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Celebrities and Climate Change

September 2017

DOI:10.1093/acrefore/9780190228620.013.596

Authors:

Michael K Goodman

University of Reading

Julie Doyle

University of Brighton

Nathan Farrell

Bournemouth University

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.

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Celebrities and Climate Change

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Summary and Keywords

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.

Celebrities and Climate Change

Julie Doyle, Nathan Farrell, and Michael K. Goodman

Subject: Media and Public Opinion, Climate Change, Case Studies, Climate Change

Communication

Online Publication Date: Sep 2017 DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190228620.013.596

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Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Climate Science

Celebrities and Climate Change

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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.

Keywords: celebrity, climate change, affect, emotion, embodiment, spectacle, neoliberal, commodification,

activism, media

Introduction

Given the increasing pervasiveness 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 negotiations in December 2015

indicated, high-profile A-list celebrities were the “charismatic megafauna” (Boykoff,

Goodman, & Littler, 2010) in Paris: They lent global star power to this high-profile political

event by “expertly” navigating the intersections between media, politics, and science

through speeches at the UN conference from actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Alec 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

& Goodman, 2009, p. 395) is relatively scarce.

Climate change communication scholars and practitioners have over the last decade

called for more culturally meaningful and socially relevant forms of climate change

communication that connect it to the cultural values, and mediated/social practices of our

everyday lives (Boykoff, Goodman, & Curtis, 2009; Doyle, 2011; Moser & Dilling, 2008).

Celebrities have arguably provided a significant response to these challenges, using their

Celebrities and Climate Change

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celebrity status to draw media and cultural attention to climate change, helping to bring

it within the popular cultural sphere, as well as utilizing their fan bases to mobilize

engagement and action via social media (Alexander, 2013). But, they have done so through

what might be termed the “spectacle”: highly visible, eye-catching, and visually

exuberant media appearances that have the potential to distract audiences from the

“real” environmental issues under scrutiny. Here, then, celebrities provide an important

human dimension to climate change beyond polar bears and melting glaciers to develop a

kind of “human embodiment of the spectacle” (Goodman, Littler, Brockington, & Boykoff,

2016) in the ways they utilize their very bodies to garner media and audience attention

around environmental activism. Yet concurrently, these visible embodiments may render

climate change as monetized and meaningless media performances rather than

interventions related to the intricate social practices of the everyday or political realms.

This article explores these tensions to understand what is politically, socially, and

ethically at stake in the growing celebritization of climate change. How is it that

celebrities have come to be the preferred spokespeople for climate change at global

scientific events, and in what ways might their involvement reshape the cultural politics

of climate on a global, national, and everyday level? In order to explore these questions

this article reviews a set of distinct and interrelated literatures from celebrity and media

studies, cultural geography, development studies, and environmental and climate

communication. The first part of the article examines the research on the historical

developments of celebrity culture within mainly Western contexts in order to situate the

changing media and political landscape through which celebrities have gained their

authority as political, social and environmental “experts.” In doing so, it explores the

emerging literature on celebrity activism in relation to humanitarian and environmental

issues and considers the problematic ways in which politics and a commodified culture

are mutually entwined and reinforced through the practices of celebrity. The article then

moves on to examine the small amount of existing research on celebrity involvement with

climate change specifically, and simultaneously draws upon the work of climate change

communication scholars and practitioners to consider the possibilities and limitations of

celebrity work on climate change. This allows an exploration of the broader socio-

political-economic factors that shape celebrity work on climate change in the context of a

media consumer culture, and a more specific investigation of celebrity’s role in

(potentially) making climate change more visible and embodied for Western audiences.

From there, the article examines campaigns from 2014–2016, in which celebrities offer

novel engagements with climate change, helping to move public discourse beyond

scientific data, and facilitating more emotional and visceral connections with climate

change. The article ends by speculating upon the challenges generated by such emotional

particularly when undertaken by celebrities who may politicize emotions that remain

circumscribed by neoliberal solutions and action.

Celebrities and Climate Change

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Celebrity Politics, or the Politics of Celebrity

Celebrities and Climate Change

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In order to understand the role celebrities play in the cultural politics of climate change,

it is important to establish how celebrities have come to occupy privileged positions

within 21st-century media, culture, and politics. Throughout history, famous or well-

known individuals have featured commonly within many cultures across the globe

(Braudy, 1997), reflecting and re-inscribing the characteristics held in esteem within their

particular societies. Consequently, historical fame reflected social structures that

valorized rigid class distinctions and legitimized the inherited positions of social elites

(Inglis, 2010). Despite these historical precedents of fame, contemporary celebrity culture

is commonly understood within academic literature as a phenomenon of predominantly

Western origin, arising in the 20th century (Schickel, 2000, p. 21; see also Rojek, 2012).

However, just as historical fame acted as an indicator of the moral, political, or economic

orthodoxies of a society, due to the corresponding elevation of those individuals who

embodied such ideals to the level of “famous,” contemporary celebrity culture reveals

much about current global societies. In this instance, celebrity reflects and validates, to

some degree, ideas of social mobility and the political ascendancy of the crowd, and is

informed by what P. David Marshall credits as the “twinned discourses of modernity:

democracy and capitalism” (Marshall, 2001, p. 4).

As both of these intertwining discourses work to emphasize and centralize the individual

—in the respective roles of citizen or consumer—it stands to reason that celebrity, with its

“capacity to house conceptions of individuality and simultaneously to embody or help

embody ‘collective configurations’ of the social world” (Marshall, 2001, pp. xi–xii), would

assume such a primary position within current global cultures. Celebrities are

simultaneously socially exceptional hyper-individuals and the embodiment of the affective

will of their audiences. That the 20th and 21st centuries have witnessed a significant

increase in the agency and territorial reach of the mass media industries within which

many celebrities have forged their fame (Turner, 2013, p. 3), further helps to solidify their

position. Richard Dyer, whose work on film stars (Dyer, 1979, 1986) provided a foundation

for later scholarly work on celebrity, considers that stars reflect socially acceptable

modes of being. They are role models for particular ways of being someone of a certain

gender, ethnicity, sexuality, class, etc. This imbues celebrities with considerable power

and influence, which led to them being considered a type of “powerless elite” (Alberoni,

1972).

However, in more recent decades, the political activity and possible influence of celebrity

upon formal politics has become more pronounced, particularly as politics has become

increasingly mediatized and more heavily influenced by public relations. Developed as a

means of explaining the “process of change in which politicians tend to adapt to various

constraints imposed by the media” [original emphasis] (Asp, 2014, p. 351); “mediatization”

refers to the ways in which aspects of social and political discourse are shaped to fit the

structures and conventions of contemporary media platforms of communication. One

outcome of mediatization is the convergence of celebrity and political cultures. This is

further enabled by publics who, as John Corner and Dick Pels (2003) suggest, “want to vote

for persons and their ideas rather than for political parties and their programmes.” In this

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context, Corner and Pels write, “political style” becomes a key “focus for post-ideological

lifestyle choices, which are indifferent to the entrenched oppositions between traditional

‘isms’ and their institutionalization.” Instead, “more eclectic, fluid, issue-specific and

personality-bound forms of political recognition and engagement” (2003, p. 7) are

enacted. Consequently, the role of the political leader, “who must somehow embody the

sentiments of the party, the people, and the state” has become aligned with the role of the

celebrity, “who must somehow embody the sentiments of an audience” (Marshall, 2001, p.

