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Celebrity and the Environment
Fame, Wealth and Power in Conservation
By Dan Brockington Zed Books Ltd
Copyright © 2009 Dan Brockington
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84813-549-9
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
The aim of the liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure. He is the very basis of civilized society. (Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying)
The authorized biography of Sir Laurens van der Post (author and conservationist) caused a stir. Van der Post had been revered by millions as a sage of wilderness and conservation. He had been a guru to Prince Charles (British royalty) and an adviser to Margaret Thatcher (when she was the British Prime Minister). He had been a mystic and a secular saint. Yet J. D. F. Jones's Storyteller: The Many Lives of Laurens van der Post exposed him as a liar, philanderer and paedophile. Jones showed that van der Post had distorted many aspects of his life, deceiving the public and those close to him in pursuit of greatness, sex and popularity.
The sordid details of van der Post's corruption are not the focus of this enquiry. This is not that sort of book. What I find more interesting is the way van der Post's followers reacted to these revelations. For the diehards, their hero was still a great and wonderful man. Van der Post is significant not because he lied, but because his fabrications had such influence and because people believed in him so strongly. They owed their understanding of African environments, wildlife and people to his words and ideas. Responding to Jones's book, Christopher Booker described sitting 'entranced while he spoke of the Kalahari or African wildlife'. Dea Birkett observed that we 'needed to believe van der Post. He pandered to a part of the Western imagination that longs for the so-called natural – a pristine wilderness and untouched primitives.'
I find it fascinating that conservation thinking, hopes, fears, plans and practices can be vested in individuals. Why do their ideas become so powerful? Why are their audiences so credulous? Why do they cling so tightly to their captains, and to their captains' beliefs?
Unfortunately Jones's book, as many reviewers noted, could not explain van der Post's appeal. Jones just demolishes every falsehood that van der Post created about himself. He does not consider why his subject's deceptions were so beguiling. Van der Post's supporters insisted that they realized the stories he spun were embellished, and that 'this tendency to embroider life into "story" was all part of the magic'. We will not be able to explain the appeal of falsehoods simply by uncovering the truth.
To answer my questions, we need to see van der Post as but one example of the work of celebrity in conservation. We shall have to forget his deceptions, and look at the public construction and consumption of his persona and writings, and those of others like him. There is a multitude of conservationists who enjoy fame and influence (and without van der Post's inventions). By examining their ideas, actions, claims, consequences and publicity, the responses they elicit and the uses the conservation movement makes of them, we can suggest some answers to my questions about the source and nature of their influence. That is the purpose of this book.
In the process of exploring these issues I have found it useful to distinguish between different varieties of conservation celebrity. I separate those who are already famous, and who lend their fame to conservation, from those who win fame from their conservation work. The latter we can divide into wildlife film presenters, celebrity conservationists and conservation 'celeactors' (fictional characters). Behind the celebrities stand ranks of charismatic, wealthy or powerful individuals who also promote conservation. The work of all of these will be explored in the pages that follow.
I shall argue that the interaction between celebrity and conservation is decades old, suggesting that it has accelerated of late, partly because of changes in the production of celebrity and in the organization and funding of conservation. The growth of conservation NGOs has provided new vectors for celebrity in conservation. They guide celebrities' charitable work, seek celebrity endorsement and support the work of celebrity conservationists themselves. More fundamentally, the flourishing of celebrity conservation is part of an ever-closer intertwining of conservation and corporate capitalism. Companies are greening, with varying degrees of sincerity and effectiveness, because being green enhances sales. Conservation is becoming more commercial because selling commodities provides funds. Far from restricting the activities of capitalism, conservation is becoming one of the means by which profit is generated. Celebrity promotion, the investments of rich executives, and the wealthy social networks of charismatic conservationists are an important, but as yet unremarked, part of this process.
I shall show that celebrity conservation alters the world it tries to save. It can promote an imagined world which may not exist. Yet this very promotion can help to realize such visions. The funding celebrity amasses conjures the dreams into existence. Celebrity also advances particular types of conservation. It can strengthen the conservation of wilderness, charismatic species and work involving indigenous peoples or heroes more easily than other conservation initiatives. This can disadvantage conservation that is not so mediagenic. More subtly, mediagenic conservation can readily promote market solutions for conservation while making certain forms of conservation injustice harder to see.
