In “The Politics of the Natural,” Noel Sturgeon dramatically illustrates how popular culture affects people’s viewpoint about nature and environment and how advertising influences people’s way of thinking on what is nature versus what is natural. Nowadays, most people are unaware and/or not knowledgeable enough about the role of U.S. pop culture in connection to how we perceive nature and the environment, and how it becomes problematic when pop misrepresents nature. Since American popular culture grows faster than we ever think, the adaptation to social patterns in representing nature in society is very perplexing. In this generation, “advertising culture often plays a key role in developing our understanding of “nature”.” (Sturgeon). This suggests that the socially constructed ideologies of nature through advertising and pop culture in society can influence people’s conception on how we rationalize social and environmental justice and thus can affect people’s perspective.
Noel Sturgeon’s stance on popular culture and its detrimental effects on people’s viewpoint about nature and environment has been both controversial and challenging especially in today’s situation. And since advertising and pop culture has clearly been very successful on misrepresenting nature, false assumptions by portraying bad images of the environment and social stereotypes in pop culture have dramatically increased. It is important to cultivate our understanding of the effects of popular culture as it dictates our judgment, and “our attitudes toward “nature” reflect our conflicting and shifting understandings of ourselves and others.” (Sturgeon).
Developing crucial questions such as “Why does pop culture affects people’s aspects toward nature and environment?” and “How does pop culture contribute to the problems of environmental and social justice in society?” is an advantage for everyone to understand why learning about these symbolic meanings in pop culture could help us examine the deep roots to why environmental and social problems persist in the first place.
Bulfin, Ailise. “Popular Culture and the ‘New Human Condition’: Catastrophe Narratives and
Climate Change.” Global and Planetary Change, Elsevier, 14 Mar. 2017.
In this journal article, Ailise Bulfin, a medical humanities research fellow and author, argues that popular culture has both positive and negative impacts in regards to the representation of ecological catastrophe in our society. Bulfin claims that the fictional representation of environmental problems can “influence people’s awareness of the environmental issues.” (Bulfin) However, popular culture tends to overly romanticize environmental disasters, or as Bulfin calls it, the “new human condition”, and thus becomes problematic in such a way that it distorts our “structures of feelings” by viewing catastrophes in our environment as only fictitious crises that do not require immediate action to be prevented. (Bulfin). Bulfin provides a thorough explanation of the role of popular culture in portraying such important environmental issues in society and the effects of U.S. pop culture addressing ecological catastrophe in today’s generation. However, addressing environmental degradation using popular culture can only lead to apathy because it only illustrates how catastrophes happen but do not actually provide solutions to the audiences that can help the prevention of these certain issues in our society.
Seippel, Ornulf. “Political Environmentalism: Class Interests, Modern Values or Postmodern
Feelings?” Innovation: The European Journal of Social Sciences, vol. 12, no. 2, June
1999, pp.129-153.
In this book excerpt, Ornulf Seippel explains how political environmentalism and postmodern culture alters society’s viewpoint on environmentalism. Seippel claims that the political force influences our postmodern values that has an inimical effect towards our environmental attitudes, both positively and negatively. The author further explains “the topic of the influence of postmodern culture on environmental politics”, and its manifestations regarding society’s environmental perspective in the 20th century. Seippel suggests that by studying the political viewpoint of environmentalism, we can determine the attitudes and values that attribute to how postmodern society view the importance of nature and environment. Thus, the society approaches the idea of nature and environment through the influence of postmodern political and environmental culture.
Best, Kirsty. “Interfacing the environment: networked screens and the ethics of visual
consumption.” Ethics & the Environment, vol. 9, no. 2, 2004, p. 65.
In this article, Kirsty Best describes how visual imagery in popular/contemporary culture changes people’s perceptions towards the environment and how “screen-mediated representation and interaction” have progressively integrated with our daily lives. Best illustrates the topic by using the film “Finding Nemo” as an example on how screen-mediated representation affects the society’s urge of consuming animals as pets that can affect not only the environment but also the animal population in the biosphere. (Best). For Best, this technological tool has been effective in driving people’s desires in consumption and can be problematic. Since technology has invaded, it has also modified our relationship with the environment by using contemporary cultural representations such as films, advertisements, music, and so on that attribute to the society’s perceptions.