203).

Outcomes of this emerging political formulation include the “celebrity politician” and the

“political celebrity.” Defining and developing a taxonomy of celebrity politicians is a

primary focus for some of the academic literature. John Street, for example, categorizes

two types. Celebrity Politician Type 1 is represented by “the traditional politician . . . who

engages with the world of popular culture in order to enhance or advance their pre-

established political functions and goals” (Street, 2004, p. 437). Celebrity Politician Type 2

“refers to the entertainer who pronounces on politics and claims the right to represent

peoples and causes, but who does so without seeking or acquiring elected office” (Street,

2004, p. 438). Van Zoonen (2005) offers a more detailed typology of celebrity politician, the

focus of which is the relative distance of the individual to traditional centers of political

power. She focuses on four key points along a spectrum that runs from traditional

politician and political insider, to political insider with mass media appeal, to political

outsiders, to the celebrity performer who is also a political outsider. This article focuses

more on the celebrity who pronounces on politics (Street, 2004) and the celebrity

performer (Van Zoonen, 2005), rather than the celebrity politician, to explore the

celebritization of climate change.

Consistent with this literature, Boykoff and Goodman (2009) develop a taxonomy informed

by the institutional background of the individual. They offer a more diverse range of

celebrity types that includes celebrity actors, celebrity politicians, celebrity athletes,

celebrity business people, celebrity musicians, and celebrity public intellectuals, thus

indicating the potential for different access points for audiences and forms of affective

engagements with climate change. This is explored in more detail in the “CELEBRITIES AND

CLIMATE CHANGE” section of this article.

What unites the various manifestations of the Celebrity Politician and/or Political

Celebrity is that they provoke concerns among some commentators regarding “the

trivialisation of public affairs” (Gitlin, 1997, p. 35); concerns that can be traced, perhaps,

as far back as Daniel Boorstin’s dismissal of celebrity as the human “pseudo-

event” (1963). Indeed, for Eric Louw (2010), celebrity politics amounts to a form of

“pseudo politics.” Similarly, Daryl West expresses concerns about a political system

“where star power is weighted more heavily than traditional political skills, such as

bargaining, compromise and experience” (West, 2008, p. 83). Celebrities, it is thought,

might crowd out more expert voices from public discourse. However, any consideration of

the role of celebrities in the politics of climate change must account for the necessity of

Celebrities and Climate Change

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climate change being made culturally meaningful and accessible to a wide range of

audiences beyond scientific and political discourse—a function that celebrities may be

better placed to undertake given the dependency of their celebrity status on

mediatization (Driessens, 2013).

Other scholars, perhaps taking their cue from Marshall and Street, turn away from

questions of the legitimacy celebrities’ political interventions in terms of a potential

dumbing down. Seeing this as something of a false dichotomy, they accept that celebrity

activists serve as the embodiment of the affective responses of their audiences to a range

of social and/or environmental concerns. They seek, instead, to determine the cultural,

political, economic, and institutional factors that facilitate this and determine its form.

One factor is the celebrity’s status as outsider to political establishments (Cooper, 2008).

This is particularly the case when considering the decline in trust of traditional politicians

and institutions, and the suspicion among the electorate that “politicians are in it for

themselves and that they serve special interests” (West, 2008, p. 79). Nonpoliticians such

as celebrities, West argues, are by contrast “considered more trustworthy and less

partisan” (West, 2008, p. 79) because “[i]n a world where entangling alliances are the rule,

these individuals are as close to free agents as one can find” (West, 2008, p. 81).

Celebrities and Climate Change

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Celebrity Activism

The celebrity activist’s status as an embodied representation of the affective will of their

audience, then, both reflects and informs the relationship of both to elite institutions:

They are outsiders. However, as Van Zoonen suggests, the successful political celebrity

projects a persona that has inside experience of politics but is still an outsider to political

institutions (van Zoonen, 2005, p. 84). This distance from formal politics lends celebrity

activists a type of moral authority, the meaning of which is transferrable to the cause with

which they are associated.

Yet, celebrity activists can provide clear qualitative benefits to humanitarian and

environmental causes associating the cause with aspects of their public persona. They

can, as Richey and Ponte suggest, “guarantee the cool quotient” of campaigns concerning

issues that might otherwise be unappealing to mass publics (Richey & Ponte, 2011, p. 37).

These qualitative benefits, provided by entertainment celebrities to environmental

organizations, work in tandem with clear quantitative benefits: Celebrities can attract

significant public attention for a cause (Anderson, 2013). This is a valuable asset for a

social or environmental organization as the competitive nature of the “attention

economy” increases (van Krieken, 2012).

Such ideas move scholarship of celebrity beyond concerns of a potential democratic

deficit caused by celebrities’ political interventions. This is replaced by an understanding

that, as Wheeler suggests, “[c]elebrities engaging in partisan or causal affairs can bring a

guile and persuasiveness in using the media, which may reinvigorate politics with new

ideas” (Wheeler, 2013, p. 24). The question that prompts much research on celebrity

politics is what might these “new ideas” be? In the case of this article, what new ideas

can celebrities bring to the politics of climate change? And how might these approaches

reflect and reinforce existing political and economic orthodoxies?

Accepting that celebrities might “teach us how to think and act politically” (Ross, 2011, p.

5), academics have questioned the types of discourses and practices into which audiences

and consumers are being interpellated. For example, Boykoff and Goodman (2009) point to

branding as a determinant of celebrity political intervention, hinting at the commercial

nature of celebrity culture and opening up the possibility for tensions between the

political economy of the celebrity industry, on the one hand, and the needs of social and

environmental causes, on the other. Given that the production and maintenance of

celebrity status is dependent upon the interrelated processes of commodification,

mediatization and personalization (Driessens, 2013), these pressures are not surprising.

Lisa Ann Richey and Stefano Ponte’s Brand Aid (2011) offers a sophisticated analysis of

these tensions, where social and environmental campaigning meet cause-related

marketing and corporate social responsibility initiatives, through a series of case studies

of brands that give financial aid in a way that gives aid to brands. In other words, through

ethical consumerism, initiatives such as Product (RED), for example, rather than focus on

poverty in the Global South, celebrate the agency of consumers in the Global North to

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“solve” such problems through their choice of consumer purchases. Celebrity, in such

instances, becomes a means to market these ideas to citizen-consumers and lends

campaigns the types of moral authority. Goodman (2013) goes further to identify a “novel

‘species’ of celebrity called Celebritus Politicus” whose members “have situated and also

have worked to situate themselves as a stylised form of the neoliberalized governance of

the problems of environment and development.”

