Bad Environmentalism
Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age
Nicole Seymour develops the concept of “bad environmentalism”: cultural thought that employs dissident affects and sensibilities to reflect critically on our current moment and on mainstream environmental activism. Funny and original, Bad Environmentalism champions the practice of alternative green politics and expands our understanding of how environmental art and activism can be pleasurable, even in a time of undeniable crisis.
Bad Environmentalism confronts serious environmental problems by way of ‘unserious’ texts. Nicole Seymour takes on complex ideas with lucidity, economy, and a witty sense of humor. Against the familiar affects that tend to characterize both environmentalism and environmental studies—such as awe, love, guilt, reverence, and earnestness—Bad Environmentalism pits less solemn alternatives, including playfulness, impropriety, irreverence, irony, frivolity, and glee. I am a convert. Bad environmentalists, unite!
Jennifer K. Ladino, author of Reclaiming Nostalgia: Longing for Nature in American Literature*
Activists today strive to educate the public about climate change, but sociologists have found that the more we know about alarming issues, the less likely we are to act. Meanwhile, environmentalists have acquired a reputation as gloom-and-doom killjoys. Bad Environmentalism identifies contemporary texts that respond to these absurdities and ironies through absurdity and irony—as well as camp, frivolity, irreverence, perversity, and playfulness.
Nicole Seymour develops the concept of “bad environmentalism”: cultural thought that employs dissident affects and sensibilities to reflect critically on our current moment and on mainstream environmental activism. From the television show Wildboyz to the short film series Green Porno, Seymour shows that this tradition of thought is widespread—spanning animation, documentary, fiction film, performance art, poetry, prose fiction, social media, and stand-up comedy since at least 1975. Seymour argues that these texts reject self-righteousness and sentimentality, undercutting public negativity toward activism and questioning basic environmentalist assumptions: that love and reverence are required for ethical relationships with the nonhuman and that knowledge is key to addressing problems like climate change.
Funny and original, Bad Environmentalism champions the practice of alternative green politics. From drag performance to Indigenous comedy, Seymour expands our understanding of how environmental art and activism can be pleasurable, even in a time of undeniable crisis.
As it turns out, climate change and the environment can be a laughing matter—at least, at an absurd or satirical level.
Foreword Reviews
Bad Environmentalism confronts serious environmental problems by way of ‘unserious’ texts. Nicole Seymour takes on complex ideas with lucidity, economy, and a witty sense of humor. Against the familiar affects that tend to characterize both environmentalism and environmental studies—such as awe, love, guilt, reverence, and earnestness—Bad Environmentalism pits less solemn alternatives, including playfulness, impropriety, irreverence, irony, frivolity, and glee. I am a convert. Bad environmentalists, unite!
Jennifer K. Ladino, author of Reclaiming Nostalgia: Longing for Nature in American Literature*
In an era in which environmental crises have been normalized and environmentalists are viewed by many as overly earnest irritants, Nicole Seymour gives us something we crave (even if we’re loathe to admit it!). Bad Environmentalism offers stunningly original, creative, and playful readings of a diverse range of cultural forms; refuses the binaries of eco-purity politics; and advances a hearty support of ambiguity, irreverence, contradiction, humor, and pleasure while holding firm against the racism and homophobia that often undergird mainstream environmentalist campaigns and logics. This is a challenging, often hilarious, and game-changing book.
David Naguib Pellow, author of What Is Critical Environmental Justice?*
Bad Environmentalism stands as an important example of the ways that humanities scholarship can make important interventions into issues of great political importance such as climate change.
LSE Review of Books
A valuable contribution to ecocriticism
CHOICE
Given the increasingly flawed assumption that environmental knowledge will inevitably lead to action, Seymour’s Bad Environmentalism creates a space to engage with texts and critical approaches that question, ironize, and challenge the limits of environmental knowledge and feeling, and that open up new ways of thinking ecologically.
The Goose
One must give credit to Bad Environmentalism for creating space for such self-reflexivity among political activists, scholars, and students alike.
Social and Cultural Geography
Films... burden the environmental movement with demands for an unattainable and easily critiqued form of perfect environmental morality. Rather, as Bad Environmentalism unswervingly proposes, environmentalists do not need to be perfect. Demands of flawlessness often allow those who deny climate change to consistently define activists as hypocritical when those campaigners drive gas-powered cars to protests, use jet fuel to fly to movie premieres, or load trash bins with protest signs.
Interface
This book was a joy to read. That is not how I feel about anything Wendell Berry or Terry Tempest Williams ever wrote, however, and Nicole Seymour’s aim (in part) is to explain why, and why I should not feel ashamed about it. Environmentalism, she insists, is a performance, and, more often than not, its performance has featured suffocating earnestness, sanctimony, seriousness, and self-righteousness. Bad Environmentalism exposes and challenges this “good affect” by turning attention away from the mainstream and toward “dissident” cultural margins.
Environmental History
Calling for alternative and expressive environmentalisms, Nicole Seymour’s Bad Environmentalism exposes the limited affects associated with mainstream environmentalism.
ISLE
She has crafted an important book that asks us—but also teaches us—to drop hierarchies of morality and identity and open our eyes to alternative visions of surviving on this planet, equitably, together.
Public Books
I consider Seymour’s analysis a crucial intervention in the privileging of the mainstream environmental messages found in documentaries by Al Gore, James Balog, and others.
The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory
A crucial intervention in the privileging of the mainstream environmental messages found in documentaries by Al Gore, James Balog, and others.
Ecocriticism
Nicole Seymour’s Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age offers its archive of “bad environmentalism” to help dismantle the affective and ideological barriers that situate the environment as our sanctified, unfunny, nonhuman Other, one whose moral, ethical, and aesthetic standards we fail to live up to (even as we threaten to destroy it).
H-Net Reviews
Bad Environmentalism, besides reminding us to check our privilege and our blind spots, gives us permission to employ affective modes that we might, in these troubling times, be tempted to suppress. Perhaps it’s not wrong to laugh as well as cry, even as the Amazon burns. Perhaps we can allow ourselves to be irritated by the sanctimony of some environmentalist voices.
Ecozon@
Theoretical in nature, the book never overwhelms the reader with deep dives into critical theorists unfamiliar to historians. Instead, it is funny, enjoyable and a call for a new type of action.
Not Even Past
Introduction
1. “I’m No Botanist, but . . .”: Irony, Ecocinema, and the Problem of Expert Knowledge
2. “So Much to See, So Little to Learn”: Perverting Nature/Wildlife Programming
3. Climate Change Is a Drag and Camping Can Be Campy: On Queer Environmental Performance
4. Animatronic Indians and Black Folk Who Don’t: Rewriting Racialized Environmental Affect
5. Gas-Guzzling, Beer-Chugging, Tree Huggers: Toward Trashy Environmentalisms
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
