Celebrities and Climate Change

Abstract

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.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.

Public engagement with climate imagery in a changing digital landscape

“…In 2016, Leonardo di Caprio's collaboration with National Geographic "Before the Flood" was made free-to-view on Youtube and attracted 60 million views soon after release. The film differs from typical climate narratives by interspersing stories of ordinary people and communities (Doyle, Farrell, & Goodman, 2017). While there are currently no analyses of public responses to the film "Before the Flood," films that have come before it, such as "An Inconvenient Truth" and "The Age of Stupid" have been studied extensively (Howell, 2011;Sakellari, 2014;Svoboda, 2016).…”

Communicating climate change through documentary film: imagery, emotion, and efficacy

“…Finally, celebrities may have an important role in generating interest in the issue as they have become increasingly prominent voices in climate and environment discourse (Anderson 2011;Boykoff et al 2010;Doyle et al 2017). However, there is also some evidence that the use of celebrities can undermine salience (O'Neill et al 2013).…”

The Tropes of Celebrity Environmentalism

“…In this sense, environmental celebrities frame affect-their own and ours by intention-as much as they do cognition through performance, narrative, and storytelling of, for example, the impacts of climate change on small farming communities in the US Midwest to the forest dwellers in Indonesia. They have, as Doyle et al (121) argue in the context of climate change celebrities, begun to usher us into a so-called post-data world of environmental politics. No longer do we have the likes of Al Gore showing us PowerPoint slides of temperature versus CO 2 data points plotted on graphs.…”