In its most simplistic sense, neoliberalism is understood as “a political-economic project

which advocates, first, a strong free-market economic system, facilitated by and

unrestricted by the state and, second, the use of the market as a model for other areas of

political and social life” (Farrell, 2015, p. 256). Individual manifestations of this philosophy

vary historically, geographically, and culturally. However, they often involve unique

combinations of processes such as the privatization of state assets; the deregulation of

markets, and/or the re-regulation of areas of civic life in a manner more favorable to

markets; the turning of people and objects into commodities to be bought and sold

through the processes of commodification, such that natural assets are converted into

goods tradeable within a market; the commercialization of institutions and sectors not

previously oriented toward for-profit practices—such as charity, health care, or education;

the marketization of sectors of society in which such commercialized institutions may

function; the individualization of societies, such that populations are encouraged to self-

identify as discrete individuals, operating as entrepreneurs or consumers, rather than

part of collective groupings; and entrepreneurialization. The methods of social and

environmental campaigns involving celebrities so often feature consumer practices, and

encourage supporters to identify with the subject position of “consumer” engaging in

moral activity within a market place (Richey & Ponte, 2011). Consequently, Celebritus

Politicus both reflects and contributes “to the moral authority of a hegemonic market-led

governance of sustainability” (Goodman, 2013, pp. 72–73). In a sustained but far less

empirically grounded critique, Ilan Kapoor argues that celebrity humanitarianism

“legitimates, and indeed promotes, neoliberal capitalism and global inequality” (Kapoor,

2013, p. 1).

Concerns about the commercial imperatives of celebrity involvement in environmental

and humanitarian advocacy and activism thus characterizes much scholarly work in this

area. Other important contributions highlight, for example, the colonial nature of Global

North-South relations as embodied by celebrity activists. Repo and Yrjölä (2011), for

instance, analyze media representations of Western celebrities engaged in development

campaigns in Africa, and trace the lineage of such portrayals back to colonial narratives

concerning popular European figures and their travels to the “dark continent.” Such

media representations work to subtly promote ideas of the rational White, European man,

as a binary opposite to the irrational African subject (also, Biccum, 2016). Taking account

of these critiques, this article now examines existing scholarly research on celebrity

involvement with climate change to explore the possibilities and limitations of this work

Celebrities and Climate Change

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in creating more culturally meaningful and affective engagements with this issue in the

context of a neoliberal commodity culture.

Celebrities and Climate Change—Media,

Politics, and Commodity Culture

Much of the earliest work on celebrity and climate change seeks to provide conceptual

and theoretical frameworks through which to make sense of, and analyze, the

celebritization of climate change, laying the foundations for specific case studies of

climate celebrities in later scholarly work (Alexander, 2013; Anderson, 2013; Boykoff &

Olson, 2013; Doyle, 2016; McCurdy, 2013).

Anderson’s (2011) review of celebrity involvement in climate change was the first of its

kind, signaling a growing academic interest in celebrity work on climate change.

However, with very little published research in this area to draw upon at the time

(notable exceptions being Boykoff & Goodman, 2009; Smith & Joffe, 2009), Anderson brings

together work on media coverage of climate change, news media sources, and the PR

packaging of news/politics, celebrity advocacy in environmentalism, celebrity culture and

democratization, and public perceptions of climate change, to explore how the

contemporary media and political landscape has shifted to include a wider variety of

voices, beyond scientists, to publicly speak about climate change.

Anderson argues that as news media increasingly rely upon PR agencies to provide

content, voices and sources are increasingly more packaged, in turn facilitating the

amplification of celebrity voices within news stories. Anderson explains that the symbolic

power that celebrities can bring to climate change, particularly if supported by the work

of an established environmental NGO (such as Greenpeace), importantly shifts the issue

from the domain of science into popular culture. Celebrities thus act as mobilizing agents

(like NGOs) to raise awareness and potentially shape public opinion: particularly

important at a time when world news coverage of climate change peaked in 2009 and

then fell, following the “Climategate” scandal. As news actors in their own right,

celebrities can provide “a powerful news hook with a human interest angle, crystallizing

issues that may otherwise be perceived as relatively removed from people’s everyday

lives” (Anderson, 2011, p. 535). Yet, Anderson concludes that increasing the visibility of

climate change through celebrity work represents a “double edged sword” (p. 543). For

example, while environmental NGOs have used celebrities for “symbolic leverage” to gain

access to news media, thus bringing attention to an issue, there is a lack of public trust in

celebrities as spokespeople for the environment and climate change (see Smith & Joffe,

2009). Rather than characterizing celebrity involvement in climate change politics as

“either democratization or distraction,” she thus calls for more “ethnographic research

into the impact of celebrity advocacy on public perceptions of climate change and

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trust” (Anderson, 2011, p. 543): a call that is subsequently taken up by researchers

working on public perceptions of climate imagery (O’Neill, Boykoff, Niemeyer, & Day,

2013).

In one of the first journal articles to critically explore the celebritization of climate

change, Boykoff and Goodman make the case for a nuanced understanding of celebrities

as non-state actors involved in “the cultural politics of climate change” (Boykoff &

Goodman, 2009, p. 396), rather than dismissing celebrities as mere distraction (Wieskel,

2005). Through the confluence of “science, celebrities, and politics,” they explore how

celebrities have become “authorized speakers” on climate change in the context of a

“Politicized Celebrity System” (p. 396). By identifying a system, Boykoff and Goodman

(2009) call attention to the multifarious ways in which celebrities as authorized speakers

operate within a broader media and political landscape that highlights the interconnected

and contested dimensions of celebrity as brands, performances, and images that circulate

through the political economies of news, media, and entertainment, and whose signs are

variously consumed by audiences. Calling attention to these spaces of interaction that

produce, sustain, and contest celebrity work (on climate change), enables a more

complex understanding of the socio-economic-political conditions that characterize and

shape the ways in which celebrities speak on climate change, and to also help illuminate

the material implications of celebrity work in shaping beliefs, attitudes, behaviors, values,

and types of (in)action on climate change.

Representative of a more nuanced approach to the study of celebrity climate politics,

Boykoff and Goodman (2009); see also Boykoff & Olson, 2013) suggest employing a celebrity

typology to highlight how different cultural factors (through diverse celebrity types) may

shape different forms of discourse and action on climate change. Drawing upon the

“circuits of culture” model (Du Gay, 1997) from cultural studies, as well as Carvalho and

Burgess’s (2005) reinterpretation of this model in their analysis of news media coverage of

climate change in the U.K. press, Boykoff and Goodman (2009) suggest employing a

“Cultural Circuits of Climate Change Celebrities model” to focus our attention upon

celebrity status as the means by which celebrities gain their “privileged spaces of

interaction” (p. 402). What Boykoff and Goodman point to is the ways that climate

celebrities’ images, words, and deeds circulate within and around the cultural sphere

across media and meditated conversations about climate change.

Their framework foregrounds three key relations that underpin celebrity climate work:

celebrities as commodities (i.e., goods to be bought and sold); celebrity bodies,

performances and embodiment (i.e., the ways that celebrities embody certain

environmental politics); and celebrities as signs/values (i.e., images to be marketized for

social and economic value). While commodity culture is central to the development of

contemporary celebrity culture (Driessens, 2013; Rojek, 2001; Turner, 2004), the implications

for considering the effects of celebrity work on climate change in particular are important

here. Although celebrities can raise awareness of this issue through their elevated media

voices, it is the question of what is being consumed and the extent to which this alters

Celebrities and Climate Change

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audience beliefs and values, or impacts upon courses of political, social, or personal

action on climate change, that is key: a concern that continues to underpin subsequent

scholarly work in this field (Doyle, 2016; McCurdy, 2013).

