How High's the Water, Mama? Rising with Our Hemlines

If there remains any question that it's de rigeur to go green, the May 2006 issue of Vanity Fair should lay to rest all lingering doubts. The well-heeled wags at Conde Nast have sounded the call for a "New Environmental Revolution" on a splashy Annie Leibovitz cover featuring erstwhile radicals George Clooney, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Al Gore, with a beatific Julia Roberts hovering above the stylishly-mossy eco-Bolshies like a latter-day Eve in an emerald Bill Blass ballgown and leafy crown. Alongside such thought-provoking headlines as "Sex and the City for Teens" (p. 100) and "Our Oscar-Party Scrapbook!" (p. 78), the UK cover invokes the dire spectre of global warming as "A Threat Graver Than Terrorism" (than terrorism!) and promises to predict which cities will be underwater by the year 2100 (p. 136). Even in the wake of Katrina, the accompanying photoshop of Manhattan up to its cockles in seawater looks excessively apocalyptic, but if Vanity Fair can make Al Gore look sexy, then I suppose anything is possible.

Global warming, of course, is no joke, and by all reasonable accounts will indeed require a radical and global political economic restructuring to mitigate -- which is precisely why the juxtaposition of "revolutionary" incitement alongside the glib pronouncement that "Green is the new black" (Editor's letter, p. 16) is so depressing. But the mind-boggling irony of claiming to re-radicalize nature by turning environmentalism into the political equivalent of a Prada handbag pales in comparison to the the Orwellian absurdity of the eco-icons VF showcases as paragons of environmental virtue. The clear-cut winner in the bizarro-environmentalist sweepstakes has got to be Lord John Browne, CEO of British Petroleum, an allegedly "green" company whose rickety infrastructure recently leaked more than 250,000 gallons of crude onto the Alaskan North Slope. "It is seemingly contradictory, if not somewhat perverse, for an oil giant to place itself at the forefront of efforts to reduce carbon emissions" (p. 112), VF concedes. Well spotted. This brazen celebration of BP's logic-defying greenwashing is slightly less contradictory, however, than the condemnation of the Bush administration for its environmental record on page 16 and subsequent eulogizing of the "creation care" of The "Good" Reverend Richard Cizik, who encourages his evangelical followers to "live their lives in conformity with sustainable principles" but opposes a woman's right to choose abortion, on page 130. Other "revolutionaries" include Arnold Schwarzenegger, Hollywood groper and Governor of California, Hank Paulson, Chairman and CEO of the Goldman Sachs group, and Zac Goldsmith, "eco-aristocrat" and environmental adviser to Tory leader Dave "homeboy" Cameron. If there is any underlying theme connecting Vanity Fair's eco-heroes, it's their shopping habits: most of them either buy or sell purportedly green commodities, the hybrid Toyota Prius ranking as the most sought-after accessory of the season. Julia Roberts buys Seventh Generation diapers; George Clooney drives a zero-emissions Tango; Edward Norton purchases solar panels from BP (double kudos!); Jennifer Boulden and Heather Stephenson of Ideal Bite advise conscientious shoppers on their apple and shampoo consumption; Ed Begley Jr....I'm not quite sure what he does, but it appears to involve standing around looking very concerned. The selection of such vapid role models is all the more unfortunate as it trivializes VF's more credible choices, like Kenyan activist Wangari Muta Maathai, who has earned her environmental stripes doing a hell of a lot more than choosing econappies over Pampers.

The Special Green Issue isn't a total loss; Michael Shnayerson's article on Appalachia (p. 144) is well worth the read, and to its credit depicts coal mining as a matter of environmental justice whose toll on the rural poor is as devastating as its toll on the landscape from which they derive a wage. Mark Hertsgaard's global warming piece is informative if run-of-the-mill (and occasionally silly, opening, as it does, with Her Maj's concerns about losing her view of the Wash out the parlour window of Sandringham). Al Gore's article ("The Future Is Green," p. 105), meanwhile, is laced with the usual platitudes and some predictable if well-deserved digs at Dubya on both 9-11 and Katrina. It's also studded inexplicably with Chinese characters (China, of course, being a global leader in environmental progressivism), presumably in a bid to secure his New Age street cred with the feng shui set. Altogether, readers are left not so much with the urge to start a revolution as the urge to splurge on a new wardrobe in suitably militant shades of khaki, but that's exactly the point: as we learned from September 11, shopping is the sacred duty of every patriotic American in the face of disaster.

It was over eight years ago that Neil Smith warned of the cooptation of environmental radicalism:

We have won a major victory by putting nature squarely and ineluctably on the popular political agenda, but we have also suffered a major defeat insofar as the agenda of politics as normal has largely digested, institutionalized and marketized the politics of nature. Compared with the late 1960s and 1970s when the politics of nature erupted, fin de millennium angst about nature is widespread but of low intensity; we're all environmentalists now (Smith 1998:272).

While the turning of the millennium has come and gone, nature angst shows no sign of abating any time soon; indeed what Cindi Katz has termed "apocalyptic environmentalism" (Katz 1995:276) seems ghastlier than ever, thanks in part to some truly spectacular recent reminders of human failure in the face of nature's awesome power: Katrina, the Pakistan earthquake, the Indian Ocean tsunami. Nature as an item of conspicuous consumption, in the meanwhile, is a story as old as the hills; the rich and famous have coveted their slice of pristine green since there has been an objectified "nature" to covet and a leisured class with the wherewithal to colonize it. The ideological coupling of the two in a placating politics of eco-consumption is a more recent phenomenon, but entrenched enough for Vanity Fair to be rather more than fashionably late to the party.

Memo to Graydon Carter: capitalists are not revolutionaries, dahlink. And I would humbly submit, dear reader, that if the salvation of the world now lies in Ed Begley's furrowed brow, then when the waters do rise, we'll be up the proverbial creek.

Citations:

Katz, Cindi, 1995, "Under the Falling Sky: Apocalyptic Environmentalism and the Production of Nature." In Antonio Callari, Stephen Cullenberg and Carole Biewener, eds. Marxism in the Postmodern Age: Confronting the New World Order. New York and London: Guilford.

Smith, Neil, 1998, "Nature at the Millennium: Production and Re-enchantment." In Bruce Braun and Noel Castree, eds. Remaking Reality: Nature at the Millennium. London and New York: Routledge.