Greenwashing Culture

Toby Miller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138962712
• eBook ISBN: 9781317333494
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Greenwashing Culture examines the complicity of culture with our environmental crisis. Through its own carbon footprint, the promotion of image-friendly environmental credentials for celebrities, and the mutually beneficial engagement with big industry polluters, Toby Miller argues that culture has become an enabler of environmental criminals to win over local, national, and international communities.

Topics include:

• the environmental liabilities involved in digital and print technologies used by cultural institutions and their consumers;
• Hollywood's 'green celebrities' and the immense ecological impact of their jet-setting lifestyles and filmmaking itself;
• high profile sponsorship deals between museums and oil and gas companies, such as BP's sponsorship of Tate Britain;
• radical environmental reform, via citizenship and public policy, illustrated by the actions of Greenpeace against Shell's sponsorship of Lego.

This is a thought-provoking introduction to the harmful impact of greenwashing. It is essential reading for students of cultural studies and environmental studies, and those with an interest in environmental activism.

1

Introducing greenwashing

This little book examines culture’s complicity with our environmental crisis. I wrote it as a provocation, to myself as well as to you, in order to think through issues that dog attempts, through spectacle and science alike, to convince the world’s public of the reality of our ecological situation. Two introductory chapters cover basic theoretical concepts and material histories and case studies of the environment and culture. Then I address museums in order to examine the record of our principal art and historical institutions, prior to engaging citizenship, regulation, and resistance.

We are standing over an abyss. Our climate is changing in ways that imperil us, our fellow animals, other forms of life, and the very Earth itself. Past and present industrial processes have exposed the planet to potentially irrevocable harm. We have entered what the world’s scientific community declared in 2016 to be an Anthropocene—an epoch characterized by major geological and ecological changes wrought by human activity (Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy, 2016). Yet despite the evidence, the contours of this abyss are far from clear to many people. How can that be? Shouldn’t something so portentous, and lying directly in front of us, be pretty obvious?

Like scientists in general, climate scholars emphasize the need for patience in undertaking and understanding their work, which relies on the steady accumulation of data and progressive projections from it, based on flexible modeling. After all, climate is the average of weather. It is history (Chakrabarty, 2014).

While there is necessarily some debate over climate change—its geography, history, speed, nature, and future—this is akin to debates over correlations between high consumption of alcohol and illness or leaping from tall buildings at a single bound and injury. In other words, the science is largely agreed, but there are always exceptions, complications, the need for additional research, and the emergence of new policy recommendations. That is how science works, through dual processes of accretion and attenuation.

In addition to the complexity of ordinary research, climate scientists confront an additional obstacle: the systematic distortion of climate science by the Anglo media. Wealthy polluters and their servants in public relations feast on occasional, entirely ordinary scholarly disagreements among climate experts, which are assiduously yet duplicitously reported as proof of a putative underlying weakness in the evidence for climate change (Maxwell and Miller, 2016; Lewandowsky et al., 2015: 2). Bourgeois public discourse is dominated by ideologues and pundits for hire who clutch at these moments and transform them into absolutes. Climate-change scientists are rarely invited to their party.¹

I’ll provide a case study that gives some scarifying context. Edelman is one of the world’s biggest public relations (PR) corporations. Caught out when other major PR concerns announced in 2014 that they would no longer work for climate-change deniers (Goldenberg, 2014), the group responded with the same guarantee. But a year later, word spread that it had advised the American Petroleum Institute (API) through a subsidiary, Blue Advertising. Tax filings disclosed that API paid Edelman US$327.4 million between 2008 and 2012 and US$52 million in 2014 alone (Quinn and Young, 2015; Merchant, 2014). In return for this largesse, Edelman schooled API in award-winning campaigns designed to avoid the charge of climate-change denial by depicting API as driven by the public good and public desires.² Most notoriously, one set of TV commercials was supposedly providing a voice to ordinary people about their views on energy and employment. As an undercover activist revealed, there was a pro-extractive script they were expected to follow (Mufson and Eilperin, 2011). Meanwhile, Edelman was equally busy advising corporations that they must put a stop to greenwashing (Chan and Sukhdev, 2012)!