Individualism as a form of neoliberal consumer identity arguably has limited capacity to

engender large-scale collective changes required for mitigating and adapting to climate

change. As such, individualism is a key issue for scholars examining celebrity involvement

with climate change communication and campaigning. As high-profile commodities and

images circulating within culture, Boykoff and Goodman are concerned about the

celebrity being viewed as the “heroic individual” (2009, p. 404), further entrenching

individual responses to climate change through neoliberal commodity actions—such as

purchasing green products, or carbon offsetting—that distract from “the articulation of

discourses calling on systemic and large-scale political, economic, social, and cultural

shifts that will likely be necessary to address the multifarious problems and difficult

choices associated with modern global climate change” (p. 404). Anderson similarly

echoes this concern when she notes that research on celebrity involvement in

environmental and climate politics “points to a tendency for the celebritization of climate

change to promote individualist rather than collective frames of action” (Anderson, 2011,

p. 535). Indeed, in an interesting observation on the rise of celebrity endorsements of

climate change in the media, Keeling (2009) notes the impact of such endorsements on

climate mitigation practices such as carbon trading: “Celebrities are commodities and

increasingly the atmosphere is beginning to be thought of as another commodity, with a

price and value being placed on it” (Keeling, 2009, p. 50). While celebrities may have

helped bring climate change into the popular imagination, it is the very nature of their

celebrity status and its problematic rise and fall that could impinge upon media coverage

in the long term, as celebrity climate failures such as Live Earth in 2007 or DiCaprio’s

11th Hour documentary are deemed more newsworthy than successes (Keeling, 2009).

Can Celebrities Help Make Climate Change More Visible and Felt?

While much earlier (and subsequent) scholarly work on celebrity and climate change

situates celebrities within their socioeconomic networks and practices of global media,

politics, entertainment, consumer culture, and neoliberalism, with its attendant

dimensions of individualism and commodification, there are also important points through

which celebrities can potentially reach out to audiences precisely because of their

celebrity status as “intimate strangers” (Schickel, 2000) using their affective capacities to

get audiences to feel certain emotions (Marshall, 2001; Nunn & Biressi, 2010). Celebrities’

capacity to communicate and engage with diverse audiences through (social) media and

popular culture could bring climate change awareness—and its perceived distance—into

different social and cultural spheres, particularly for younger audiences (Alexander, 2013).

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Indeed, climate change communication research over the last 20 years (see Moser, 2010)

highlights that persistent barriers to communication and engagement have prevailed,

with climate change perceived as a distant, remote, and future threat for Western

audiences (Boykoff, 2011; Doyle, 2011), unless its impacts have been experienced personally.

As such, scholars have explored the role of imagery, framing/discourse, ideology, and

values in communicating climate change, and how these forms of meaning-making shape

public understanding of, and engagement with, this issue. Researchers and practitioners

are increasingly calling for more localized, emotional/affective, and participatory modes of

communication that more clearly link to, as well as challenge, people’s existing social

values and identity in order to make climate change understood and felt at the level of

the everyday.

Two key opportunities for climate communication through celebrity work coalesce here:

the potential to personify and make climate change more visible and salient as a human

(rather than simply an environmental) issue; and the role of celebrities as human signs

who can embody and generate a range of feelings and affects about climate change.

Here, though, the confluences of visibility/image and embodiment through celebrity are

problematic. Boykoff and Goodman’s (2009) observation that celebrities literally and

figuratively embody climate change politics refers to the media performances of

celebrities as commodities. As such, these human embodiments problematically focus

upon the celebrity body as a politicized site that embodies economic relations,

transforming into what Goodman (2010) later discusses as “spectacular” visuals that

deflect attention away from the political cause under question.

While maintaining this critical perspective on climate celebrities and the spectacles they

create, reviewing the research on climate imagery highlights some of the potential that

celebrities offer in terms of generating different types of imagery to make climate change

more culturally meaningful. Earlier research by Doyle (2007, 2009) on environmental NGO

campaigning highlighted the problematic role of photographic imagery in prioritizing

climate impacts to non-human nature (particularly polar bears and melting glaciers) at

the expense of humans, as well as reinforcing the notion of “visible truth” and “bearing

witness” as a representational condition of climate change knowledge and its

communication. Focusing upon humanitarian and development NGOs, Manzo (2010) found

a wider repertoire of climate imagery used, including humans and non-human nature, but

criticized the ways in which humans affected by climate change were positioned through

a colonial gaze that rendered climate change as happening to geographically “distant

others.”

More recent work by O’Neill (2013) has demonstrated a broader range of images of

climate change within news media in the United Kingdom, United States, and Australia,

with people being the most frequent theme, followed by impacts. Celebrities were present

in the people theme—a finding that supports earlier research by Smith and Joffe (2009)

into climate imagery in U.K. press coverage. Smith and Joffe note that celebrities are

often visualized in activist modes, for example, at demonstrations, and that such images

help personify climate change for a British audience. In contrast, research on climate

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imagery within Canadian print media by DiFrancesco and Young (2010) found that while

human beings were the most common form of imagery, celebrities made a minimal

appearance, demonstrating national differences in terms of celebrity saliency in the

context of climate change. Yet, even as celebrities become visually associated with

climate change, further research by O’Neill et al. (2013) finds that people in the United

Kingdom, United States, and Australia, perceive images of celebrities to undermine the

saliency of climate change.

Taken together, these findings identify an increase in celebrity images within the visual

iconography of climate change, while simultaneously indicating the public’s lack of trust

of celebrity involvement with climate change. Celebrities, it is suggested, are not helpful

in terms of raising awareness and facilitating action on climate change. However, it is

important to acknowledge the current lack of textual or ethnographic research in this

area beyond still imagery within print or online media, particularly as social media, rather

than print news or news websites, are the main source of news for women and young

people (Reuters Institute for Journalism, 2016). Given that celebrity culture is largely youth

and female oriented, different types of imagery (such as video), celebrities, media, and

consumption practices would need to be analyzed.

Importantly, this research also points toward a diversification of voices in climate change

communication beyond scientists and NGOs (Anderson, 2011). Historically, environmental

NGOs, and particularly Greenpeace, were the main non-state actors making climate

change meaningful to the public through their campaign and communication strategies

(Doyle, 2007), “bearing witness” to climate impacts through photographic documentation

(Doyle, 2009). Goodman and Barnes (2011) have explored how celebrities bear witness to

suffering by visiting “spaces of poverty.” Thus, have celebrities become the new witnesses

of climate change? What are the spaces that celebrities are visiting/embodying/signifying

within the cultural politics of climate change, and how do these reinforce, challenge, and/

or advance different forms of public and political engagement? These questions will be

explored in the next section.

