Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age

by Nicole Seymour

Traces a tradition of ironic and irreverent environmentalism, asking us to rethink the movement’s reputation for gloom and doom Activists today strive to educate the public about climate change, but sociologists have found that the more we know about alarming issues, the less likely we are to act. Meanwhile, environmentalists have acquired a reputation as gloom-and-doom killjoys. Bad Environmentalism identifies contemporary texts that respond to these absurdities and ironies through absurdity and irony—as well as camp, frivolity, irreverence, perversity, and playfulness.  Nicole Seymour develops the concept of “bad environmentalism”: cultural thought that employs dissident affects and sensibilities to reflect critically on our current moment and on mainstream environmental activism. From the television show Wildboyz to the short film series Green Porno , Seymour shows that this tradition of thought is widespread—spanning animation, documentary, fiction film, performance art, poetry, prose fiction, social media, and stand-up comedy since at least 1975. Seymour argues that these texts reject self-righteousness and sentimentality, undercutting public negativity toward activism and questioning basic environmentalist that love and reverence are required for ethical relationships with the nonhuman and that knowledge is key to addressing problems like climate change. Funny and original, Bad Environmentalism champions the practice of alternative green politics. From drag performance to Indigenous comedy, Seymour expands our understanding of how environmental art and activism can be pleasurable, even in a time of undeniable crisis.

Genres: Nonfiction, Climate Change, Ecology, Environment, Green, Politics

304 pages, Paperback

Published October 30, 2018

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Andrea McDowell]

I need to come clean.

I am a climate worker; this makes me sanctimonious and obnoxious. I see that now. My sincere concern and wish to have a positive impact in the world in some way is the very thing that has prevented progress on climate action. If only I had been funnier, more irreverent and ironic! Then we might not be teetering on the edge of disaster.

We all should have been taking better lessons from the pages of history. Yes, the Famous Five were known for their civil disobedience and campaigning on suffrage for women, but who could forget that incomparable parody skit of the inconsistencies in the suffrage platform that tilted public sentiment and won the day? Sure, MLK and Rosa Parks are lionized for their activism, but omg, they were just insufferable--right? So sanctimonious. They should have taken themselves much less seriously; they might have advanced the rights of African Americans much faster. And the abolitionists! They were awful. Standing on their stages talking about the evils of slavery (so seriously! Unforgivable) in their dresses and suits made from slave-harvested cotton, drinking their slave-harvested coffee with slave-harvested sugar! Even the slaves and the freed blacks wore clothes made by slavery! If only they had poked more fun at their own hypocrisies, we might not have needed a war to end slavery!

Maybe you think these comparisons are grotesque. Maybe you think I am tearing down your heroes. Indeed it is with my own heart breaking that I type these words. But my eyes have been opened: only edgy, irreverent, ironic, self-conscious communications can get through to the public on environmental (and I imagine any other) issues, just as Nicole Seymour writes.

Mind you, I do have questions. Why is it that the edgy, self-conscious, ironic, irreverent works of environmentalism she champions in these pages are so unknown? If Al Gore turns people off because of his sanctimony and hypocrisy, why is he famous all over the world for his activism, and why have so many signed up for Climate Reality training and gone on to implement it in their own communities? If environmentalists don't recognize the works Seymour prefers and have no sense of humour, why is it that I'm only aware of Wildboyz and Green Porno and the Lesbian Park Rangers etc. because my environmental and climate activist friends have told me about them approvingly? She seems so certain of her opinions on the effectiveness of the modes she prefers that I must believe she has some research to cite about their effectiveness, so where is it?

I'm similarly perplexed about why her own book hasn't been getting more coverage. Surely, as she says, she is finally pointing the way to progress! Yet her book was only reviewed in blogs and academic english journals. So confusing! Yet David Wallace Wells' The Uninhabitable Earth, published in the same year, has twice the google results and was reviewed in the NYT and The Guardian (among others) and hit several bestseller lists, even though it is dripping with sincerity and is (in my memory) quite devoid of jokes. Did he bribe someone?

I'll also admit to some confusion about why it is that this book takes itself so seriously. Isn't Seymour undercutting her own message by penning something so ... well ... dull?

No matter; I'll correct this single-handedly by pressing this book into the hands of everyone I know who needs it. It goes without saying that everyone I know in the climate and environmental spaces needs a copy (and that's a lot!) so they can stop this foolish experimentation with saying what they mean. But also! All of my married mom friends! For years I've heard them complaining about how their husbands never help around the house. Clearly the real problem all along is that they weren't funny enough when they said it! They weren't ironic and irreverent! They didn't poke at their own hypocrisies! How can their husbands be held responsible for their (in/)actions when there is anything at all in the message or messenger they can point to and disapprove of?

