|
Article Excerpt
Many commentators in the U.S. academy, press, and nonprofit and activist worlds have recently argued that an effective response to the unprecedented global scale of the ongoing climate crisis demands a new kind of environmentalism. In the realm of public activism, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger assembled a variety of preexisting critiques into their notorious position paper "The Death of Environmentalism," which argued that "modern environmentalism is no longer capable of dealing with the world's most serious ecological crisis" and that "a more powerful movement depends on letting go of old identities, categories and assumptions." (1) The plea to reorient environmentalism away from its traditional focus on resource conservation, wilderness preservation, and pollution prevention and cleanup has become the hallmark of some who see global climate change (GCC) as an issue that supersedes all other ecological agendas. The underlying problem is one of scale. For one thing, GCC is too big a problem for any current institutional actor. More importantly for this essay, the implicit assumptions of global "Environmentalism 2.0," as the news media have dubbed it, have broad consequences for the structure of the environmental movement itself and even for the fundamental terms in which "the environment" is understood in the cultural productions that so often shape or at least articulate consensus in contemporary societies. The very scale of the global context presents deep challenges to the customary ways that the West imagines basic concepts like place, agency, and justice. As literary ecocritic Ursula Heise has pointed out, the realist narrative structures that sustained earlier phases of environmentalism--structures that made use of well-defined places (Hetch Hetchy, for example), iconic human agents (John Muir), and readily grasped mechanisms of cause and effect (damming destroys alpine valleys)--may be inadequate to represent an invisible global crisis, the responsibility for which lies in billions of widely dispersed individual and corporate actions and the effects of which are first indicated not in new forms of tangible damage but as abstract upticks in statistical risk. (2)
Fredric Jameson, speaking of the general significance of the sense of the global that is brought about by planetwide crises like GCC, has noted that new forms of nationalism are apt to arise to defend "national difference" against the abstracting and leveling mandate of large-scale climate regulation. (3) In the environmental movements of non-Western countries, this phenomenon has often taken the form of nationalist arguments against the environmental depredations of international extractive industries and manufacturers.
Although the United States is not immune to this kind of environmental appeal, matters are complicated considerably by several relevant historical facts. For one thing, the United States has long been the world's largest polluter and emitter of greenhouse gasses (GHGs) both in terms of its domestic industries and its financing and consumption of polluting industries elsewhere in the world. Because of its simultaneous role as a single nation (prone like any other to fits of domestic econationalism) and a transnational ideological force that drives much of the current economic globalization (often called "Americanization"), the United States is in an unusual position with regard to the cultural politics of climate change. Any American cultural consensus on climate must grapple with the finitude of an American ideology and power long associated with nature, a subject out of favor since the end of the Cold War. Indeed there are signs that U.S. environmental culture, without waiting for intellectuals to sort out the theoretical dimensions of the new representational paradigm, is already undergoing a rapid and difficult shift toward the undefined target of climate-change discourse. This essay explores the aesthetic and ideological dimensions-some more obvious than others--of this new phase of environmental representation, with a particular concern for the fate of environmental justice as a core component of global Environmentalism 2.0. The environmental justice movement (EJM), despite its major differences with traditional environmental preservationism, shares with that earlier ideology an emphasis on place- and community-based measures and standards of justice. (4) As we see it, the palpable investment of some forms of new environmental discourse with geopolitical anxieties (particularly directed toward China) threatens to obscure the EJM's crucial revisions of older forms of environmentalism while uncritically redeploying some of the most problematic racist and nationalistic tropes of the latter. Much of the essay is devoted to teasing out some emblematic moments of this troublesome reactionary trend. From our perspective, an effective response to GCC requires a more careful integration of global environmental justice, environmental justice cultural studies, (5) and ecocriticism in order to produce new kinds of ecocultural narratives that do not pit nation against nation, race against race, or species against species. Despite the negative tone of our critique, we remain convinced that clarity about human and nonhuman standards of true environmental justice can be advanced--even in an age of environmental crises of global scale--by the cultural sphere's privileged ability to articulate differences in worldview, facilitate mutual understanding, and even trigger the empathy that lies at the heart of global environmental justice. (6)