I shall suggest that perhaps the most insidious and pervasive influence is on countless individuals' relationships with the wild. In industrial urban societies, people seek to reconnect with nature by vicariously participating in the activities conservationists and celebrities support. At a time when conservationists are calling for people to restore relationships with the wild, many can do so simply by following the exploits of celebrities. People need celebrities to get close to nature on their behalf when they themselves cannot.
Celebrity conservation produces images that are commodities in themselves, sold or used to elicit donors' support, and which are consumed with little awareness of these images' origins or conditions of production. It is difficult to imagine an alternative, for celebrity is deeply rooted in the very fabric of modern democracy. As conservation expands in tandem with philanthropy, the challenge NGOs, donors and their critics face is how to encourage investigations of the relationships that lie behind conservation's images.
An outline of the book
Chapter 2 introduces the two main issues that this book examines – celebrity and conservation. Its purpose is to acquaint the uninitiated in either topic with recent writings, in order to prepare them for the arguments in the rest of the book. Thereafter the book falls into two parts. The next three chapters are more descriptive, the final three more analytical.
Chapters 3 to 5 describe the business of celebrity conservation, dealing in turn with celebrities who support environmentalism, wildlife filmmakers and celebrity conservationists. Chapter 3 plots the contours of celebrities' support for environmental and conservation causes, particularly climate change. It considers the charge that celebrities can make themselves vulnerable to criticism by supporting such causes. Chapter 4 looks at wildlife films and the nature portrayed by them. It explores the tension between audience demands that wildlife films be authentic and the requirement of the industry that it produces commodities for sale. Chapter 5 considers the people who have won fame from their conservation work. I examine what their work involves and the social, political and economic forces that have created them. These celebrities' associations with nature are often hallmarks of personal authenticity, but they can only be properly understood as products of forces much larger than their own personalities. Each of these chapters also serves to demonstrate a different aspect of celebrity conservation. Celebrity conservation is strong and powerful (Chapter 3); it is perceived to be authentic and true (Chapter 4), and yet it is a socially constructed world shaped by audiences. Its images and personalities can be understood only in their broader social and historical contexts (Chapter 5).
Chapters 6 to 8 examine the forces that have shaped the interaction of celebrity and conservation, the discontent with this interaction, and the world it creates. Chapter 6 attempts to explain the proliferation of celebrity in conservation. It discusses trends in the nature of celebrity and conservation NGOs which have made them mutually dependent. It also considers trends in the power of foundations and rich individuals as well as corporate needs to support green causes. It examines the implications of recent trends in giving by the wealthy for the democratic nature of conservation work. Chapter 7 looks at a variety of dissatisfaction with celebrity conservation. I consider the charge that celebrities who adopt conservation causes are incompetent at best and often hypocritical. I also examine the role of violence in conservation strategies that celebrities support. I argue that we cannot blame celebrity for the problems at work; they are generic to the conservation movement. Chapter 8 examines some of the more profound consequences of celebrity for conservation. It looks at what these developments portend for popular participation in the environmental movement as a whole. It examines the nature of the mediagenic world in whose image our own world is being remade.
Readers may share my ignorance of the identity and achievements of some famous people. To avoid this I have assumed that no one is so famous that everyone will recognize them. Whenever a famous person is mentioned for the first time in the text I explain why you might be expected to have heard of them. I make no exceptions, not for Nelson Mandela (Africa's greatest statesman) nor the late Princess Diana (of the British royal family). If you spot exceptions, then either they are careless mistakes on my part, or these individuals have been mentioned in earlier pages (including tables), or they are academic writers of whom I do not expect you to have heard, but whose writings you will find listed in the Bibliography.
Finally, scattered through the text are several thoughts and phrases of Oscar Wilde (wit and writer). He is a useful author for thinking about celebrity, although he lived in the nineteenth century just before the dawn of celebrity as we know it. Wilde was an attention seeker throughout his adult life, and preoccupied by fame, particularly his own. He understood that for the well-known 'there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about' (The Picture of Dorian Gray). His bitter observation in prison that 'between the famous and infamous there is but one step, if so much as one' (De Profundis) captures one of the qualities of contemporary celebrity. He was fascinated, too, by charisma, noting in Dorian Gray that '[t]here was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence'.
There is also a useful contrast between the respective fates of Wilde and van der Post. Both were writers and each was much concerned with his own greatness. There are some parallels, too, in the pain they caused to those who loved them while seeking their own emotional and sexual fulfilment. There are also key differences: Wilde was vilified in his own lifetime, van der Post was lionized. Most importantly, van der Post represented authenticity. He claimed to be real and to be able to show people 'the real Africa'. Wilde played with authenticity, laughed at it, and questioned its meaning. Van der Post serves well as an example of the role of authenticity in conservation, as well as of liars in society. Wilde proves an excellent commentator.