And please, someone, press this book into Ms. Thunberg's hands with all possible speed. Her sincerity will clearly be her downfall and this will doom us all to apocalypse. Imagine how successful she could be if only she were ironic! How can she expect anyone to pay attention to her when there is so much genuine rage in her words? We simply must save her from this appalling tendency to speak from the heart.

~~~~~

The above is for the author or her fans, if they ever come this way. For the rest of you:

Seymour is like the Christina Hoff Summers & Camille Paglia of environmentalism, only boring as sin. When her arguments weren't infuriating me, they were literally putting me to sleep. On the rare occasions she references a bit of academic research, she twists it. For example, she often refers to one of my favourite climate communications books, Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life, and the research it cites showing that the knowledge deficit model is flawed and the problem isn't that people don't know enough. But I actually read that book, so I can say with 100% certainty that Norgaard isn't lecturing people on being funnier, uses the inconsistencies to discuss the construction of denial rather than using them to attack environmentalists, acknowledges that there are no clear winners in terms of turning opinions or motivating actions, and concludes that we'll have to "make the path by walking it." Strange how this doesn't ever turn up in Seymour's book. I guess that wouldn't support her point that the problem with environmentalism is that we're not funny enough.

The rest of the time she doesn't even try to provide evidence. How do we know that environmentalists aren't already trying to use humour? We don't. Is there any evidence showing that people respond better to funny messages than sincere ones? Not in here. And anyone who spends fifteen minutes with climate and environmental activists knows that a ritual unburdening of recent hypocrisies happens all the time (does Seymoure know *any*?). (This book is like a dude arguing that women invite sexual assault by how they dress and speak, and who writes of women in such a way that it's clear he's never spoken to a woman beside his mother ever in his life.) She never even contemplates that maybe, just maybe, the reason Al Gore and the "sincere" and "sanctimonious" environmentalists she decries are more well known is because PEOPLE RESPOND BETTER TO THEIR MESSAGES. Maybe people don't like irony, Nicole; maybe it's just you.

Over and over we hear about the fucking backlash and how people attack environmentalists with charges of hypocrisy etc., AND WE NEVER ONCE HEAR THAT MOST OF THOSE PEOPLE ARE WELL-FUNDED CLIMATE DENIERS BACKED BY FOSSIL-FUEL COMPANIES. We never hear of the hypocrisies in the charges of hypocrisy. We never hear any doubt or questioning of the legitimacy of the backlash. It's just, "I hear a lot about how they're sanctimonious hypocrites, and I'm going to take that 100% on face value as fact and proceed from there." It's shamefully shoddy scholarship.

I got 100 pages in (alternating fury and sleep), and then just started skipping and skimming, then read the Conclusion. Apparently 9/11 and the ensuring war show that irreverence, humour and satire are better ways to confront evil than sincerity or engagement. Yep. It was the stand-up comics that did it. The rest of us just got in the way.

Has it ever occurred to this woman that we don't need to turn it into a competition? That it's ok to have both? Again, has she EVER MET an environmental or climate activist? Or is her own social circle somehow the only one on the planet where they don't love satire and comedy, even if that's not how they're speaking up themselves?

This is a terrible book. I can't even give it one star. Normally a book like this would go straight from my hands to the give-away pile, but in this case, given her argument, maybe I'll use its pages as the basis for a very sincere piece of environmental/climate art.

[Denise Woodruff · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wasn't sure about this one I entered the giveaway by accident. I won so I read it and I actually loved it. what you think you know you may be right and surprised me is what you don't think of when things are said. Some of the things they say don't they do. It's a easy read it's is kinda funny. I love the way the author put this together. I have never read books like this it has never.caught my interest but I won the book so out of respect I read it. I'm glad I won it now I got to find more like it

[Savannah Paige Murray · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book! Seymour offers great theoretical terms like “trashy environmentalism” and others which push back against the typical representation of environmentalism. I was particularly drawn to Ch 4 about the whiteness of environmentalism and Ch 5 about class. So glad I read this!

[Kai · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm writing a formal book review for Social & Cultural Geography, so nothing here except to say that this book is GREAT. if you have institutional access, you can read my review at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/1...

[Erica Eller · Rating 4 out of 5]

Over the past year, I've begun writing exclusively in the niche of sustainability. Since I come from a literary theory and criticism background, the themes and tropes within the sustainability niche feel a bit over-trodden and ripe for renewal. For this reason, I enjoyed Seymour's book, which primarily makes a critique of existing environmental works and campaigns for their affective modes. It brings to light the ways that environmental rhetoric and critique that takes a shaming, moralistic, sentimental, pastoral, prescriptive, and perfectionist stance may scream more about the producers' socio-economic positions than really inspire environmental actions or affinities.