In responding to the controversy over the disparity between its claims and its finances, Edelman did what it might advise a client to do: claimed to be misunderstood, sacrificed an executive, announced that it believed in climate change, and divested from Blue Advertising (Gunther, 2014; Elliott, 2014).³

Let’s get real: Greenpeace’s Dealing in Doubt reports are remarkable indictments of PR firms like Edelman facilitating climate-change denial.⁴ The industry routinely funds astroturf organizations (faux grassroots activists) and coin-operated think wankery (failed academics) that appeal to everyday experience and junk science and against democratic regulation underpinned by scholarly advice (Schäfer, 2012; Schlichting, 2013).

Edelman oleaginously refers to astroturfing as “third party technique” (Burton and Rowell, 2003) and is the author of a “Grassroots Advocacy Vision Document” that incarnates civil society mimesis on behalf of corporate distortion.⁵

Such conduct runs contrary to the US PR industry’s code of ethics. Its list of “improper conduct” includes “‘grass roots’ campaigns or letter-writing campaigns to legislators on behalf of undisclosed interest groups” and “employing people to pose as volunteers to speak at public hearings and participate in ‘grass roots’ campaigns.”⁶ The bizarrely titled Word of Mouth Marketing Association (truly) promises that its members will “make meaningful disclosures of their relationships or identities with consumers in relation to the marketing initiatives that could influence a consumer’s purchasing decisions.”⁷ Note that the word “citizen,” which should apply given the attempt to forestall the democratic regulation of industries, is invisible.

Edelman has form in this regard, across many industries. In tobacco, it dedicated decades to combating medical science, encouraging simpleton smokers to continue their deluded indulgence.⁸ In pharmaceuticals, it spruiked spurious studies guaranteeing hair regrowth to gullible guys (Moynihan et al., 2002). In chemicals, it set up supposedly grassroots campaigns for Monsanto contra critiques of genetically modified food (Beder, 1998). In retail, it paid operatives masquerading as cross-country campers to blog favorably about Wal-Mart car parks and store managers (Frazier, 2006). And its collaboration with Trans Canada sought to discredit anyone questioning the Energy East pipeline.⁹

Edelman registered record profits in 2014: US$812 million, up 8.2 per cent on the previous year. The company noted in particular that it helped universities deal with the impact on public opinion of sexual violence on campus (Barrett, 2015).

In 2015, the firm launched its latest “Trust Barometer Survey,” which disclosed that “half of the global informed public believe that the pace of development and change in business today is too fast, that business innovation is driven by greed and money rather than a desire to improve people’s lives and that there is not enough government regulation of many industry sectors.”¹⁰

So Edelman knew what it was doing, and it knew the public disapproved. But fear not. One of its Senior Vice Presidents, nominated as among the “Top 100 Thought Leaders in Trustworthy Business Behavior,” was on hand to “help you navigate” any “claims of ‘greenwashing’” (Campher, 2014).

While PR/media distortions are central components of the propaganda that fills us with doubt as we confront our abyss, they are only part of the cultural blockade erected by capital against the truth: there is seduction through kindness and affinity as well as bald-faced mendacity.

And culture is complicit in two ways with both climate change itself and our failure to deal with it. On the one hand, it is directly responsible for significant carbon footprints and ecological crimes, via building construction and energy use, artistic production, visitor travel, and media coverage.¹¹ Despite that, cultural institutions endeavor to legitimize the harm they cause by promoting themselves as good environmental citizens. And on the other hand, they accept sponsorship from the gas and petroleum industries, thereby imbuing those extractive corporations with a positive image by embedding them within the everyday pleasures of culture. Taken together, such activities amount to serious greenwashing. Cultural institutions both leave their own ecological mark and provide symbolic cover for more significant polluters—a dual problem.

