As it turns out, climate change and the environment can be a laughing matter—at least, at an absurd or satirical level.

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!

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.

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.

A valuable contribution to ecocriticism

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.

One must give credit to Bad Environmentalism for creating space for such self-reflexivity among political activists, scholars, and students alike.

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.