Bad Environmentalism

Most environmentalist rhetoric comes in a select number of accepted repertoires e.g. indignant moralizing and sanctimonious nature worship. Although effective on some audiences, the sincerity and seriousness that pervades these responses puts many people off. Moreover, it can prove alienating for marginalised communities or the working class, who, with plenty of problems of their own – from to financial stress to police brutality – might balk at the idea of someone crying over the fate of a single polar bear. This does not mean that these communities cannot be reached, or that they do not have powerful environmentalist traditions of their own. But their traditions are rarely acknowledged in academic circles – being complicated, ambiguous, crass, or populist.

Nicole Seymour’s book Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age attempts to broaden the spectrum of environmentalisms acknowledged in academia by highlighting how humour, irony and irreverence provide different inflections of the same old discourse, but with occasionally more sensitivity to matters of class, race or sexuality. Although Seymour does not profess that such bad environmentalisms, as she calls them, are necessarily better than the middle-class sincerity we are used to (which can start to seem pretty radical in certain postmodernist contexts), they do serve a purpose: questioning the power of expert knowledge, exposing privilege, and building bridges between polarized communities, among other things.

For example, in her discussion of the documentary Peak, Seymour analyses the use of its comically uncomfortable long takes. In these moments, rather than rush on with the message, the film creates a space that becomes inflated with questions and ambiguous feelings by resisting the urge to narrativise, or to spell out the moral lesson. By lingering instead of moving on, suspended moments like these break up the narrative arcs that have become staples in environmental documentaries, drawing attention to the complexities of the present, instead of focusing on a set of futures in which utopia or ruination has already been achieved.

However, whereas humour can create moments of pause, and introspection, it can equally be employed to smooth over conflict, and to move the conversation on to less controversial topics. This just goes to show how difficult it is to make generalizations about comedic register – not that Seymour attempts any. She stays very close to the cultural texts that serve as the objects of her analysis, from films and cartoons, to stand-up and sketch comedy. Perhaps because she stays so close to the texts, the book is less explicitly involved in exploring their reception, or the in/out group dynamics of the different audiences that are hailed. When she does write about reader/viewer reception, she writes about affect in a more general sense. For example, she dwells on the circulation of shame – which, when evoked, may be reflected back and back again in wildly unproductive ways.

Instead of a shame-fueled environmentalism, Seymour advocates for a shameless, trashy, 'effluent' environmentalism. An environmentalism free of perfectionism and guilt, like the kind espoused in Elizabeth Stephens' and Annie Sprinkle's documentary Goodbye Gauley Mountain. Self-proclaimed eco-sexuals, Stephens and Sprinkle are experienced role-players. Because they juggle so many different identities (lesbian, environmentalist, but also - coalminer's daughter, Appalachian etc.), they can operate with a kind of self-reflexive, ironic distance that helps them engage with people based on shared values vs. differences. The benefit of distance demonstrates, once again why ecocriticism’s obsession with immediacy, immersion, and proximity needs to be questioned. We also stand to gain insight from stepping back, and out of yourself – to see how one fits into a larger social whole.

Laura op de Beke

Works Cited

Seymour, Nicole. Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age