Language English ISBN-10 0816525811

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Environmentalism in Popular Culture Gender Race Sexuality and the Politics of the Natural Noël Sturgeon 9780816525812 Books Reviews :

Environmentalism in Popular Culture Gender Race Sexuality and the Politics of the Natural Noël Sturgeon 9780816525812 Books Reviews

• This book blew my mind. READ IT.
• Environmentalism in Popular Culture is a necessary challenge of ideas many of us may look upon with positive energy, but which require be pushed further. Equally, Sturgeon scripts a thought-provoking thesis on how ideas of personal responsibility and individualism have eclipsed ideas of corporate responsibility and social accountability, mainly through persistent messaging presupposing the righteousness of the unregulated free market and the inherent danger of anything approaching the commons as a Communist fantasy.
  
  This volume offers up an appraisal of green business that should be fundamental to anyone's understanding of such evolutions in capital. Benevolence comes with it many hooks, and Environmentalism in Popular Culture unabashedly calls out the cynicism in which some of the noted benevolence is rooted. Sturgeon is furthermore clear in how North American chauvinism colors green business' interactions with the Third World, presupposing at once mysticism and helplessness, while failing to offer a lens to Western dominance for such happenings. The result of these ideologies coming to roost is soft capital, in the form of green business, partners with the hardline factions of globalization to present suffering as the natural order of life. Individuals, as the logic goes, are alone responsible for their own lot, not the governments and corporations which engineered societies to their own benefit. Enter theories that are but a hair more sophisticated than eugenics and one is left with the lucky, the cunning and the strong flourishing in a world where regulation is scorned as a roadblock to money rather than a guard for the public interest. What's more, a focus on individuals simply recycling, buying green and purchasing hybrid cars eludes what Sturgeon calls "social justice in a global context."
• When I was a university student in the '80s and '90s, I got to observe firsthand the growth in popularity of a field loosely known as "cultural studies," with its promotion of a "new" field of political inquiry which it called "identity politics." As a prospective graduate student, I was accepted into a department which advertised its practice of what it called "critical/cultural studies." So I was at least familiar with cultural studies as an academic trend. Later in life, I became more focused upon environmental topics.
  
  Noel Sturgeon's "Environmentalism in Popular Culture" has combined the "cultural studies" and environmentalist interests in an interesting, politically-committed book. This book is subtitled "Gender, Race, Sexuality, and the Politics of the Natural," which should tell you a good amount about its proclaimed method "global feminist environmental justice analysis." Sturgeon's central idea is that
  
  US environmentalists use popular narrative tropes to get their message across in ways that they think will be widely effective. But they do not often critically examine what relationship these stories have to the long-standing use of arguments from the natural that have promoted inequality and supported conquest throughout US political and social history. It is crucial, therefore, to examine the negative implications and effects of environmentalist deployment of certain narratives about nature, given that some of these narratives are simultaneously used to uphold troubling ideas about US power, heterosexist and sexist concepts of families and sexuality, and racist ideas about indigenous and Global South peoples. (7)
  
  Thus what follows in the rest of this book is a sort of mythography of these "popular narrative tropes." In constructing this mythography, Sturgeon examines a wide variety of different media presentations from advertising pitches (which employ "environmental" tropes) to films ("King Kong," "Dances With Wolves, "Hidalgo") to science fiction ("2001 A Space Odyssey," "The Day After Tomorrow") to Disney movies for children to specifically environmentalist nonfiction such as "An Inconvenient Truth."
  
  The tropes that Sturgeon selects for her analysis are probably the most important part of this book. Sturgeon reveals the American "frontier" myth as persisting past the close of the actual physical frontier, and two iconic figures stand out as emblems of this "frontier" myth. The first is the trope of the Ecological Indian, who is both Pocahontas (Disney version) and Iron Eyes Cody in the famous "Keep America Beautiful" antilittering ad campaign in the '70s. The Ecological Indian is a symbol of pristine purity, untainted by the ugly realities of imperialism but still standing (in a symbolic, unreal sense) against the imperialists. The other "frontier" myth is that of space exploration as a benign form of colonialism, as reflected in space opera. There are, of course, plenty of examples of each of these "frontier" myths.
  
  The "frontier myth," here, is of course a justification of the imperialist conquest of the Old West, though in the modern era such a myth is given an environmentalist twist as the "Ecological Indian," the myth of Native American purity, now presumably deceased, which is ostensibly re-dramatized in order to sponsor the preservation of nature without really getting the "White Man" to substantially change his ways.
  
  The space exploration myth is here used to explore the connection between the "frontier" attitude of science fiction writers, and Reagan's "Strategic Defense Initiative" for the militarization of space, which contributes to the population of near-Earth orbit with lots of "space junk," dangerous debris moving quickly in high-Earth orbit. Militarized "wastelands" in space are said to be analogues of previous militarized wastelands on Earth.
  
  When Sturgeon reflects upon children's movies (and other texts), she considers "superhero" narratives of "saving the Earth" which do not consider the corporate/ government "business as usual" context in which the Earth (really, ecosystem complexity) is in fact endangered.
  
  An interlude in this book about polar environments, both North and South, dramatizes the extent to which penguins are (in movie narratives in "The March of the Penguins" and "Happy Feet"), depicted as "popular symbols that conflate heterosexist family values and the need to resist environmental threats" (136), and another movie, about northern polar locals, which examines the real relations between abrupt climate change and the disappearance of sophisticated ways of "living off the land" among indigenous people living in the Arctic Circle area.
  
  Ultimately Sturgeon wishes to transition readers from social critiques of media images to a systematic critique of "the metabolism of man and nature" (to borrow Marx's phrase). She hopes that environmentalism will "move beyond individual modifications of ways of living to address the systematic, institutionalized structures that maintain inequality and promote environmental devastation." (182)
  
  But these structures are not really addressed here, not to the extent to which we can understand the hypertrophy in "the metabolism of man and nature." Sturgeon is too busy trying to bring identity politics into the conversation, and in doing so, she critiques media participation in mythic structures which have contributed to environmental devastation (e.g. the suburban nuclear family, the colonial frontier). Indeed, we would do well to reject such mythic structures, and to know them when we see them in the mass media.
  
  Mass media hopes that we might "save the Earth," however, were never anything but a fiction. Sturgeon is in a bit of a rush to proclaim that the critiques of racism, sexism, and heterosexism have a contribution to make to the critique of "the metabolism of man and nature" under capitalist, industrial conditions, without specifying too carefully what that latter critique really is. Perhaps we are intended to find out about metabolic critique by reading other books. Many of my previous diaries here are about the metabolic critique of capitalism, incl. book reviews. Certainly Sturgeon has been reading titles on much of that list -- she's got Joan Martinez-Alier prominently on her reading list, for instance.
  
  Even so, books such as Sturgeon's are fun to read. Previous books on "green" criticism have gotten bogged down in lengthy lists of categories this one moves carefully from cultural reference to cultural reference in ways which really entertain the reader while inviting her to think carefully about her exposure to entertainment industry messages. Recommended.