Lecture 9 Flashcards
the politics of eco grief, guilt and anxiety
The politics of eco-affect
- How can eco-emotion inform political claims?
- How can eco-emotion inform political projects and attitudes?
- How might eco-emotion inform political action?
o For examples, see slides
Main idea Cunsolo & Ellis
climate change creates human loss and therefore grief
Environmental grief is unusual due to its
o Timeframe (it can be anticipatory).
o Disenfranchised quality (mostly unrecognized and therefore not dealt with).
Eco grief and physical loss
o Loss of material possession and property.
o Slow violence of gradual change to environment.
o Disruption to how people interact with and connect to environs (inuit community).
Eco grief and loss of knowledge and identity
o Knowledge of environment thrown into disarray by climate change.
o Can call identity into question for those who maintain close ties to environment and whose sense of self is linked to it.
Main idea about grief and politics (Cunsolo and Ellis)
grief indicates interdependence with and reliance on what’s been lost.
Eco grief, interdependence and interconnection
- Grief highlights interconnection between and relational ties to other people and things.
- Eco-grief draws attention to humans’ interconnection to and dependence on nature (people are saddened by the loss indicates their reliance on it).
By drawing attention to our dependence on environment, eco grief implies that we have responsiblity toward it
2 responsibilities
o Ethical responsibility to treat that which we depend on in a way that’s morally sound.
o Political responsibility to use collective power to protect that which we depend on.
By drawing attention to human loss……..
- By drawing attention to human loss, eco-grief implies that people suffering from it may be entitled to justice and reparation.
Eco grief and eco anxiety, the risks
- People may respond to fraught eco-affect via psychological defense mechanisms.
- May manage eco-anxiety via
o Denial and disavowal (example on slides) - But this can create a vicious cycle: denying and disavowing climate change allows phenomenon causing negative eco-affect to worsen, which may lead some to double down on denial and disavowal.
- May manage eco-grief via
o Numbing or substance use
Nostalgia & eco-authoritarianism
- Eco-grief can be linked to nostalgia.
- Nostalgia can be used to strengthen appeal of authoritarianism.
- Nostalgia, grief and anxiety may feed into allure of eco-authoritarianism.
Climate change can throw a wrench in people’s ability to
o Manage existential fear of death.
o By giving live some enduring meaning.
Existential dread
- By upending the reassuring sense that life has meaning after we’re gone, climate change can heighten existential dread, leading some to seek relief in reaffirming the status quo.
- In this context, more far-reaching eco-political proposals may meet with reactionary backlash because they press on an affective sore spot, existential fear and distress.
Jensen, eco guilt and rhetoric
- Language and discourse can be used to encourage people to feel and act certain ways.
- Eco-friendly rhetorics: appeals to make small adjustments to everyday behaviours for the sake of the environment.
o “please recycle” on cans - Eco-friendly rhetorics are very common, especially in advertising and institutional branding.
Eco friendly rhetorics are profitable because they’re common (Jensen)
o Can convert interest in environmentalism into sales and consumption.
o Can distract from systemic change by focusing on individual action.
- Eco friendly rhetorics tap into low-lying levels of collective guilt and atonement.
- They promise relief from collective guilt via individual action.
o Buying green products
Jensen implication 1
- Implication one: eco-friendly rhetorics can perpetuate guilt atonement cycle.
Jensen implication 2
- Implication two: eco-friendly rhetorics can inhibit political environmental action and change (so that it’s expressed as individual behavior and atonement).
1971 crying indian public service announcement
o Produced and paid for by bottle and packaging corporations of keep America beautiful INC.
o In response to rise of radical green movements.
o Renders companies making disposable products blameless by pushing eco-blame onto consumers.
o Eco-emotional manipulation deflects attention from economic actors’ systemic contribution to harm.
Environmental scapegoating
- Scapegoating: blaming single person or group for misfortunes or wrongdoings of others.
- Environmental scapegoating: blaming single person or group for environmental misfortunes or wrongdoings.
- Used by corporations to shift blame for environmental harm onto consumers.
- By displacing their own contribution to environmental harm onto consumers, corporations absolve themselves of environmental wrongdoing.
2 dimensions of environmental scapegoating in the PSA (Jensen)
- Two dimensions of environmental scapegoating in the PSA
o Viewers blamed for pollution of physical landscape.
o Viewers blamed for industrial-colonialism.
What is the dissonance in the PSA?
- American audience asked to identify with both a) ad’s protagonist and b) the forces responsible for making him cry.
- This dissonance triggers a sense of collective guilt (viewers are guilty for both environmental degradation and genocide which are fused together).
Activation of guilt in the PSA
- Question of who’s responsible for pollution are deflected by focusing on inherited, collective guilt of an entire nation and its present environmental sins.
- Activation of guilt breeds desire for emotional relief, redirecting potential anger into a quest for reconciliation and atonement instead.
- Attribution of environmental harm to ambiguous group of people absolves corporate actors of guilt by rendering them indistinguishable from other actors.
- Collective guilt then individuated and attached to atonized consumers who are invited to atone via individual action and not politics.
Environmental scapegoating today
- Eco-guilt individuated and weaponized via carbon footprint concept.
- Popularized by British petroleum in 2005 in a 100 million dollar US media campaign.
- Attributes blame and guilt for environmental harm to individual consumers who should track and reduce their personal footprints to save the planet.
- Distracts from BP’s own carbon emissions and contribution to environmental harm.
- Focuses attention on individual adaption instead of collective, systemic change (political change).
Hypocrite’s trap
- Used to silence advocates of environmental change by pointing out how they either participate in or benefit from the environmental status quo.
o Politicians going by plane while calling for stronger environmental legislation. - Asserts that personal actions must align with recommendations for change.
- When the 2 are misaligned, advocates of environmental change are dismissed as hypocrites.
- Hypocrite’s trap guilt trips individuals for their inevitable participation in ecologically harmful systems.
- Hypocrite’s trap normalizes neoliberal commonsense wherein systemic compulsions are reduced to a matter of personal choice.
- Hypocrite’s trap transforms the collective, systemic culpability into individual blame and obstructs change because virtually no one can avoid accusations of hypocrisy.
Double bind
- Communication paradox where the substance of a message is undercut by its context.
o Like encouragement to switch from plastic to paper straws to fight climate change. - Suggested behavior modification may be environmentally beneficial but is so mismatched to the severity of the problem as to be self-undermining.
- It is crucial that you but the act doesn’t make an impact.
- Used to guilt people into taking environmental action that can only be insufficient, and to then blame them for this very insufficiency.
- Used, like the hypocrite’s trap to level accusations of complicity and eco-hypocrisy.