The growth in cultural production related to GCC looks remarkably like the graph of the historical rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide used to great effect in An Inconvenient Truth (2006): consistently low numbers preceding a breathtaking spike. In the case of climate-change culture, the beginning of the spike can be pegged at 1989, when Bill McKibben wrote the first general-audience guide to the phenomenon, The End of Nature. The peak is not yet in sight: 2004 witnessed the first installment of Kim Stanley Robinson's climate-change trilogy, Forty Signs of Rain; global warming skeptic Michael Crichton's hysterical polemic State of Fear; and the first major cinematic treatment, Roland Emmerich's The Day After Tomorrow. In 2006, Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth and subsequent Nobel Peace Prize focused national and international attention on the problem. Even more recently, GHG environmentalism has continued to take on new subject matter (Hurricane Katrina, for instance) and to expand into new genres, including school texts, policy statements, nonfiction books, documentaries, and television specials. And the effects of climate-change discourse are not restricted to works explicitly about global warming: many more books and films on apparently unrelated subjects bear traces of new GHG-environmentalist perspective.
The specifics of all of these GCC works are of course quite various, and already their diversity precludes a truly comprehensive survey and analysis. Such a caveat notwithstanding, there are a number of significant trends in GCC culture that we would like to identify and analyze by way of discussing a set of emblematic cultural texts ranging from environmental photography to policy guides to documentaries. The first trend is the by-now fairly ritualized forswearing of older conservationist and preservationist environmental models. The second is the elision of specific race- and class-based environmental injustices as key aspects of the GCC narrative. The third is the introduction of nebulous, but nevertheless readily identifiable, cultural anxieties about the geopolitical rise of China and the associated decline of U.S. global power. And the fourth, to come full circle, is the redeployment of traditional U.S. environmental tropes in ways that soft-pedal environmental justice goals in favor of a geopolitical agenda that aims to preserve U.S. economic and political power. As we tease out the details of this pattern, we want also to be sensitive to moments in which expressions of global environmental justice breakthrough the consolidating narrative, becoming on occasion visible alternatives to that narrative. We undertake this latter task primarily through a reading of a documentary, Up the Yangtze (2007), which we argue moves successfully between the multiple scales of the individual, national, and global in ways that escape some of the analytic and political traps we warn against. Although we cannot yet point to a full-fledged alternative to Environmentalism 2.0, we hope at least to make clear the hazards of a "new" environmentalism that fails to come to grips with the shortcomings it inherits from the old, particularly when it comes to race, nature, and nation.
America's Panda Bear
In the winter of 2007, the most effective image to date of GCC went viral on the internet. A photograph purportedly showing two polar bears dramatically stranded on a shrinking ice floe, first posted to the Canadian Ice Service's website, made its way into the larger environmental networks before spilling out into virtually every email chain letter and news page on the Web. By the time the photo made it into the print media, the import of the image had been established: "They cling precariously to the top of what is left of the ice floe, their fragile grip the perfect symbol of the tragedy of global warming," began the accompanying text in the London Daily Mail of 1 February 2007.
As an illustration of imminent extinction, the picture hardly could be more compelling. Driven to the edge of a lonely chunk of ice literally hollowing out beneath them, the two bears stare into the camera with a look of interest that can easily be construed as hunger or even as a request for help. An inverted Adam and Eve, isolated and about to be extinguished along with their icy paradise, the bears spoke to a host of sentiments clustered around common Western tropes of wilderness, human dominion, and animal welfare. The public case for the global warming crisis, almost twenty years in the making, appeared finally to have found a consensus-clinching image.
[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]
As became clear...
|
