Cultural Industries And The Environmental Crisis

This volume critiques the current model of the creative economy, and considers alternative models that may point to greener, cleaner, more sustainable and socially just cultural and creative industries. Aimed at the nexus of cultural and environmental concerns, the book assesses the ways in which arts and cultural activities can help develop ideas of the ‘good life’ beyond excessive and unsustainable material consumption, and explores the complex interactions between cultural prosperity, place and the quality (and availability) of employment, leisure and the rights to self-expression. Adopting a deliberately wide and inclusive interdisciplinary and international perspective, contributors to this volume showcase current and future ways of ‘doing’ creative economy, ecologically, otherwise and differently. In 11 chapters, the book outlines some of the most relevant arguments from among the growing literature that critically analyzes the current creative economy, with a focus on issues of gentrification, inequality and environment. This volume is timely, as it emerges into a political and economic context that is seeking desperately to ‘reboot’ the economy, re-establish ‘business as usual’ and to do so partly through significant investment and expansion in the creative economy. The book will be suitable for upper level undergraduates and postgraduates studying a wide range of topics, including: cultural and creative industries, media and communications, cultural studies, cultural policy, human geography, environmental humanities and environmental policy, and will be of further interest to arts professionals, creative economy researchers and policymakers. The chapter “Towards a New Paradigm of the Creative City or the Same Devil in Disguise? Culture-led Urban (Re)development and Sustainability” is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Greenwashing Culture examines the complicity of culture with our environmental crisis. Through its own carbon footprint, the promotion of image-friendly environmental credentials for celebrities, and the mutually beneficial engagement with big industry polluters, Toby Miller argues that culture has become an enabler of environmental criminals to win over local, national, and international communities. Topics include: the environmental liabilities involved in digital and print technologies used by cultural institutions and their consumers; Hollywood's 'green celebrities' and the immense ecological impact of their jet-setting lifestyles and filmmaking itself; high profile sponsorship deals between museums and oil and gas companies, such as BP's sponsorship of Tate Britain; radical environmental reform, via citizenship and public policy, illustrated by the actions of Greenpeace against Shell's sponsorship of Lego. This is a thought-provoking introduction to the harmful impact of greenwashing. It is essential reading for students of cultural studies and environmental studies, and those with an interest in environmental activism.

Culture, Creativity and Environment: New Environmentalist Criticism is a collection of new work which examines the intersection between philosophy, literature, visual art, film and the environment at a time of environmental crisis. This book is unusual in the way in which the 'imaginative', 'creative', element is privileged, notwithstanding the creativity of rigorous cultural criticism. Genuinely interdisciplinary, this book aims to be inclusive in its discussions of diverse cultural media (different literary genres, art forms and film for instance), which offer thoughtful and thought-provoking critiques of our relationships with the environment. Our ability to transcend the ethical and aesthetic categories and discourses that have contributed to our alienation from our environment is dependant upon an enlargement of our imaginative capacities. In a modest way this book might contribute to what Ted Hughes, speaking of the imagination of each new child, described as "nature's chance to correct culture's error".

Ferkiss (emeritus, government, Georgetown U.) delves thoughtfully into how various civilizations and cultures, including Western civilization, have historically looked at humanity, nature, and technology. He then looks at the conflicting attitudes of contemporary thinkers, seeking a balance, but maintaining a bias toward reverence for nature and an unwillingness to allow technology and its owners to set all the terms. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Worldwide environmental crisis has become increasingly visible over the last few decades as the full scope of anthropogenic climate change manifests itself and large-scale natural resource extraction has expanded into formerly remote areas that seemed beyond the reach of industrialization. Scientists and popular culture alike have turned to the term "Anthropocene" to capture the global scale of environmental and even geological transformations that humans have carried out over the last two centuries. The chapters in Ecological Crisis and Cultural Representation in Latin America examine the dynamics and interplay between local cultures and the expansion of global capitalism in Latin America, emphasizing the role of art in bearing witness to and generating awareness of environmental and social crises, but also its possibilities for formulating solutions. They take particular care to draw out the ways in which local environmental crises in Latin American nations are witnessed and imagined as part of a global system, focusing on the problems of time, scale, and complexity as key terms in conceiving the dimensions of crisis. At the same time, they question the notion of the Anthropocene as a species-wide "human" historical project, making visible the coloniality of natural resource extraction in Latin America and its dire effects for local people, cultures, and environments. Taking an ecocritical approach to Latin American cultural production including literature, film, performance, and digital artwork, the chapters in this volume develop a notion of ecological crisis that captures not only its documentary sense in the representation of environmental destruction (the degradation of the oikos), but also the crisis in the modern worldview (logos) that the acknowledgment of crisis provokes. In this sense, crisis is also the promise of a turning point, of the possibilities for change. Latin American representations of ecological crisis thus create the conditions for projects that decolonize environments, developing new, sustainable ways of conceiving of and relating to our world or returning to old ones.

Gare has produced one of the first books to combine cultural theory and environmental philosophy. He critiques the current philosophies of the environmental movement and suggests his own controversial theory of a new postmodern worldviewPostmodernism and the Environmental Crisis is the only book to combine cultural theory and environmental philosophy. Arran Gare analyses the conjunction between the environmental crisis, the globalisation of capitalism and the disintegration of the culture of modernity. He explains the paradox of growing concern for the environment and the paltry achievements of environmental movements. Through a critique of the philosophies underlying approaches to the environmental crisis, Arran Gare puts forward his own, controversial theory of a new postmodern world view, designed to be the foundation for a successful environmental movement.

How new media and visual artists provide alternative ways for understanding and visualizing the entanglements of media and the environment in the Asia-Pacific. Images of environmental disaster and degradation have become part of our everyday media diet. This visual culture focusing on environmental deterioration represents a wider recognition of the political, economic, and cultural forces that are responsible for our ongoing environmental crisis. And yet efforts to raise awareness about environmental issues through digital and visual media are riddled with irony, because the resource extraction, manufacturing, transportation, and waste associated with digital devices contribute to environmental damage and climate change. Screen Ecologies examines the relationship of media, art, and climate change in the Asia-Pacific region—a key site of both environmental degradation and the production and consumption of climate-aware screen art and media. Screen Ecologies shows how new media and visual artists provide alternative ways for understanding the entanglements of media and the environment in the Asia-Pacific. It investigates such topics as artists' exploration of alternative ways to represent the environment; regional stories of media innovation and climate change; the tensions between amateur and professional art; the emergence of biennials, triennials, and new arts organizations; the theme of water in regional art; new models for networked collaboration; and social media's move from private to public realms. A generous selection of illustrations shows a range of artist's projects.

The last decade has seen a dramatic increase in the attention paid by social scientists to environmental issues, and a gradual acknowledgement, in the wider community, of the role of social science in the public debate on sustainability. At the same time, the concept of `culture', once the property of anthropologists has gained wide currency among social scientist. These trends have taken place against a growing perception, among specialist and public, of the global nature of contemporary issues. This book shows how an understanding of culture can throw light on the way environmental issues are perceived and interpreted, both by local communities and within the contemporary global arena. Taking an anthropological approach the book examines the relationship between human culture and human ecology, and considers how a cultural approach to the study of environmental issues differs from other established approaches in social science. This book adds significantly to our understanding of environmentalism as a contemporary phenomenon, by demonstrating the distinctive contribution of social and cultural anthropology to the environmental debate. It will be of particular interest to students and researchers in the fields of social science and the environment.