The Tropes of Celebrity Environmentalism

The Tropes of Celebrity Environmentalism. , 2020

Celebrity advocacy for environmental causes has grown dramatically in recent decades. An examination of this expansion and the rise of causes such as climate change reveals the shifting politics and organization of advocacy. We address these changes to the construction and interpretation of celebrity advocacy and detail how they have produced a rich variety of environmental celebrity advocates. We also account for differences between legacy (e.g., radio, TV, newspapers) and online celebrities and their practices (e.g., hash-tag publics, brandjacking, online communities). Environmental celebrity ad-vocates' performances can be divided into nine tropes, each characterized in part by the particular varieties of environmentalism that they promote. We present the tropes and discuss their five cross-cutting themes. We conclude with a set of questions for future research on celebrity environmentalism.

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Climate Science, 2017

Since the mid-2000s, entertainment celebrities have played increasingly prominent roles in the cultural politics of climate change, ranging from high-profile speeches at UN climate conferences, and social media interactions with their fans, to producing and appearing in documentaries about climate change that help give meaning to and communicate this issue to a wider audience. The role afforded to celebrities as climate change communicators is an outcome of a political environment increasingly influenced by public relations and attuned toward the media’s representation of political ideas, policies, and sentiments. Celebrities act as representatives of mass publics, operating within centers of elite political power. At the same time, celebrities represent the environmental concerns of their audiences; that is, they embody the sentiments of their audiences on the political stage. It is in this context that celebrities have gained their authority as political, social, and environmental “experts,” and the political performances of celebrities provide important ways to engage electorates and audiences with climate change action More recently, celebrities offer novel engagements with climate change that move beyond scientific data and facilitate more emotional and visceral connections with climate change in the public’s everyday lives. Contemporary celebrities, thus, work to shape how audiences and publics ought to feel about climate change in efforts to get them to act or change their behaviors. These “after data” moments are seen very clearly in Leonardo DiCaprio’s documentary Before the Flood. Yet, with celebrities acting as our emotional witnesses, they not only might bring climate change to greater public attention, but they expand their brand through neoliberalism’s penchant for the commoditization of everything including, as here, care and concern for the environment. As celebrities build up their own personal capital as eco-warriors, they create very real value for the “celebrity industrial complex” that lies behind their climate media interventions. Climate change activism is, through climate celebrities, rendered as spectacle, with celebrities acting as environmental and climate pedagogues framing for audiences the emotionalized problems and solutions to global environmental change. Consequently, celebrities politicize emotions in ways that that remain circumscribed by neoliberal solutions and actions that responsibilize audiences and the public.

For many contemporary media celebrities, the environment—and in particular, climate change—is the new black. One cursory gaze across the global media-scape confirms this: Leonardo DiCaprio has produced and starred in Before the Flood (2016) which tells the tales of his journey as the UN Ambassador of Peace to engage powerful leaders about climate change. This, of course, was preceded by his widely publicised Best Actor speech at the Oscars where he made an impassioned plea for the audience to be concerned about climate change, public procrastination and inequality. Olivia Munn, Harrison Ford, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jessica Alba witness and ‘emote’ for audiences about the impacts of climate change across the world on ordinary people and ecologies in the television programme Years of Living Dangerously (2014). Mark Ruffalo writes a series of prominent columns about fracking, solar power and clear air and water in the Huffington Post, the Millennial ‘newspaper’ of record. Even ‘public intellectual’ celebrities such as Naomi Klein are getting in the act: She has starred in—along with her six-year old son—an online short film put together by the UK’s Guardian newspaper entitled Under the Surface that shows the impacts of climate change on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. For her, discussing her emotional responses to climate change and introducing her son in the film, worked as a way for her to ‘communicate in a visceral way, the intergenerational theft at the heart of this crisis’ (Klein, 2016). Environmental politics, with this celebritization and media-isation of climate change and other ecological issues, has gone spectacular. Celebrities, as our witnesses and muses, now speak very loudly for and about the environment in increasingly important ways that have impacts on what we know about Nature, how we feel about it and what we should do to ‘save’ it. In this era of global environmental change, environmental celebrities have positioned themselves as increasingly powerful and politicised meditators of our increasingly fraught human-environment relationship.

Given the increasingly pervasive and spectacular role of celebrities in humanitarian and environmental campaigning since the late 1990s – as spokespeople for NGO campaigns (Anderson, 2013) and as creators of their own organizations (Alexander, 2013) – it is surprising that relatively little research has been undertaken to explore celebrity involvement in climate change campaigning and communication. Indeed, as the COP21 Paris negotiations in December 2015 indicated, high profile A-list celebrities were the “charismatic megafauna” (Boykoff et. al., 2010) lending global star power to this high-profile political event, ‘expertly’ navigating the intersections between media, politics and science through speeches at the UN conference from actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Alex Baldwin, and former celebrity politician and actor, Arnold Schwarzenegger. With the rise of “Celebritus Politicus” (Goodman, 2013) in recent years, it is not surprising that a global political event about the future of our planet would garner elite celebrity endorsement, yet research on understanding this growing “celebritization of climate change” (Boykoff and Goodman, 2009b, p. 395) is relatively scarce.

