Nature Inc.: Environmental Conservation in the Neoliberal Age

5. Celebrity Spectacle, Post-Democratic Politics, and Nature™ Inc.

108 chapter five Celebrity Spectacle, Post-Democratic Politics, and Nature™ Inc. Dan Brockington Two frontiers of capitalist expansion are restructuring environmental resource use and policies. There is a new round of landgrabbing by elites, corporations , and governments worldwide that is threatening the resource bases of the rural poor (Borras et al. 2011; Fairhead, Leach, and Scoones 2012b). And there is the reconfiguration of environmental policies around payments for environmental services, which again could substantially compromise rural livelihoods (Engel, Pagiola, and Wunder 2008; Redford and Adams 2009; Kosoy and Corbera 2010; Brockington 2011). Both trends are driven by the same dynamic—the relentless capitalist pursuit of profit, which seeks to enclose new lands and create (and take possession of) new commodities. In such a context, spending any time thinking or writing about celebrity may seem foolish. Barricades and protest are surely more intelligent responses to landgrabbing than reaching for the nearest copy of Heat (a celebrity news magazine). I have some sympathy with that response; I have firsthand experience of how useless Heat can be when opposing landgrabs. However, if we follow the politics of celebrity endorsements for environmental issues and other good causes, then we can learn a great deal about how the political space and policy environments have been created that enable such appropriations to take place.1 To understand the nature of celebrity’s role in Nature™ Inc. we must make three routine observations. First, there is not enough critical public or academic debate about these twin capitalist frontiers. As Redford and Celebrity Spectacle • 109 Adams (2009) have complained, payments for environmental services are greeted too enthusiastically. Landgrabs are portrayed as attempts to solve global food shortages or replace hydrocarbons with green biofuels. The persuasive forces of profit-seeking capitalism, with decades of experience of guile behind them, and the marketing branches of NGOs are being directed at selling these possibilities. Accumulation through dispossession can be welcomed as a progressive move. Second, we must note that celebrities are part of the persuasion to support these moves. The Prince’s Trust (established by Prince Charles, first in line to the British throne), for example, has been adept at enrolling a large number of international names to promote plans to make the carbon in rain forests worth enough money for capitalism to seek to preserve it (Igoe 2010).2 Harrison Ford (an actor) supports Conservation International to advertise the possibilities of realizing value from ecosystem services in Africa. Even if Ford somewhat gauchely declared that Africa was a continent where “nature and people are one,” the message was clear. Nature is good for business, and African ecosystems are a good place to conduct it. Finally, we must note that celebrities are also part of the opposition. Consider, for example, the appearance of Paul McCartney (a musician), Robert Redford (an actor), and Cilla Black (a TV personality) joining Greenpeace to speak out against oil exploration in the Arctic during the recent Earth Summit.3 They were initiating a signature petition that will enroll more than a million signatures and that will then be deposited symbolically beneath the ice of the North Pole. Their stance provides an apparently welcome contrast to more establishment-driven publicity. It surely represents an instance of popular and civic power taking on political and economic power in opposition to capitalist expansion. In some respects their stance is just that: it both seeks to limit capitalism’s terrain and may create the political space for more opposition. But we cannot just take this campaign at face value. Look at the sorts of politics that this is promoting. Burying signatures beneath the North Pole creates good spectacle, but it does not give those signatories much voice or visibility. Rather, it gives Greenpeace political capital to wield; the primary direct beneficiary of this Arctic petition will be Greenpeace and not the Arctic. This is the same organization whose support of the newly declared Chagos Marine Protected Area has aroused some controversy because that support did not, initially, make clear enough Greenpeace’s backing of the claims of formerly resident Chagossians or their opposition to the presence of a massive, polluting American military base on Diego Garcia in an exclave in the heart of the park (Sand 2010). This unusual example shows that 110 • Dan Brockington mainstream conservation organizations can be rather useful to the establishment . Celebrity opposition to capitalist expansion, therefore, needs to be taken not just at...