Environmentalism in Popular Culture

ISBN: 9780816525812

出版年: 2008-12

页数: 240

定价: $ 33.84

内容简介

In this thoughtful and highly readable book, NoAl Sturgeon illustrates the myriad and insidious ways in which American popular culture depicts social inequities as anaturala and how our images of anaturea interfere with creating solutions to environmental problems that are just and fair for all. Why is it, she wonders, that environmentalist messages in popular culture so often anaturalizea themes of heroic male violence, suburban nuclear family structures, and U.S. dominance in the world? And what do these patterns of thought mean for how we envision environmental solutions, like agreena businesses, recycling programs, and the protection of threatened species? Although there are other books that examine questions of culture and environment, this is the first book to employ a global feminist environmental justice analysis to focus on how racial inequality, gendered patterns of work, and heteronormative ideas about the family relate to environmental questions. Beginning in the late 1980s and moving to the present day, Sturgeon unpacks a variety of cultural tropes, including ideas about Mother Nature, the purity of the natural, and the allegedly close relationships of indigenous people with the natural world. She investigates the persistence of the amyth of the frontiera and its extension to the frontier of space exploration. She ponders the popularity (and occasional controversy) of penguins (and penguin family values) and questions assumptions about human warfare as anatural.a The book is intended to provoke debatesaamong college students and graduate students, among their professors, among environmental activists, and among all citizens who are concerned with issues ofenvironmental quality and social equality.