The bad environmentalism of 'nature is healing' memes

Dados Bibliográficos

ID2406567
AutoresKai Bosworth (0000-0001-7381-648X, Virginia Commonwealth University, autor correspondente)
Ano2022
Volume29
Fascículo3
Páginas353-374
Data de publicação2022-07-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoCultural Geographies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 1474-4740 • E-ISSN: 1477-0881
EditoraSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/14744740211012007
OpenAlexW3157629727
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas17

What can memes teach us about shifting popular-cultural understandings of nature? While a certain form of environmentalism with proclivities for dour, self-righteous, sentimental, or apocalyptic tones is often taken to be hegemonic, Nicole Seymour argues that a more irreverent 'low environmental culture' should not be occluded. Humor and irony can serve as emotional registers for environmental media that provide openings for the emergence of playful environmentalisms perhaps more amenable to a diverse audience. Such 'bad environmentalism' mobilizes humor by transgressing the emotional norms of piety within environmentalism. This article deepens the concept of bad environmentalism through an examination of the emergence of 'nature is healing' memes during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Implicitly critical of nefarious arguments that the death-dealing pandemic would provide a 'pause for nature' and thus that 'humans were the real virus', the formal and easily reproduced 'nature is healing' genre subverts conventional understandings of 'the natural' as well as the naturalization of social order and political economy. In particular, I extend Seymour's argument - and pop cultural studies of the environment - by parsing five modes through which the 'nature is healing' genre plays ironically on differing understandings of the natural. These are the out-of-place in nature; nature out-of-place; drawing attention to a naturalized social order; naturalizing social transformation; and absurdity in the natural world. Close attention to different modes of humor provides insight into the ambivalence of affect within ecological and political movements; 'bad affect' can, after all, produce careful and critical aesthetics. Such research demonstrates the utility of a widened and potentially counterhegemonic repertoire of affective responses to environmental and political crisis

Aesthetics · Argument (complex analysis · Environmental ethics · Environmentalism · Epistemology · Natural (archaeology · Political science · Politics · Sociology · History · Humor Studies and Applications · Law · Philosophy