Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age

FEATURING NICOLE SEYMOUR – There is bad news about the global climate every day. We’re burning more fossil fuels instead of less, the predictions are more dire than scientists thought, and the impacts are shattering: deadly wildfires, super-storms and unseasonal hurricanes, horrendous heat waves.

Glaciers are melting, whole species are disappearing, and there are seemingly insurmountable political obstacles to doing anything about it. We have resorted to turning on one another and laying blame for using too much plastic, or too much water, or eating meat, and so on.

It appears as though our human brains are not quite capable of tackling such a massive existential crisis. Showcasing the doom and gloom doesn’t seem to work. In fact it may be having the opposite effect, causing us to retreat.

Now, a new book aims to convince us that art, creativity, and even irreverence are necessary to move forward on climate change and that environmentalists need to shed their reputation of being killjoys.

Nicole Seymour, Associate Professor of English at California State University at Fullerton. Her earlier book was Strange Natures: Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer Ecological Imagination. Her new book is called Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age.

**This segment was originally broadcast on December 10, 2018.