Ecoporn Exposed

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They go largely unnoticed, and yet they reveal a broad truth about the environmental movement: It has failed to generate a compelling language for itself. Its propaganda falls flat, its style is outdated, its rhetoric is stale. It needs to be reborn.

So what's next? Next is all or nothing -- either a critical facelift for environmentalism or a long slow slide into obsolescence. A soft aesthetic produces soft results. So-called 'radical' environmentalists and little-read deep ecologists hark to our 'duty' to preserve and care for nature, poignantly calling for a profound paradigm shift that will allow the human race to see beyond its own wants, needs, and foibles to a Higher Love -- a tall order for people who can't decide whether to use paper or plastic.

To survive, the environmental movement needs to do what the far right has done so well since the advent of Ronald Reagan: find base and selfish selling points for our product. Make people afraid not to buy. Wilderness and biodiversity conservation in the 21st century will mean national security, food security, atmospheric security -- in short, survival. Environmentalists have a powerful product, and the onus is on them to use powerful tools for the sale.

Doomsaying alone is not the ticket. Environmental advertising has to define a new style for itself, a style with unapologetic momentum, a hardball-playing, fast-moving engagement with the realities of anthropogenic devastation. It can no longer shrink from the rude, the vicious, or the unsightly. Think of Richard Misrach's stunning photography book Violent Legacies, which features desecrated toxic landscapes rendered lovely by tragedy and good composition. Consider the gentler and colder work of Lee Friedlander in The Desert Seen, which sacrifices touristic prettiness for a near-clinical complexity, or the work of Lynn Davis in Wonders of the African World, the companion book to the Henry Louis Gates public television series, which shows us that landscape and preindustrial architecture, the natural and the contrived, may be similarly formal expressions of a dignity elicited by the desert's rigors.

If environmentalism wants to hold off the end of nature, it is going to have to stop relying on the static prettiness of landscapes and the staged cuteness of animals to gather new recruits. What it needs is not a well-meaning posse of smiling grannies handing out Hallmark cards in the mall, but the guts to assault us with the ugly effects of our own appetites.

Reprinted from High Country News (April 2004). Subscriptions: $32/yr. (24 issues) from 119 Grand Ave, Paonia, CO 81428; www.hcn.org A longer version of this essay originally appeared in Naked: Writers Uncover the Way We Live on Earth (Four Walls Eight Windows, 2004), edited by Susan Zakin.

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