The connection between self-absorption and green advertising is a subtle yet crucial one. Green advertising plays not upon the consumer's desire to act ethically, but to believe that he or she is acting ethically.
If one is willing to accept the claims of a company's advertising uncritically, it is very easy to respond to green advertising and rest easy in the knowledge that one is helping the environment, happily without the slightest inconvenience to one's own comfort. If ecological problems were this easy to solve in reality, they would certainly have been resolved long ago.
Short Term Thinking
While, according to John Berger, advertisements "often refer to the past and always speak of the future", it is not a future reality of which they speak, but only the idealized future which will theoretically exist if one buys the offered product.
The future is used as a site for fantasies of something better, and as an environment in which to place images of the consumer with his or her desired commodity. Critical analysis of the future effects of current purchases, whether personal, financial, or ecological, is notably absent. “Green” advertising utilizes the future as a concept to promote products, but rarely addresses it in a serious way.
Recent ads for hydrogen powered cars are a good example. Phrases such as "a zero-emission future" and "in the future, the only effect felt from driving a car could be the wind in your face", rather than supplying the consumer with a realistic view of what the future may hold, merely reinforce a number of fallacies about the cure-all nature of hydrogen power.
Enthusiasts of new forms of energy, which are always advertised as a solution to the problems of old forms of energy, should remember that the gasoline car was itself advertised as a solution to the incredible pollution caused by the use of horses in cities.
The idea that there is a technological solution to every technological problem is a deeply held, and unfortunately false, view within modernity. However, utilizing short-term thinking, any new technology which postpones the negative effects of previous technologies, even if by doing so it makes those effects more severe, is seen as a solution [Catton 1982].
Belief in the validity of short-term thinking indicates an absence of holistic awareness, a refusal to acknowledge that, "as Bateson puts it, 'lack of systemic wisdom is always punished.' If you fight the ecology of a system, you lose - especially when you 'win'" [Berman 1981].
Nature as Optional
Within advertising, nature is often engaged as an object but, with the exception of environmental advocacy groups, never as a subject. Even in advertising for efficient vehicles, ecotourism, and other 'green' products, the focus is not on nature for its own sake but on the desires and feelings of the consumer, focusing on the environment's usefulness to humans.
The pristine views of nature that surround the vehicles in car ads are there solely for the purpose of the vehicle; they have no life outside of it. Within modernist thought, nature is seen as a site of recreation, rather than a living system with concerns, needs, and priorities of its own. Its natural beauty, rather than being understood as an incidental product of its health and integrity, is put into the service of capital, where it assists in the selling of goods.
This view of nature as optional is a result of the separation from nature's demands that modernity affords. In an urban setting, a human could understandably forget what those realities are. However, due to the unsustainable nature of a growth based system within a finite larger system, the reprieve from these realities is temporary. This fact remains unaddressed within the technotopia of green advertising.
Read more of Alan Foljambe's articles on automotive advertising:
- The Displacement of Nature
- Cars, Ads, and Individualism
- Making Friends With Nature
- A Narrowing of Options
- Dominating Nature
- Cheerleader for Modernity
Sources
Alvord, Katie. Divorce Your Car! Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 2000.
Ballard, Geoffrey, Ideas, CBC Radio, December 3, 2003.
Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1972.
Berman, Morris. The Reenchantment of the World. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981.
Catton, William R. Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1982.
Meister, Mark, and Phyllis M. Japp, Eds. Enviropop: Studies in Environmental Rhetoric and Popular Culture. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002.
Honda advertisement, Atlantic Monthly (February 2003), back cover.
Chevron advertisement, Atlantic Monthly (November 1995), p. 97.