Indeed, if we return to the question of the embodiment of climate activism by climate

celebrities, the potential for celebrities to offer more affective, and effective, forms of

public engagement can be explored by diversifying the range of celebrities, media forms,

and demographic groups analyzed. For example, Alexander (2013) explores the use of

Twitter by U.S. actor Ian Somerhalder, star of The Vampire Diaries, to engage his youth

fan base with environmentalism and climate change. The assumed “authenticity” of

Somerhalder’s apparently self-created tweets, including his appreciative tweets to his

followers, are important in creating a two-way relationship with his fans, helping build an

affective relation. Alexander analyses the forms of communication used by Somerhalder

in promoting environmental advocacy, finding both a marketing approach (of small step

changes and altering consumption practices) and values-based approach (advocated by

Crompton, 2008) that focuses upon relationship building, rather than external status, as a

means of enabling more long-term pro-environmental behavior change. While tensions

occur between these two discourses—partly due to Somerhalder’s celebrity status—his

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use of social media enables the “collectivism of the social media generation” (Alexander,

2013, p. 364) to be aligned with the ethical/moral values he communicates. In doing so,

Alexander is hopeful for the emergence of more “eco-celebrities such as Somerhalder,

role models and objects of desire with embedded spiritual/environmental values and

collaborative modes of address” (p. 365). Indeed, given the increasing level of overwhelm

and hopelessness associated with climate change (Moser, 2016), and the need for more

emotionally resonant and participatory modes of communication and engagement, we

wonder if celebrities who are able to engage with young people specifically through social

media and popular culture, might find more hopeful ways of facilitating social and

political action, in “cool” (Richey & Ponte, 2011) and creative ways. The next section

explores some of these questions.

Emerging Climate Celebrities After Data:

Emotion, Affect, and Journey in Novel Modes of

Climate Engagement

Considering celebrities as contemporary forms of “climate muses”—regardless of how

potentially commodified or individualizing in action or outcome—the nature of celebrity

reflections and media production around climate have shifted over time. They have

changed in both the format—from telling audiences about climate change to witnessing

its impacts for us—and also characteristics—from knowledge and exhortations for action

to affective and emotional appeals to audiences and the public. Through a brief overview

of some of the key celebrity interventions in climate change discourses, here we explore

how celebrity involvement in climate change pedagogies has formed part of a shift in

climate change communication. This has moved from dry accounts of the latest scientific

knowledge about the changing climate, to stories of personal and/or literal journeys upon

the climate landscape and those of climate-related impacts. Indeed, as the header on

Leonardo DiCaprio’s documentary Before the Flood (2016) suggests, “the science is

settled, the future is not.” This section works to briefly explore these shifts in what we

might call novel “modes” of climate change celebrity engagements, from climate

celebrities as narrow pseudo-experts and green lifestyle gurus to the newly expanded role

of a climate change witnesses who work as on-the-ground correspondents telling

audiences the stories of ordinary people and everyday ecologies at threat from climate

change. In doing so, this section builds on the previous research previously analyzed to

pose questions that, we argue, necessitate further research and suggest where research

on celebrity and climate change communication might find fruitful possibilities.

From An Inconvenient Truth to Before the Flood: Getting Emotional

About Climate Change Through New Modes of Media and Celebrity

Performance

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Al Gore’s Academy Award winning documentary in An Inconvenient Truth was designed

to provide its audience the latest data, information, and knowledge about climate change

and the threat it posed to the planet. Simply put, it attempted to educate and convince

the public in minute PowerPoint detail about the rise in CO emitted by humans and the

corresponding rise in global average temperatures. At roughly the same time, the

Leonardo DiCaprio-produced documentary the 11th Hour was also designed to teach the

public about climate change. Utilizing the “talking head” appearances of numerous

environmental movement figures such as Paul Hawken, Wangari Maathai, Bill McKibben,

and David Suzuki, all voiced-over by DiCaprio, it spread the word about climate change

exclusively through climate “experts.” Equally, 2007’s Live Earth concerts intended to

raise global-scale awareness about climate issues educating the public about climate

change through “enviro-tainment” in order to make these politicized, educational-focused

encounters more audience friendly. These three celebrity-fronted climate change media

events utilized celebrities to not just bring attention to the issue, but also act as public

pedagogues who could speak about the science of climate change and vouch for its

“reality.”

In profound contrast, more contemporary celebrity climate interventions are quite

different. While celebrities are still public pedagogues, they intervene in ways that intend

and create alternative, novel, and more complex outcomes. Such interventions offer, we

suggest, “After Data” media modes of discourses, practices, and audience connections.

For example, one important recent After Data climate change celebrity intervention

comes in the form of the documentary Before the Flood (2016; BTF). We briefly discuss

BTF in order to illustrate the ways that more contemporary celebrity-fronted climate

change media—and the role of the celebrities themselves—have moved us into novel,

more affective modes of celebrity climate change engagement and framing.

BTF is a heavily resourced and visually stunning documentary film produced and narrated

by, but also starring, Leonardo DiCaprio. In the film, he goes on a “witnessing” journey as

the UN Ambassador of Peace to see the firsthand impacts of climate change in the Arctic,

the island nation of Kiribati, the oil sands of Alberta, and the polluted streets of Shanghai.

Unlike the 11th Hour, this is a significant personal journey for DiCaprio shot through with

stories of his early childhood to the ways he has been ridiculed and critiqued by

conservative pundits. This is a journey that has DiCaprio front and center as our serious,

earnest and caring, emotive and affective guide and male “lead.” He solemnly implores us

to do something about the climate in front of the UN, sheepishly admits he has a larger

carbon footprint than most people, and is angrily confronted by an Indian conservationist

about America’s grotesque levels of material and energy consumption. As Fisher Stevens,

the film’s director, stated about DiCaprio: “. . . it’s nice to film someone like Leo who has

the quality of charisma. We wanted Leo to meet the experts and make the experts more

palatable, so that everyone could understand them” (G’Sell, 2016). Importantly, on the

ground and emplaced encounters with nature, experts, environmentalists, and elite

politicians and business leaders are specifically interspersed with ordinary people and

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communities “performing” their emotive responses to the everyday ways they are being

impacted by climate change.

Before the Flood is one of the most watched documentaries of all time with over 60

million views across multiple media platforms (Calvario, 2016). Unlike previous climate

change interventions, BTF accentuates and showcases emotions and affects throughout

the film: the smiles and sincerity of Elon Musk who is ready to deploy his battery business

and entrepreneurial skills in service of a carbon-free future; the dire warnings of Ban Ki-

Moon; and, of course, those of the main witnessing muse of DiCaprio who marvels at the

“violence” of icebergs calving into the ocean, the surprise of being confronted about his

own personal climate impacts, and his hopeful tone in discussions of easy climate “wins.”

The narrative that DiCaprio crafts and the images he shows us are as emotional and

affective at their core as they are “rational” and “statistical” in the climate science that

should underpin our feelings. The “‘debate’ about climate change is over” (BTF, 2016) the

film’s website shouts—the word “debate” firmly squeezed between quotation marks—as

we move into the human-induced era of the Anthropocene. As a review of the BTF in The

Hollywood Reporter states (DeFore, 2016), “Maybe movie stars can sway public opinion

more effectively than tightly reasoned activist docs full of hard data and compelling

narratives. Here’s hoping.” BTF illustrates the distinct shift to an After Data mode of

climate change intervention whereby the emotional registers of climate change—be they

of the “star” celebrity, those they are talking to or those feeling the impacts of global

environmental change—are what define and carry the narrative arcs of these new forms

of spectacular environmental media (Goodman et al., 2016).

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Feeling the Atmosphere Through Star Power: Initial Thoughts and

Potential Future Directions

While space does not allow a fuller exploration of this novel After Data mode of celebrity

climate change media outputs and engagement, we do want to provide some short

thoughts on why, we think, this shift has occurred and some of its implications.

