Green advertising can be defined as any ad that promotes a green lifestyle, explicitly or implicitly addresses the relationship between a product and the biophysical environment, or presents a corporate image of environmental responsibility [Banerjee 1995]. The term 'green', used extensively to connote ecologically sustainable qualities, has been adopted into the world of automotive advertising in an attempt to associate automobiles with ecological imagery in the public eye.
Replacing Nature With Cars in the Human Mind
Green advertising in the automotive industry, rather than expanding the parameters of advertising to incorporate the perspective of the non-human environment, uses imagery of that environment to strengthen the dominance of a world view that sees the private automobile as both non-problematic and inevitable.
The presentation of capitalist structures (whose purpose is to maximize profits) as being concerned with ecological health is an unexamined paradox within the advertising industry. Advertising imagery, while not a central cause of the ecological damage that has been caused by cars, is closely associated with both a consumerist mindset and the creation of a societal structure in which cars have become indispensable [Kilbourne 1999].
Short term thinking, individualism, and the idea of nature as optional are among the central concepts used by advertising to displace connection to the natural world in the consumer's mind and replace it with the image of the car. The purpose of 'green' advertising is not to make cars more ecologically benign but rather to make them appear so to the buyer, so that the buyer will be able to feel more closely connected to nature while still purchasing and using cars.
Once the complex reality of nature has been displaced by the simple reality of the car in the consumer's mind, formerly vital connections begin to atrophy, making it ever more difficult for the consumer to conceive of a way of life other than consumerism.
As connection becomes displaced in the mind of the consumer, so does the consumer become displaced in the landscape. Villagers, people who 'know their place', are transformed, with the help of the automobile, into tourists. "Experiencing the world as a tourist first became popular with the automobile... The land becomes an idyll, nature a fairy tale world - and the gasoline vehicle...is the fairy that abducts you there” [Sachs 1992]. The car trains us to always look forward, because of what it leaves behind.
Humans in Cars Always Want to Go
A world in which people lived in one place, relatively free of overwhelming sensory input from other places, is becoming a distant cultural memory. Succumbing to the multiple assault from television, computers, cars, and easily accessible air travel, modern people learn quickly to always value 'there' over 'here', a state of mind which is ideal for the economy, and disastrous to the natural world.
"The domination of distance has brought with it a revaluation of space: the gaze is directed at distant locales beyond the neighborhood, and the immediate spatial world has declined in significance” [Berman 1981]. Why care for your locale when there is always a better one available? As cars become ever more necessary within the human psyche, nature is relegated to the status of a playground, an option for recreation when there is nothing better to do. And the only way to access nature, of course, is in your car.
Read more of Alan Foljambe's articles on automotive advertising:
- Short Term Thinking and Nature as Optional
- Cars, Ads, and Individualism
- Making Friends With Nature
- Dominating Nature
- A Narrowing of Options
- Cheerleader for Modernity
Sources
Banerjee, Subhabrata, Charles S. Gulas, and Easwar Iyer. “Shades of Green: A Multidimensional Analysis of Environmental Advertising,” Journal of Advertising Vol. 24, No. 2 (Summer 1995), p. 21-32.
Berman, Morris. The Reenchantment of the World. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981.
Kilbourne, Jean. Can't Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel. New York: Touchstone, 1999.
Meister, Mark, and Phyllis M. Japp, Eds. Enviropop: Studies in Environmental Rhetoric and Popular Culture. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002.
Sachs, Wolfgang. For Love of the Automobile. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
