Lecture 9

Question 1

The politics of eco-affect

Answer 1

• 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

Question 2

Main idea Cunsolo & Ellis

Answer 2

climate change creates human loss and therefore grief

Question 3

Environmental grief is unusual due to its

Answer 3

o Timeframe (it can be anticipatory).
o Disenfranchised quality (mostly unrecognized and therefore not dealt with).

Question 4

Eco grief and physical loss

Answer 4

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).

Question 5

Eco grief and loss of knowledge and identity

Answer 5

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.

Question 6

Main idea about grief and politics (Cunsolo and Ellis)

Answer 6

grief indicates interdependence with and reliance on what’s been lost.

Question 7

Eco grief, interdependence and interconnection

Answer 7

• 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).

Question 8

By drawing attention to our dependence on environment, eco grief implies that we have responsiblity toward it

2 responsibilities

Answer 8

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.

Question 9

By drawing attention to human loss……..

Answer 9

• By drawing attention to human loss, eco-grief implies that people suffering from it may be entitled to justice and reparation.

Question 10

Eco grief and eco anxiety, the risks

Answer 10

• 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

Question 11

Nostalgia & eco-authoritarianism

Answer 11

• 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.

Question 12

Climate change can throw a wrench in people’s ability to

Answer 12

o Manage existential fear of death.
o By giving live some enduring meaning.

Question 13

Existential dread

Answer 13

• 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.

Question 14

Jensen, eco guilt and rhetoric

Answer 14

• 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.

Question 15

Eco friendly rhetorics are profitable because they’re common (Jensen)

Answer 15

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

Question 16

Jensen implication 1

Answer 16

• Implication one: eco-friendly rhetorics can perpetuate guilt atonement cycle.

Question 17

Jensen implication 2

Answer 17

• Implication two: eco-friendly rhetorics can inhibit political environmental action and change (so that it’s expressed as individual behavior and atonement).

Question 18

1971 crying indian public service announcement

Answer 18

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.

Question 19

Environmental scapegoating

Answer 19

• 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.

Question 20

2 dimensions of environmental scapegoating in the PSA (Jensen)

Answer 20

• Two dimensions of environmental scapegoating in the PSA
  o Viewers blamed for pollution of physical landscape.
  o Viewers blamed for industrial-colonialism.

Question 21

What is the dissonance in the PSA?

Answer 21

• 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).

Question 22

Activation of guilt in the PSA

Answer 22

• 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.

Question 23

Environmental scapegoating today

Answer 23

• 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).

Question 24

Hypocrite’s trap

Answer 24

• 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.

Question 25

Double bind

Answer 25

• 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.