Why this shift, then? Several potential and further “testable” reasons come to mind. One

of these seems quite simple: According to a Pew Research Center Global study, the

majority of those in their study of global attitudes to climate change from the United

States (74%) and United Kingdom (77%) believes global climate change is either very or

somewhat serious (Stokes, Wike, & Carle, 2015). Moreover, 69% of those polled from the

United States supported action as part of an international agreement, while in the United

Kingdom 79% responded similarly (Stokes et al., 2015). Given these shifting public

attitudes and beliefs, narratives and urgings have to shift into new registers to not just

gain audience attention but spur public action for those who “believe” but also as a

strategy to engage the remaining “non-believers.” At the same time, however, these

polling numbers belie the fact that there are still large numbers who maintain partisan

denialist and skeptical outlooks on climate change—including many powerful political

figures in the media—as any quick read of the comments section attached at almost any

climate change article on the Web will lay bare. In particular, there is growing concern

over “climate silence,” which is the worry that there are not enough public, media, or

even personal discussions about the severity and impacts of climate change (Romm, 2016);

emotional climate celebrities are perhaps working to maintain climate change as a topic

worthy of continued urgent and critical public discussion. In a way, no matter what, these

shifts in celebrity-fronted climate media are quite astute given the knowledge/action gap

—whether that be individual action or policy action—that has come to bedevil larger-

scale, immediate solutions to the climate conundrum. In some ways, the moves to these

impact and emotional registers through celebrity media interventions is not just about

making these new tropes and registers “fashionable” but also utilizing them in ways that

might work to cut through not just the normalized, everyday media cacophony, but as a

means by which to transcend the knowledge/action gap to spur more and greater action.

Furthermore, if Dan Brockington’s (2014) work on the role of celebrities in the realms of

humanitarianism rings true, then one of the key audiences for these new interventions

might actually not be the general public but rather other elites and those in power in

order to make affective connections and get them to work for more and better climate

policy. DiCaprio’s position as Peace Ambassador is certainly what this is about so his

documentary seems like a logical extension of this elite-to-elite emotionally tinged

communication.

A second reason for these movements might also be quite simple, if somewhat

problematic: These shifts might be about maintaining and expanding these celebrities’

brands as eco-warriors to both use but also expand their fan base in a desire to create

greater cultural, political, and economic capital for themselves. As Jo Littler (2008) has so

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astutely put it, being socially conscious and politically active is part of the very job

description of celebrities operating in the early 21st century, such that caring is not just a

part of their brand but caring works to create economic value for the “celebrity industry

complex” that is behind even these climate change interventions. Thus, the move to more

emotional and impactful registers is not mutually exclusive from the creation of value nor

deepening of the celebrity industrial complex, but instead go right to the heart of the

“conspicuous redemption” Boykoff and Goodman (2009) discussed as one of the

characteristics of climate celebrities. As argued earlier, climate change celebrities are

commodities in human form that generate cultural and economic capital but are also

caring commodities that embody, perform, and work to elicit the concerns, emotions, and

behaviors of care and responsibilities in audiences. As the old adage goes, climate change

celebrities are “doing well by doing good” and more research is needed to determine not

just what the impacts of their notions of “the good” are but also how audiences’ react to

these changing registers in contemporary climate change media.

Discussion and Conclusion: From Accentuated

Celebrity Emotion and Affect to More

Vociferous Climate Action?

By way of a brief conclusion, we offer a short discussion of what we feel some of the

implications might be with this more emotionally charged celebrity-fronted climate

change media that seems to have ushered in our proposed After Data era of climate

communications. First, as suggested throughout this section, the example of BTF works

through a different set of framings than previously offered by earlier “numbers” and

“science” focused climate media interventions by articulating and fully accentuating

emotion and affect through narrative arcs and encounters of the impacts of climate

change on people and nature, communities and ecologies. Thus, the overall “feel” of these

novel celebrity-fronted climate media outputs is one of a greatly heightened emotional

and viscerally connect with and through recognized celebrities to those people and places

witnessing and experiencing climate change.

Second, not only have the engagements and outputs of celebrity-fronted media

interventions shifted, so too has the role of climate change celebrities themselves: They

now work as morally tinged, affective pedagogues, framing for us through emotional

discursive reflections, embodiments, deeds, and performances how and in what ways we

should feel about climate change impacts and what to do about them. In addition climate

change celebrities have taken on the novel roles of emotive climate journalists and

investigative documentarians, allowing us to see and feel firsthand the impacts of climate

change. Climate change celebrities, through this new “witnessing” mode of their persona

and performances become “affective translation devices” who emote about climate

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change but also report, interpret, and explore those communities and ecologies impacted

by climate change. No longer are climate change celebrities sales people and endorsers

of the products of brand “climate science,” but instead they are witnesses to, and the

affective voices of, the Anthropocene. In a twist, then, on the byline from BTF, given these

contemporary climate change celebrity media engagements, the science of climate

change might be settled but how to feel about it is certainly not.

Third, and directly connected to the previous two points, the emotive climate change

media and the celebrity engagements and performances that facilitate novel climate

affects normalize emotion as a response and as a motivational force to “solve” climate

change. In this, celebrity performances of affect also normalize the celebrities

themselves: They feel as ordinary people and so should and must we. They care—showing

this in words, deeds and affect—and so should and must we. They are ordinary, they are

authentic, they are genuine, and, most importantly, they are believable. Their

performances of ordinary emotion—a kind of performance of a non-performance as it

were—are those designed for maximum authenticity such that we too can and should feel,

we too can and should do. For example, as the director put it about DiCaprio’s role in

BTF,

We wanted Leo to be Everyman. Obviously, he lives a very rarefied life, but in this

film he plays a kind of Everyman in terms of this issue. He actually has a good

effect on the experts during interviews; they want him to understand, to make it

clear . . . It was important to humanize Leo, to make him seem vulnerable. And he

was vulnerable; we all were. When you’re walking on ice in the Arctic you have

trust people to tell you where to walk or you’re gone. When you’re in Greenland,

you take a wrong step and you shoot down the rapids. When you’re in a helicopter

flying over bushfires in Sumatra, it can be pretty terrifying. The fact that Leo is

willing to go there and do all this—none of us made any money on this film, and

certainly he didn’t—it shows that he really cares.

(G’Sell, 2016)

Yet, climate change celebrities are also, at the very same time, extraordinarily, or better

yet, extraordinarily ordinary in ways that are also about authenticity and connection.

Their extraordinariness provides them that heightened perch from which to feel, from

which we want to watch them feel, and to which we are supposed to respond. They are,

but also are not, outside of their elite status through their emotive behaviors and

concerned words. It is this vacillation between and among elite and not elite, ordinary

and extraordinary, every day and spectacle, through their media performances that allows

climate change celebrities the ability and multiple identities from which to attempt to

transcend climate politics. Affect and emotion are wielded here as sorts of “transcending”

tools to cut across audience political identities and get them in the “gut” or “heart” from

which care, responsibility, and action will flow. But of course, as we know, there really is

no transcending of politics either in general nor in this highly charged case of climate

change. Rather, a better way to see all of this might be that these novel modes of affective

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climate media and celebrities work to specifically politicize emotion and affect in the

context of climate change in ways and to ends that have yet to be seen but which have

also begun to define the After Data era of the climate mediascape.