Seymour points out how the dominant voice of environmental discourse is often situated in hetero-normative "white" affective modes of propriety, service, asceticism and restraint. Seymour argues that these modes counter-intuitively distance people who might otherwise engage more in support for environment through their modes of employment, as they often implicitly exclude non-white, non-straight and non-middle class world views. In other words, the audience of environmental writing and advocacy is predominantly slated to look and talk a lot like the socio-economic class background of the authors. At the same time, she argues, these normative environmental "affective" modes also employ rhetoric that shields or mystifies the implicit paradoxes embedded in such normative environmental discursive modes. In a very telling example, she points out how Leonardo DiCaprio gets chided for flying on airplanes for air travel, even though he has raised millions of dollars in support of conservation and other environmental causes.

Throughout the book, she identifies an eclectic set of texts or projects that employ modes that exist outside the dominant "environmentalist" discursive plain. I particularly enjoyed her selection of texts, because I was already familiar with many of them, and they were suddenly identified as representative of an "other" way to engage in environmental affective production.

In my opinion, the book opens up an important frame of critique in two ways. Firstly, it helps us to question how different modes of environmental discourse can be produced using different affective modes including, but not limited to irony, camp, satire and humor to tease out some of the implicit ironies within much of environmental writing today. It also provides means to diversify the environmental discourse in ways that could make environmental support more approachable to different audiences.

However, the book also lacks substance when it comes to making distinctions between covertly anti-environmental humor versus environmentally supportive humor. It would be nice to have a chapter that cites the ways that anti-environmental propaganda also employs its own discursive modes.

Seymour also critiques the affective impact of works that have shift from more ambivalent, open-ended, non-prescriptive discourse towards more directive and promotional support for the environment (Green Porno). In this sense, she prefers works that don't tell the readership/viewers what to think or what the text stands for, engaging them in the art of critique rather than ones that transparently state their message.

If ambivalence is the privileged affective realm, however, then how should we approach works that deliberately hide their plain speech and employ cultural doublespeak? What do we do with campaigns produced by think tanks to specifically confuse and distract viewers from the real issues of environmental damage, if they still achieve humor and enjoyable affect? Drawing distinctions between elusive works that subtly encourage viewers to problematize and engage in critical support of the environment from those that specifically obfuscate to lead viewers away from pro-environmental stances would be helpful in this book.

Furthermore, the book lumps together all kinds of genres of texts without really drawing distinctions between the different aims of these texts: whether they are produced as comedy, advocacy, etc. She tends to prefer comedic works (Wildboyz), while comparing them with texts intended as educational works and advocacy campaigns (Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth). Obviously these different genres will employ contrasting affective modes based on their overarching aims. In this sense, her main thesis boils down to suggesting that environmental advocates employ more humor, looking across genres to establish their affective modes.

Lastly, I would like to point out the lack of rigor with which the book defines its own understanding of what "environmentalism" means. If the author had established a clear and transparent view of the her own environmental purview, it would help us understand not only what she sees worth mocking: prescriptive environmental liberal perfectionism, but what she stands for. After reading the book, she seems unwilling to proclaim genuine support for any environmental policies, protests, scientific data, ethical, or historical stances that could help inform the reader what her environmental "agenda" is. So far, it seems aimed at popularizing support for the environment, but "what environment?" is what I'm curious about. How does she define it? This unwillingness or lack of interest in commenting far beyond the affective plain, for me, weakens the thrust of her argument.

However, from a creative writer's perspective the book did inspire me to beware of those over-trodden tropes of environmental discourse, avoiding the idealization of "nature," and understanding that not everyone buys into the elevated, moralistic tone that condemns polluting industry and technology. Moreover, I gained a better understanding of how the Bahktinian "canivalesque" literary stance I hold so dear can effectively merge with my environmental interests.

[Sarah Jaquette · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic book. All of my issues with environmentalism make sense through the lens of “irony” that Seymour develops here. Humor and the environment don’t usually go together, but they should! Rarely do you read a book on the environment that you laugh through. It’s all still serious of course, but what might be the role of humor in saving the planet? Read the book and find out.