Sustainability

Screen culture and conglomerates are starting to echo the green shooting phenomena; roles such as sustainability director, eco-manager, eco-consultant, and eco-assistant are taking a more prominent space in the entertainment and cultural industry to achieve the goal of creating sustainable productions. In this current context, there seems to be a need for an agent to catch the attention of the audience to make a claim about green policies and contribute to a green literacy fabric. This opinion article recognizes that there are two types of voices, internal (scholars and practitioners) and external (celebrities and audiences), that have arisen in the audiovisual industry from different perspectives. Hence, through a theoretical approach, it tackles the particularities, typologies, and the role celebrities play as hot spots to push both viewers and creators into better decision-making models. The results show two main typologies: celebrification, in which a person becomes famous due t...

Conservation Science and Practice, 2020

The use of celebrities in marketing campaigns is widespread globally, including in environmental conservation. Celebrity endorsements are pervasive, but there is limited evidence of their effectiveness. We conducted a review of celebrity-endorsed environmental campaigns. We report on the extent to which celebrities have been used in these campaigns, whether evaluation of the endorsement has been conducted, and assess whether there is evidence that the celebrities achieved the objectives they set out to accomplish through their engagement. We searched the peer-reviewed and grey literature in six languages from July 2018 to January 2019 and found 79 campaigns implemented in nine countries from 1976 to 2018. Two thirds of campaigns were implemented in China and reported in Chinese. Only four campaigns were evaluated, but none of the evaluations provided evidence of the effectiveness of celebrity endorsement. Evaluation focused instead on overall campaign outputs and outcomes. Claims of effectiveness were made, but the lack of measurable objectives, theory of change, outcome indicators, and critical evaluation renders it impossible to determine whether the outcomes achieved by the campaigns can be attributed to celebrity endorsement. It thus remains unclear whether celebrity endorsement can contribute to conservation efforts. It is essential for environmental practitioners and researchers to report the outcomes and lessons learned from celebrity endorsements to ensure that their future use in conservation marketing campaigns is evidence-based, thereby improving conservation practice.

AEA Randomized Controlled Trials

We conduct a natural field experiment on the effect of having a celebrity endorse an information campaign aiming to induce pro-environmental behavior in the context of single-use plastics consumption. We find that an information campaign does not have a significant effect on behavior unless it is endorsed by a celebrity. Subjects in the treatment with a combination of information campaign and celebrity endorsement use around 25% fewer plastic items compared with subjects in the control group. Adding a pledge to the endorsement does not result in an incremental reduction in the use of plastic items. Exploratory analysis suggests that the information campaign itself affect attitudes, but not behavior, and that it is the celebrity endorsement itself that affect behavior.

Paper Prepared for Symposium “Capitalism, Democracy, and Celebrity Advocacy,” University of Manchester, UK, 19-20 June 2012

The growing prominence of celebrities within the global environmental movement-and their power to shape and advance this movement's aims-has been a burgeoning focus of recent research. Thus far, such analysis has viewed the phenomenon primarily through a political economy lens, contending that celebrity is harnessed to further the agenda of a mainstream environmental movement that has become increasingly conjoined with neoliberal capitalism, as expressed in the mounting enthusiasm to address ecological decline through corporate partnership and incentive-based market mechanisms. This presentation draws on psychoanalytic research to offer the complementary suggestion that celebrity also functions as a form of transference helping to sustain the fantasy implicit in this neoliberal vision "that capitalist markets are the answer to their own ecological contradictions" (Büscher 2012:12). Through transference, the charismatic authority conferred to larger-than-life celebrities helps to conceal the gaps between Real and Symbolic in this vision and thus obfuscates contradictions inherent in the execution of neoliberal environmental strategies. From this perspective, cynical suspicion concerning celebrities' authenticity may paradoxically enhance their authority, and thus this analysis helps to explain counterintuitive findings that widespread ambivalence towards celebrities does little to diminish their power to shape public sentiment.

Celebrity Studies, 2015

The growing prominence of celebrities within the global environmental movement – and their power to shape and advance this movement’s aims – has been a burgeoning focus of recent research. Thus far, such analysis has viewed the phenomenon primarily through a political economy lens, contending that celebrity is harnessed to further the agenda of a mainstream environmental movement which has become increasingly conjoined with neoliberal capitalism, as expressed in the mounting enthusiasm to address ecological decline through corporate partnership and incentive-based market mechanisms. This article draws on a psychoanalytic approach to offer the complementary suggestion that celebrity also functions as a form of transference helping to sustain the fantasy implicit in this neoliberal vision ‘that capitalist markets are the answer to their own ecological contradictions’. Through transference, the charismatic authority conferred to larger-than-life celebrities helps to conceal the gaps between Real and Symbolic in this vision and thus obfuscates contradictions inherent in the execution of neoliberal environmental strategies. From this perspective, cynical suspicion concerning celebrities’ authenticity may paradoxically enhance their authority, and thus this analysis helps to explain counterintuitive findings that widespread ambivalence towards celebrities does little to diminish their power to shape public sentiment.