Fourth, the proposed pathways to change and climate change solutions through these

new emotive climate media interventions have potential implications and offer up

important new questions, particularly the gendered modes of engagement and action this

may generate. What if emotion and affect, the core entryway to raising awareness and

spurring public action, don’t gain the traction that these celebrities hope? Moreover, will

these attempts actually overcome the knowledge and now, emotion and action gaps that

might appear and be maintained? This begs a further question: Perhaps these moves to

affect and impacts are missing the point in that some of the issues with lack of rapid

movements on climate impacts are less about feelings and more about what the audience

does (Mendick, Allen, & Harvey, 2015) with the science, knowledge, and data around

climate change? Either way, further research needs to explore the ways that the public

and climate media audiences actually engage in shifting everyday actions or broader

political action in light of our suggested affective shifts in climate change celebrity media.

A second issue of concerns is the ways that climate celebrities and their media

interventions, affect, and emotion or not, work to set up particular pathways to solutions.

Thus, we might be more emotive about climate change, but if the solutions celebrities

propose include the typical “weak brew” of more and better conscious capitalism,

sustainable consumption, and individual responses of light bulb changing, then it seems

that even the historic Paris Agreement might now not mean much. Critical interrogation

of what affective climate celebrities propose as solutions, like the overall public impact of

the turn to impacts and emotions in climate media, is greatly needed.

Finally, we end this section with a more speculative and possible set of implications

worthy of critical questions. Namely, will science and data return as a celebrity-endorsed

product as climate change impacts accelerate and we get deeper into the Anthropocene?

Will the science of mitigation and resilience come to the forefront of celebrity

performances? In particular, it seems as if feeling more deeply about climate change

might not be enough as the “climate denialist in chief” of Donald Trump begins to move

on reversing U.S. climate policy and creating much wider global impacts in terms of the

Paris Agreement. Or will these accentuated affects spur greater and more vociferous

climate action that might cross both social media and city streets in unprecedented ways

working to combine knowledge, pedagogy, affect, and celebrity in ways unforeseen as of

yet? The new roles and performances of climate change celebrities will be fascinating to

watch, if nothing else, as we potentially move into even more dangerous times in the

Anthropocene.

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Notes:

(1.) See Moser (2016) for an excellent summary of climate communication research in the

last five years, and its potential future directions.

(2.) The COP21 Paris Accords are a ray of light here, and it might be interesting to

consider the impacts of these media interventions and indeed the role of affect and

emotion both before Paris and after as well as how further interventions might be called

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upon in light of the “climate change denier in chief” in form of Trump coming to power in

the United States.

Julie Doyle

University of Brighton

Nathan Farrell

Bournemouth University

Michael K. Goodman

University of Reading

A scoping review of celebrity endorsement in environmental campaigns and evidence for its effectiveness

Article

Full-text available

Aug 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.

Chinese Public Perception of Climate Change on Social Media: An Investigation Based on Data Mining and Text Analysis

Article

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Aug 2022

li Zeng

Climate change is a serious threat to humankind. As broad public participation is required in climate change mitigation efforts, it is critical to understand how the public talk about climate change on social media. This study sets out to increase the understanding of Chinese public awareness of climate change, as well as explore the potential and limitations of social media for public engagement on climate change issues. It examines the Chinese public’s discussion about climate change on social media Weibo during the last six years through data mining and text analysis. The analyses include volume analysis, keyword extraction, topic modeling, and sentiment analysis. The results indicate three main aspects of public awareness and concern regarding climate change. First, public awareness of climate change is growing in China. Second, the sentiment analysis shows that the general sentiment toward climate change is becoming more positive over time. Third, based on keyword extraction and topic modeling, the discussion on climate change shows a top-down perspective, an optimistic economic perspective, and a preference for celebrity content. The study provides a comprehensive picture of Chinese social media users’ views on climate change issues, based on large-scale research data. It contributes to a better understanding of what Chinese people think about climate change on social media generally. These findings may provide government and environmental organizations with valuable insights for better climate change campaigns on social media.

‘It is a bloody big and responsible job’: perspectives on climate change communication from Australia-focused practitioners

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Nic Badullovich

Climate change is a complex social-political issue in Australia with a history of dysfunctional conflict over climate policy. This presents challenges for the practitioners communicating about climate change to different publics. To date, academic research has focused on exploring how effective communication can be achieved but rarely has this been understood from a practitioner’s perspective. I present the findings of nineteen ( n = 19) semi-structured interviews with climate change communication (CCC) practitioners in Australia. The interviews explored occupational experiences as a means to understand the state of practice, challenges, and ways forward for CCC. I explore four key themes in this analysis: the practitioners, their goals, the barriers, and their perspectives on framing. Participants spoke of the complexity in doing CCC work, including many barriers, but their focus on effective communication and engagement remains strong in the face of challenging circumstances. Graphical abstract

Heladas y friajes: un acercamiento a la calidad informativa y encuadres en la cobertura periodística de los cibermedios en el Perú

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El presente trabajo académico analiza el tratamiento informativo de los cibermedios sobre los friajes y las heladas en el Perú. El objetivo principal fue estudiar la calidad informativa y los encuadres que la Agencia Peruana de Noticias Andina y los diarios El Comercio y La República utilizaron en sus artículos digitales. A través de una metodología mixta, se analizaron 139 notas publicadas durante 2021. Los resultados demuestran que la mayor cantidad de artículos parten de medios externos; se priorizan las fuentesoficiales; se dejan de lado géneros periodísticos como la crónica y el reportaje; no se potencia la multimedialidad; y los encuadres más empleados son el meteorológico y de asuntos públicos. Los investigadores concluimos que la calidad informativa es deficiente en cuanto a la agenda informativa, el manejo de las fuentes y la diversificación de géneros. No se expone la problemática desde la sociedad civil y se sobredimensiona la participación de políticos.

The Tropes of Celebrity Environmentalism

Article

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May 2020
ANNU REV ENV RESOUR

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.

The Tropes of Celebrity Environmentalism

Article

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Oct 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., hashtag publics, brandjacking, online communities). Environmental celebrity advocates’ 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. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Environment and Resources, Volume 45 is October 19, 2020. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

“Tied to the Land”: Climate Change Activism Among U.S. Hunters and Fishers

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Jessica Love-Nichols

This paper investigates climate change activism among sportsmen and sportswomen, or hunters and fishers—a politically conservative group with historically deep roots to environmental conservation. Recently members of this community have created an NGO that focuses solely on climate change action—Conservation Hawks—and several other long-standing organizations have begun to include climate communication and activism within their mission. This article draws on fieldwork conducted throughout the rural western U.S., including ethnographic interviews with sportsmen/sportswomen, participant observation in hunter education courses and conservation events, and publicly-available media produced by hunting-oriented conservation organizations. Using an ethnographic and discourse analytic approach, I find that three primary discursive practices are particularly important within hunting and fishing community—a performed closeness to wildlife and wild places, a privileging of experiential and embodied epistemologies, and a valorization of the past wilderness. In both interviews and sportsmen-oriented media, these discourses can be drawn on when creating doubt and climate skepticism. Increasingly, however, activist groups use the same rhetorical strategies to promote climate change action. I argue that such shared discursive practices can thus mobilize collective identities, challenge political polarization, and create new political subjectivities around climate change in the rural western United States. I also argue that these discursive practices shape the actions portrayed as reasonable responses to the climate crisis within this community. This analysis thus illuminates climate activism within an understudied group, showing the depth of the civic movement on climate change. It also specifically highlights the importance of shared discursive practices to both climate skepticism and climate activism among one politically-conservative group in the United States, rural white hunters, and fishers.