Wilde's banter should not always be taken too seriously; it certainly was not by Wilde himself. As George Orwell (author) observed of him, one could never be sure if his words, or the man himself, ever meant anything. I sought to include his aphorisms at first because they were funny, outrageous and apposite. I hoped that they might offer some light relief. I found, however, that they became more important than that. The more I examined the world of celebrity conservation, the more I realized that this is a realm that tends to prove Wilde remarkably right. His ridiculous ideas become mere descriptions, or prophecies fulfilled. Wilde's commentary makes it easier to see the antiquity of some of the processes and consequences of celebrity conservation and to see apparently new phenomena as reworkings of much older practices.
CHAPTER 2
Combining celebrity and the environment
The truth about the life of a man is not what he does, but the legend which he creates around himself. (Oscar Wilde, to Jacques Daurelle)
This book addresses two quite different topics, celebrity and the environment, each of which requires a separate introduction summarizing recent writings and developments. I shall examine first the spate of writings in the new sub-discipline of celebrity studies, and look at the nature, causes and effects of celebrity and its curious relationships with democracy. I then consider environmentalism and conservation, exploring the changing nature and growing power of the conservation movement and its social impacts. Finally, I demonstrate why celebrity is so important for understanding the conservation movement, and vice versa.
On celebrity
The origins, nature and consequences of celebrity are the focus of a burgeoning sub-discipline: celebrity studies. Turner observes that celebrities are those whose private lives attract more attention than their professional lives. They are people who experience a degree of incongruence between the attention normally given to their work and the publicity their lives receive. In Boorstin's famous phrase, '[t]he celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness.'
Celebrities are generally synonymous with the great and the good, but, as Rojek notes, what we celebrate is also their power to transgress, their latitude of excessive behaviour, their profligate consumption of power, beauty, money and luxury, their dwelling in 'a different world than the rest of us [which] seems to give them licence to do things we can only dream about'. Indeed Rojek extends the argument. The desire and pressure to become famous, the experience of 'achievement famine', have encouraged some people to pursue notoriety. There are people who have found a place in the celebretariat (the word is Rojek's) because of their evil deeds.
Scholars of celebrity are united in emphasizing that celebrity is not a recent phenomenon. One of the principal texts, Daniel Boorstin's book The Image, was first published in 1961, and remains a fresh and perceptive read. Boorstin, Rojek and Gamson trace the origins of contemporary fame to the spread of printing presses and newspapers in the nineteenth century (Boorstin calls it the Graphic Revolution). Contemporary celebrity is characterized by the 'illusion of intimacy, the sense of being an exalted confrère, that is part of celebrity status in the age of mass media'. It begins with the spread of cinema. When Griffith developed close-up shots of stars' faces (1910) it allowed people to observe, and identify with, the actors and actresses much more closely; Griffith called it photographing thought.
Rojek offers a typology of celebrities. He suggests that some people are ascribed fame from birth, such as royalty, some achieve fame through great deeds, such as athletes and sports stars, and some are attributed fame by the media, such as the competitors on Big Brother. His categories recall Shakespeare: 'some are born great, others achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them'. The difference between Shakespeare's time and ours, however, is in what constitutes greatness. As Boorstin observed when quoting those lines '[i]t never occurred to [Shakespeare] to mention those who hired public relations experts and press secretaries to make themselves look great.'
How do we explain fame? One school of thought needs to be discounted straight away. Some people explain celebrity by virtue of celebrities' personal qualities, their beauty and skill or the force of their personalities. The trouble with this argument is that, while possessing such characteristics might ease some of the representational processes involved in creating celebrity, no merit or distinction is strictly necessary. There is little that skilled photographers, clothes designers, directors, speech writers or recording technicians cannot conceal, and even fewer limits to the inventive powers of agents, managers and publicists. There are many people with wonderful qualities who do not win any fame – and others with few who do. It is possible to manufacture celebrity out of little.
The mistake here is to equate celebrity with charisma. It is an understandable mistake, for both, in Wilde's words, deal with legends, but the legends of celebrity and charisma are forged in quite different ways. Celebrities' legends are commercially produced and depend on the media, whereas charisma is recognized through direct personal contact.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Celebrity and the Environment by Dan Brockington. Copyright © 2009 Dan Brockington. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
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