Expanding the Scope of Justice

Chapter 7 is a tale of two environmental organizations that each deploy popular “short-form” media as tools to engage younger cohorts, moving them from environmental ideals into environmental action. While both organizations’ mediamaking challenges the consumer capitalist “myth of disposability,” they intervene in this myth with very different priorities and environmental urgencies in mind. The first organization’s orientation is largely biocentric and uses endangered species tattooing to extend the moral sphere of “who counts” to include vulnerable and threatened nonhuman populations. The second organization’s mission is squarely humanfocused, attending to environmental justice issues and the plight of poisoned minority communities that have been morally excluded from what is explored in the chapter as the “sphere of justice.”

Vegetarian Vampires

Chapter 5 explores conflicting expressions of ecopiety and consumopiety as worked out in and through thecontemporary remixing and remaking of vampire narratives for an age of environmental crisis. This chapter teases out how, as one reads across these popular narratives of piously “abstaining” vampires, a moral sensibility emerges that equates the deep, monstrous desire to consume and deplete the earth’s resources with the vampire’s voracious hunger to consume and drain the life of its host. Intermingled with messages of virtuous environmental temperance, however, vampire media franchises market endless tie-in consumer products to enthralled fans, in turn whetting a voracious appetite to consume. These counterpoints of pious consumer restraint and yet enthusiastic fan participation in vampire narratives via the virtues of consumer capitalism, ironically and strategically, tap into and feed off one of America’s most powerful consumer demographics: teenagers.

“I Can’t! It’s a Prius”

Chapter 3 explores Toyota Corporation’s hybrid automobile, the Prius, as a consumer icon of green virtue, charting media representations that portray the Prius as a vehicle of ecopiety as practiced through acts of consumopiety. It then sharply contrasts these eco-pious cultural readings of the Prius with ones that are intensely hostile and resistant. Drawing insight from “moral foundations theory” and its theorized connections to political disparities in environmental attitudes, this chapter’s media analysis of the Prius provides an opening into the complex incongruities between media “encoding” and media “decoding,” as messages of the Prius as icon of “environmental piety” get filtered through different power dimensions of class, gender, sexuality, and race. The resulting oppositional narratives give rise to the new and fascinating “subgenre” of pornography called “pollution porn.” This chapter probes seemingly unlikely, but nonethelessoperative, class-based media interventions into a dominant environmental discourse that is often perceived to be elitist, self-righteous, and smug.

Fifty Shades of Green

Chapter 2 attends to the role played by “moral offsets” and what socialpsychologists term “moral self-licensing” in intertwined stories of ecopiety and consumopiety in the nottotally unrelated realms of both popular erotic fiction and corporate public relations messaging.Reading across platforms, this chapter teases out various portrayals of environmental “sin” and “virtue,”juxtaposing the corporate public relations practice of “greenwashing” with the “eco-pious” storying of CEO and philanthropist protagonist Christian Grey in the popular mass-market romance Fifty Shades of Grey. As critics/activists use social media to organize and voice objections both to the corporate practice of public relations “greenwashing” and to the romanticized representations of abusive power in Fifty Shades, these protesters wield digital technologies as tools of narrative interruption and contestation. Their citizen interventions and “transformative works” of media offer insight into the participatory dynamics of what the chapter argues is an emergent environmental economy of virtue as mediated through popular culture.

Restorying the Earth

The first chapter introduces the reader to a number of theoretical tools and analytical lenses for understanding ecopiety and consumopiety, defining more closely the meaning and use of those terms in this book and their relationship to one another. This chapter also explains the concept of what the author calls “restorying the earth”―the ongoing processes of mediated moral engagement in recrafting or remaking storiesof earth and our place in it in an age of environmental crisis. The author presents theories of “media intervention,” considering how media interventions become “moral interventions” in popular narratives of ecopiety. The chapter’s theoretical discussion also plays upon therapeutic uses of the term “intervention” in popular discourse in order to think through associations between practices of environmental virtue and notions of “denial, addiction, and recovery.”

Introduction

This chapter outlines the structure and thesis of the book while introducing the concept of “ecopiety”―a shorthand term used in this text to refer to practices of environmental (or “green”) virtue. The chapter also introduces the reader to the book’s featured “sightings” of ecopiety, as observed mostly in and through NorthAmerican consumer marketing and mediated popular culture. This book argues that the fundamentally individualized, free-market, privatized, voluntary approaches currently marketed as adequate to addressing our monumental environmental challenges are not only wholly inadequate to the task but indeed can be counterproductive in the worst possible ways. Ecopiety, as marketed, is both too dourly restrictive in some ways and grossly facile in others. It simultaneously asks too little and too much, making pious actions taken on behalf of the environment grim, unappealing, onerous “duties or obligations,” on one hand, while on the other, it offers superficial, perfunctory modes of practice that are byandlarge insignificant in terms of scale and scope of impact. The author proposes alternatives for creative cultural paths into the future, as conjured by a variety of environmentally themed popular media works, practices, and narratives.

Conclusion

The book’s conclusion focuses explicitly on storied visions of the future, examining the speculative storying ofearth’s fate embedded in space-exploration company “SpaceX’s” marketing of Mars colonization, contrasting it with the earth-“reinhabiting” storied play enacted in environmentally themed alternate reality gaming. Both of these mediations of the future―planetary and extra-planetary―situate environmental action, not in a framework of grim duty or obligation, but in the inviting sphere of play and delight, though with vastly different frameworks, goals, and outcomes in mind. The conclusion argues that ecoplay, as an inviting conduit into the work of ecopolicy, provides a far more effective strategic approach than ecopiety for moving environmental ideals into substantive action. With such an approach in mind, this chapter makes the case that delight, not duty, will prove to be a more compelling motivator for catalyzing social change as we experiment with more life-sustaining ways to live into the future.

Green Is the New Black

Chapter 4 delves into entanglements of ecopiety and consumopiety in the narratives of “green capitalism” as found in the world of mobile-device “carbon sin–tracking” software applications, reality TV programs, and popular fashion manuals. Each of these products models and markets an ideal of a depoliticized, individualized, privatized, stylish, consumer-based environmental practice that reinscribes the virtues of capitalist consumption as an effective solution to pressing environmental problems. This individualized ecopiety either explicitly eschews or more subtly obscures collective solutions to environmental crisis that might entail broad policy initiatives, increased government regulation, and public funding to address environmental problems. To absorb fully the contested multiplicities of popular moral engagement in environmental issues and their functions variously as both obstacles and catalysts to social transformation, this chapter argues that, at a time of environmental crisis, functionality and utility of theoretical tools to get critical work “done,” even when placed in unconventional combination, outweigh hereditary loyalties to particular schools or ideological “silos.”

Composting a Life

Chapter 6 analyzes the online marketing and other popular media representations of “green burials” and “eco-funerals.” Ecopiety becomes the basis for more elaborate lines of imported, expensive, “green” consumer products. Green burial activists concertedly build bridges between personal green burial planning and collective civic engagement to effect policy making. Mega marketers, by contrast, portray the virtuous purchase of eco-friendly funerary goods as an end in itself. In both marketing and funeral practices “on the ground,” the bodies of eco-pious corpses have a story to tell about humans’ relationship to “stuff” and to their own mortality in an age of environmental crisis. Beyond merely identifying the relentless influence of capitalist logics and forces of assimilation, this chapter makes a concerted analytical pivot.It probes what kind of potential green burial practices might hold for prompting Americans to face their own mortality as they begin restorying death in more positive ways that could in turn induce limits on death-denying consumption.