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this book Nicole Seymour challenges us to consider who is allowed to be an environmentalist. What are the signals of authenticity must people put forth to be considered an environmentalist, and by relying on those signals, what opportunities do we miss. By focusing on "Bad" environmentalism, Dr. Seymour asks us to think about what are the affective modes we expect (sacrifice, scarcity and frankly guilt) and what are alternative methods of engaging with environmentalism. Each chapter focuses on a different way in which people are bending, or breaking, our societal rules about what environmentalists should look like. From trashy TV shows to Mike Judge movies, she critically looks at media that do not involve David Attenborough, but yet somehow still manage to engage the audience in conversations about species and habitat loss.

A real strength of this book is its ability to highlight work by LGTBQ, Black, Native American and Poor scholars who are working within and around environmentalism. By focusing on often excluded voices she shows that there are multiple perspectives that we are missing when we only look to a white, heteronormative, sanctimonious approach to doing environmentalism.

I taught this as part of my class on Anthropcene Conservation because I like the perspective of re-imagining our future. Dr. Seymour asks us to think about different ways that we can be green, and to not rely on the way that we have always done things as a valid reason to perpetuate a myopic, exclusionary and frankly boring, way of being environmentalism. Rather, she offers a vision that includes diverse voices practicing a form of environmentalism that can draw on camp, irony and joy to make us feel good about what we're doing to protect the earth.

[Jessica DeWitt · Rating 5 out of 5]

I try to explore the boundaries of mainstream "environmentalism," and expand the groups of people, actions, and behaviours that can fit under this umbrella term in my research and writing. In Bad Environmentalism, Nicole Seymour provides a wealth of new ways to think about and interrogate this topic in my own work. Seymour's writing is always sharp and clear, and keeps me engrosses even when I have no prior knowledge of the cultural pieces she is writing about. I will definitely refer back to this work repeatedly in the future.

[Dylan]

I'm reading through Lithub's 365 Books to Start Your Climate Change Library, a reading list in four sections (Classics, Science, Fiction & Poetry, and Ideas). This book is #8 of Part 4: The Ideas and #20 overall.

Yeah, so, I didn't finish this one. I think that reading social/cultural criticism & theory is probably a muscle that you need to work out & I am extremely out of shape. Or it’s a foreign environment that I need time to acclimate to. Or whatever metaphor you want to use. Though I am also tempted to use a different metaphor, one where someone’s head is so far up their back end, that wow oh wow the acoustics make them sound so good to themselves, but to anyone else it just sounds like muffled nonsense.

I agree with the general idea that climate activism has an optics problem. I agree with the general idea that new approaches to how we discuss environmentalism would be helpful/enriching overall. I disagree that people who are upset - vocally & publicly - about climate change and its negative effects (drought, mass displacement of people from their homes, extinction, wildfires, etc, etc) are somehow being unduly sanctimonious or self-righteous or something. The main body of the book is analysis of a range of different things that employ unconventional "affects" - irony, perversion, camp, i.e. "bad environmentalism"- as a response to the alleged mainstream environmentalist affect of self-important doomsaying. Anyways, I'm sure the works discussed are worth checking out, and I probably will, but 200 pages of extremely boring analysis is not the method I am going to use.

It’s a bold move to combat what you see as a lack of effective “affective” messaging on the part of climate activists & communicators by writing a dry-as-dust, overly-academic, 10-inline-citations-per-page slog of a book.

Shoutouts to cover designer Michel Vrana and also iStock Photo user cranach for the truly great cover art.

[Sarah Ray · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is unlike anything I've ever read. Who makes environmental issues funny? Seymour, that's who. But in all seriousness, she builds a fabulous case for why humor is needed to save the planet. She isn't using humor to just dismiss the gravity of the problems. On the contrary, she is detailed and researched about the way comedy enables people to access forms of critique and care that they otherwise would be shut off to. The mode of tragedy has dominated environmental narratives for too long; it's time for comedy to help us make sense of the challenges ahead.

[Zander Kessler · Rating 3 out of 5]

While this definitely isn’t a light pleasure read, I thought it was really important. I love and identify with the idea of being a ridiculous, sarcastic, absurd, imperfect and often hypocritical environmentalist. If you are like me and read a lot of depressing non fiction this is a good read for a different nuanced angle on environmentalism and the climate crisis. Definitely demands ones full attention and dedication which is my reason for the 3 star rating, I would’ve liked something a little less dense, given the messaging of the book.

[Mills College Library]

700.108 S5216 2018

[Sam Pointon · Rating 4 out of 5]

very nerdy literary theory vibes loved it. probably the only environmental humanities work analysing the simpsons movie

[Angela Antle]

Loved this! A great read for artists woking in the environmental humanities.