REVIEW: Environmentalism and Popular Culture (Noel Sturgeon)

[Xiao Rong]

Environmentalism and Pop Culture: Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Politics of the Natural, by Noel Sturgeon
Published in 2008 by University of Arizona Press

This is not exactly a “pagan” book in the most common sense, but I picked up this book from my university library because many Pagans are committed to a reverence for nature and environmentalist principles, and often I wonder how to best go about doing so given the urgent issues facing us today, including climate change, pollution, ocean acidification, deforestation, and a million other things. I am also very much interested in discourse and popular culture, and how what we see in media shapes what we think what the environment is, and what our role is in relation to it.

Standard disclaimer about how this review is solely my opinion, etc.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Sturgeon operates from what she calls a “global feminist environmental justice perspective”, in which she combines analyses of race, gender, sexuality, economic justice, and sustainability concerns. In it, she argues that there is no way that we can extricate social justice from environmental concerns, for environmental degradation hurts the world’s poorest and most vulnerable, and capitalism contributes to environmental degradation, and no solution to either is complete without addressing both. To make this point, she draws on popular culture, ranging from Pocahontas to March of the Penguins and touches on a wide variety of issues, addressing common environmental images and tropes such as the Ecological Indian, penguins on melting Antarctic ice, and even the image of the Earth as a blue marble itself.

THE GOOD

This was an incredibly powerful book, and really challenges almost everything we see. Despite being a slim volume, clocking in at 224 pages, it has a LOT to unpack. She doesn’t address paganism, but she is fairly critical of a lot of images that are fairly common in pagan imagery and thought. I think this criticism is healthy, though, because as responsible citizens, we do need to think carefully about how we represent the Earth that we care for, and the people in it. For example, she asks how do we think about the image of the Native American as the first and ultimate environmentalist? Using examples from film, she shows that we often think of Native Americans as a disappeared, vanished culture, closer to nature than we were but also stereotypes them as mystical, anachronistic, and incompatible with progress. She also asks the hard question: what kind of repercussions does this have on Native Americans today, who face real, current environmental problems which are tied to the complexities of tribal sovereignty, racism, economic justice, etc.?

She relentlessly questions the power of the word “natural” and what it means to give this word and its associations political power, and interrogates how “nature” has been used by many movements (such as the environmentalist movement, anti-gay movement, anti-feminist movement, and others) to give themselves authority and legitimation in ways that may be contrary to environmentalist and social justice aims. She also draws connections between a wide variety of issues, such as how reproductive justice is not merely limited to current debates on abortion and contraception, but also encompasses the reproduction of capitalist, gender, and family structures, so we should be careful of how we use heteronormative stories to legitimate environmentalism. You really have to read the book to get it - I can’t even begin to do it justice here!

Her writing, though academic, is generally clear, and she illustrates her points well with examples from ads, films, TV shows, and books, even ones that might be considered too common or harmless for consideration (not even Captain Planet and Schoolhouse Rock are safe from her!) And to be fair, it’s not all criticism - she does point out what is good about these shows (such as diverse casts and the environmental messaging), but Sturgeon makes the case that we can, and should, demand better media to help us imagine a better future.

THE BAD

There were a few times that she was pulling together a lot of very disparate movements, such as the problems with undervaluing women’s work, militarism, and environmental destruction, but she goes on about each of these for a while before tying them back together, and this was sometimes confusing. I had to read through this book two or three times in order to make sure I was following her connections all the way through.

Like I said before, it is a lot to unpack in a very short book, especially for one on a topic as broad as “Environmentalism in Popular Culture”, so she can really go into detail on just a few common tropes. I hope she delves further into the topic in future books, or someone else follows it up. As wonderful as an introduction as this book is, it’s still just the tip of the iceberg.

And, as a general note, this book will likely not be found in your local library; you’d probably have to go to a university library or online.

TO TAKE WITH A GRAIN OF SALT:

This book is an academic book, so some of the writing is dense (denser than a lot of other scholarly writing, in my opinion). This isn’t a light read, by any means, even though it is a short book. It would help to have some background in feminist, critical race, and social justice theory.

THE VERDICT:

I believe that, as pagans who are interested in protecting the earth, we have an obligation to be thoughtful about the images and stories we choose to help us turn our thoughts into action, and this book is vital to challenging the dominant ways of thinking that might be counterproductive for our cause. I would recommend this book strongly to anyone who likes analytical and scholarly social sciences literature (which I recognize is not necessarily to everyone’s taste).

5 out of 5 stars