Celebrities have a great deal of social capital. How they use it can be critical and the consequences far-reaching.
This post reflects on a paper by Abidin, C., Brockington, D., Goodman, M. K., Mostafanezhad, M., & Richey, L. A. (2020). The tropes of celebrity environmentalism. Annual review of environment and resources, 45(1), 387-410. The paper is available Open Access (anyone can download and read it) at the link I’ve embedded in the citation.
Reading this introduced me to a new research field – celebrity studies – specifically celebrity environmental advocacy, and made me think about the ethics of celebrity advocacy in general, not just with regards to the environment. While some certainly demonstrate long-term commitment to specific causes – the paper highlights Harrison Ford’s collaboration with Conservation International, for example – many others demonstrate fleeting and shallow interest in the causes they ‘champion.’
But if even shallow personal commitment on the part of a celebrity can influence some portion of their followers to invest some of their time, effort or money in a worthwhile cause, where’s the harm?
As Abidin et al. make clear, the problem lies at least partly with how extensively celebrity performances are managed and curated by others not in the public eye. Management teams advise their clients on which causes to advocate for, and those decisions aren’t made with ‘maximum environmental protection’ in mind (for example). Rather, the considerations driving the decisions of which causes to champion are more likely to be financial and reputational.
One discomfort with these celebrity advocacy mechanisms lies in the fact that those making the decision regarding which cause to champion are not necessarily experts in environmental studies, conservation or sustainability. This means that the causes chosen by management teams to be championed by their celebrity clients may not be all that great in reality. Another issue lies in the very basic distaste towards the fact that celebrities exist at all – that they hold such power and influence over such large numbers of people and that their social capital is frequently based on factors which would not, in ordinary people, be considered worthy of esteem.
What much of this amounts to is that lots of ordinary people are bring told what to think and do by people who have not actually decided to make those pronouncements out of any personal commitment to the issue at hand, but because doing so will benefit them as an individual and possibly, by association, will benefit those who manage their celebrity personality and public lives. Care for the environment ends up being a minor but happy by-product of these mechanisms – whereas many of us would prefer it to be the primary motivation and effect.
Whether or not one counts the advocacy of individuals such as David Attenborough or Greta Thunberg can be a point of disagreement. On the one hand, the primary motivation and direct effects of their advocacy are more consciously constructed with ‘The Cause’ in mind. On the other, they do still benefit personally from the attention they gain through their very public advocacy, and a key frustration remains: the cause itself should be enough to garner attention – why do we need a celebrity?
Unfortunately, there are so many things that need fixing that most of us are overwhelmed when it comes to thinking about how to ‘give back’ or where to direct what surplus capital we may have. As Abidin et al. made clear, despite the seemingly endless supply of celebrities of every flavor, from the perspective of the charitable sector there are still not enough to go around.