As we’ll see, several groups stand against these tendencies. Progressive patrons and non-government organizations (NGOs) resist complicity; scientists disclose its impact; a few journalists report the ensuing controversies; artists embark on self-reflexive critique; and civil servants broker conflicting stakeholders’ points of view. But before examining the greenwashing of culture, we must understand core terms in the debate.

Philosophy

A complex heritage underpins world views that focus on the interests of human beings (anthropocentrism) versus the planet as a whole (eco-centrism). From anthropocentric perspectives, Bacon avowed four centuries ago that “commerce between the mind of man and the nature of things … is more precious than anything on earth” (1620) and Descartes argued that “reason or good sense … exists whole and complete in each of us, … the only thing that makes us men and distinguishes us from the lower animals” (2007: 1). A century later, Kant also regarded people as uniquely important because they were conscious of themselves and their place in the world: “through rank and dignity” they were “an entirely different being from things, such as irrational animals, with which one can do as one likes” (2006: 15).

A hundred years on, Hegel exalted in a world dominated by human beings’ physical and symbolic mastery, avowing that one can put one’s “will into everything,” such that an object or place “becomes mine.” Because people are unique in their desire and capacity to conserve objects and represent them via semiosis, a strange dialectical process supposedly affords them a special right to destroy as well. Such willpower is independent of simple survival, and sets humanity apart from other living things. As per Kant, the capacity to transcend our “spontaneity and natural constitution” supposedly distinguishes us from other animals. These semiotic abilities permit the destructive use of power, what Hegel called “the right of absolute proprietorship.” As a consequence, “sacred respect for … unused land cannot be guaranteed.” The necessary relationship between people and nature asserts itself at the core of human consciousness as a struggle to achieve freedom from risk and want. Nature’s “tedious chronicle,” where there is “nothing new under the sun,” is correctly disrespected and disobeyed by progress (Hegel, 1954: 242–3, 248–50 and 1988: 50, 154, 61).

Such arguments also work with more applied philosophizing: the industrialist Henry Ford argued that “unused forces of nature” must be “put into action … to make them mankind’s slaves” (1929: 71), while Vannevar Bush, US Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development during the Second World War, celebrated the drive to release humanity “from the bondage of bare existence” (1945). And hence the anti-indigenous, anti-flora, anti-fauna doctrine of terra nullius (empty space), which denied land title to native people, fantasizing their ideological and pragmatic lives to harmonize with nature rather than transform it (Skillington, 2017).¹² It receives doctrinal buttressing from anti-evolution Protestants. Trinity University’s head, Jerry Falwell, Jr, was anointed by Donald Trump to run an education taskforce (Miller, 2017). His college, like many others who profess religion, declares that: “Angels were created as ministering agents, though some, under the leadership of Satan, fell from their sinless state to become agents of evil. The universe was created in six historical days and is continuously sustained by God” (Jaschik, 2009).¹³

Hegelian discourse remains powerful today: Adorno defined the Enlightenment as “the progressive technical domination of nature” (1975: 18). Such talk incarnates two baleful certainties: human sovereignty over the world, and a paradoxical guarantee that its exercise will not fundamentally challenge the basis of life. Of course, such anthropocentric positions have been challenged, not least because nature can be so comprehensively altered by technology and labor that it eludes human control. Bacon, Descartes, Hegel, and their kind do not rule the philosophical roost.

For all his privileging of consciousness, Kant gave an impassioned account of the natural world as equally beautiful and sublime, aesthetic and awesome. That paradoxical amalgam forced him to confront a space beyond both nature and human semiosis alike—a terrifying place where “the shadows of the boundless void into the abyss before me.” This raised a horrifying specter: an apocalyptic vision that one day we may realize there is nothing left, nothing else, nothing beyond (2011: 17)—akin to William James later noting that “nature is but a name for excess” (1909: 63). Such anxieties obliged Kant to recogni...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introducing greenwashing
• 2 Introducing culture (with Richard Maxwell)
• 3 Museums
• 4 Citizenship, regulation, and resistance
• 5 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index