Environment and social change

Geoff Craig. This book analyses representations of sustainable everyday life across advertising, eco-reality television, newspapers, magazines and social media. It foregrounds the discursive and networked basis of sustainability and demonstrates how such media representations connect the home and local community to broader political, social and economic contexts. The book shows how green lifestyle media negotiate issues of sustainability in varying ways, reproducing the logic of existing consumer society while also sometimes providing projections of a more environmentally friendly existence. In this way, the book argues that everyday lifestyles are not an irredeemable problem for environmentalism but an important site of environmental politics.

Matt Halliday (2023). At the launch of the Auckland Climate Festival last month, Green Party Auckland Central MP Chlöe Swarbrick spoke about how building a community is the best way to avoid being overwhelmed by the scale of the climate emergency.

Advertising might not have been the first thing on Swarbrick’s mind. But earlier in August, New Zealand’s Commercial Communications Council had announced its own community initiative to address emissions within the advertising sector.

Labelled Ad Net Zero, it’s part of an international framework launched in the UK late in 2020. “Our ambition,” it states, “is to reduce the carbon impact of developing, producing and running advertising.”

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Amanda Rutherford (2022). The existential threat to Earth in Greenland (2020) offers this apocalyptic film as a symbolic and threatening reflection of present-day concerns surrounding the continuation of life and societies in a rapidly changing ‘infected’ world. Clearly, some lives are deemed more valuable than others, leaving the weaponised individuals ahead of the rest. This chapter serves to explore the disturbing themes of death, where modern-day anxieties surrounding the ‘value’ and discrimination of life are found within times of crisis. It also examines how Greenland poses as a metaphor of present-day climate change and environmental concerns. 

In S. Baker, A. Rutherford, R. Pamatatau. (Eds.). Contemporary horror on screen. Springer Nature.

Matt Halliday (2023). 

Can we imagine a world without fossil fuel advertising, let alone fossil fuels themselves? That was essentially the question posed by United Nations Secretary General António Guterres this week.

Calling the coal, oil and gas industries the “godfathers of climate chaos”, who had “shamelessly greenwashed” environmental issues through lobbying, legal action and advertising campaigns, he said:

I urge every country to ban advertising from fossil fuel companies.

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