Powerful but Short-Lived: Pop Bands as Influencers of Climate Discussions on Twitter

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Influencers are considered important in raising environmental awareness on social media. In February 2021, BlackPink, a popular popband, were announced as official advocates for COP26, which was followed by tweets on Twitter. We aimed to study the effectiveness of influencers for climate communication on social media. We analyzed the spread of tweets and the duration of effects over a period of four weeks following the announcement. We found that on the day of the event there were 1518 primary tweets which were liked and retweeted 2600 times which reduced to 62 primary tweets and 209 retweets and likes four weeks after the event. We also found that the influencer engaged a community that might not have been otherwise engaged, specifically fans of BlackPink, but this was short lived. Our findings suggest that influencers are potentially important to raise awareness, but efforts are needed to sustain engagement.

Vegan celebrity activism: an analysis of the critical reception of Joaquin Phoenix’s awards speech activism

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Dec 2022

Acceptance speeches have long been used by celebrity activists as platforms from which to promote their personal, political or ethical agendas. The actor Joaquin Phoenix, an outspoken proponent for animal rights and veganism, dominated the Hollywood awards season in 2020 for his portrayal of Arthur Fleck in Joker and used his platform to address this cause. The reaction to Phoenix’s speech in the trade and mainstream press reveals much about the role of celebrity vegan activism in the contemporary cultural and political climate. This article analyses the critical reception of Phoenix’s Oscar speech across 37 US and UK trade press and mainstream news articles. In doing so, we highlight how gender and notions of hegemonic masculinity are managed and reproduced through the press discourse on celebrity animal rights activism. We argue that Phoenix’s star persona and celebrity advocacy complicate the gendered norms associated with vegan practice. Finally, we address the issues of authenticity by examining Phoenix’s performance of advocacy at the Oscars to argue that and the actor’s speech popularises an emergent redemptive narrative of veganism, which negotiates hegemonic masculine ideals.

Extreme Sustainability Rhetoric and Sustainable Development

Book

May 2022

This book considers the nature, causes, and consequences of extreme pro- and anti-sustainability rhetoric, exploring how and why the expressions of radical views on sustainability-related themes may prevent real sustainable development. Following a thorough introduction on sustainability rhetoric, on dialogue, and on the role played by ideologies in the building of environmental beliefs, Fracarolli Nunes and Lee Park examine positions and statements expressed or made by individuals, companies, governments, and NGOs in the last decades. The outcomes of these considerations lead to the classification of expressions in different categories of sustainability rhetoric, laying the groundwork for the development of a ‘sustainability spectrum’: a metric for the level of radicalization of sustainability positions, which ranges from apocalyptic views to ultimate denial. Through the combination of historical perspectives, theoretical frameworks, and conceptual developments, this book provides a foundation for a more informed and productive dialogue between radically opposing views on sustainability issues. This volume will be of great interest to students, scholars, and practitioners researching and working in the areas of environmental communication and media, environmental politics, and sustainable development.

The environment movement at a crossroads Weathercocks & Signposts

Technical Report

Full-text available

Apr 2008

Tom Crompton

Celebrity vegans and the lifestyling of ethical consumption

Article

Full-text available

Jul 2016

Julie Doyle

Veganism offers an important critique of unethical and unsustainable food production practices, yet vegans have been historically stigmatized in mainstream media. Given the recent prominence of celebrity vegans, this article asks, how might the cultural intermediary work of vegan celebrities make the ethical practice of veganism more accessible? And how do vegans’ ethical concerns about the exploitative production and consumption of animals as food and by-products get reframed in the context of celebrity consumer culture? Bringing together philosophies of ethical veganism and eco-feminism with literature on ethical (food) consumption and celebrity culture, this article analyses the educational campaigning work on veganism by Hollywood actor, Alicia Silverstone and TV chat show host, Ellen DeGeneres. It finds that veganism is figured as a diet and lifestyle that foregrounds an ethics of care, compassion, kindness and emotion - about and for humans, animals and environment - consistent with ethical veganism. Yet these ethics are reworked through the commodity logic of celebrity culture to make it more marketable and thus consumable as a set of ideas and gendered lifestyle practices, where the individual choice is to be a healthy, happy and kind self. The tensions between ethical veganism as an intervention at the point of consumption within the production of exploitative and gendered human/animal/environmental relations, and the focus upon an individualised lifestyle politics through which celebrities maintain their commodity status, thus coalesce in the work of celebrity vegans.

The Anti-political Populism of Cultural Studies

Chapter

Jan 1997

Todd Gitlin

Cultural Studies in Question

Book

Jan 1997

Fame Attack: The Inflation of Celebrity and Its Consequences

Book

Jan 2012

Chris Rojek

The follow up to Chris Rojek's hugely successful Celebrity, this book assesses celebrity culture today. It explores how the fads, fashions and preoccupations of celebrities enter the popular lifeblood, explains what is distinctive about contemporary celebrity, and reveals the psychological, social and economic consequences of fame both upon the public and celebrities themselves. The book develops the framework for looking at celebrity culture which Rojek set out back in 2001, by showing how ascribed celebrity, achieved celebrity and celetoids overlap. The book gives a new emphasis to the role of the media and public relations in engineering fame, and the psychological consequences of celebrity - notably Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Celebrity Worship Syndrome. The book is a landmark contribution in explaining how celebrities dominate the social horizon and why we need them.

Heavenly Bodies

Chapter

Jan 2007

Richard Dyer

Introduction: The Re-Styling of Politics

Chapter

Jan 2003

The Media and Political Process

Book

Jan 2010

P. E. Louw

The Powerless ‘Elite’: Theory and Sociological Research on the Phenomenon of the Stars

Chapter

Jan 2007

Francesco Alberoni

Mediatization: Rethinking the question of media power

Chapter

Jul 2014

Kent Asp

This chapter presents mediatization of politics as a process of mediainduced societal change that goes beyond the visible face of media power. Three questions are central to my attempt to rethink the question of media power: the nature of mediatization, its causes, and effects. Five key elements make up the core of my account of the mediatization theory: (1) adaptation as a process of social learning to a changing media environment, (2) the media as constraints on actions; the emergence of powerful and independent media institutions, and (3) the increased media dependency as causes of mediatization, and (4) shifts of power as an effect, and (5) social change as a consequence. The age of television was the background for my original account, relevant first and foremost for the systems world. Today, my conclusion is that the news media have become an integral part of the political institutions, whereupon the mediatization of politics should have reached a final phase. But whereas the process of mediatization may have peaked on the systems level, the mediatization of the lifeworld has only just begun. Consequently, mediatization theory should also today-in the age of the Internet-be a most relevant tool for approaching and rethinking the question of media power.

Celebrities and Climate Change

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