Celebrity Environmentalism

For those who love the natural world and want to help protect it a big issue is how to get people’s attention.  Playing to the media and generating publicity aims to get attention so that people will notice garbage in the oceans, melting glaciers, devastated estuaries, and to get attention so that people will change their habits.

Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, is probably the most celebrated among attention getters for climate change.   A series of lessons in the the documented impact of global warming, this film is now at the center of a broader campaign called Take Part.

The Day After Tomorrow is pure Hollywood fiction.  My sister-in-law, a very earnest, no-nonsense kind of person, dismissed this film saying that she had asked one of her scientist friends about it and he had assured her that giant hurricanes like this just could not happen.  I thought this missed the point.  Of course the film is a soapy, soppy, exaggeration.  We can still ask what its impact on audiences is.  After seeing this film are people (other than my sister-in-law) more aware of pollution?  Are they more aware of laws and policies that concern climate change?  The Pew Center has taken my sister-in-law’s question more seriously than her scientist-friend did, and used it as an opportunity to explore climate change issues.

The dueling voyages of Plastiki and the Junk Raft are two attention grabbers devoted to publicizing plastic pollution in the world’s oceans.  If everyone knew about the huge floating conglomeration of plastic in the Pacific Ocean, the so-called “great Pacific garbage patch,” would they buy less plastic?  Would they be more careful about recycling plastic?  These voyages have been documented and publicized by the PBS Newshour, The National Geographic, The New Yorker, and many other outlets.

I have not yet found a source that attempts to measure the impact of any of these examples of celebrity environmentalism.