“It’s Not Easy Being Green”: The Greenwashing of Environmental Discourses in Advertising

Abstract

Under the political framework of free-market fundamentalism, corporations are appropriating environmental discourses through green capitalism and greenwashing. For environmental emancipation to occur, it is important to problematize the corporate discourses that put a price on nature and obfuscate the domination of nature by capital. The authors use an environmental political-economy framework to examine the ways particular products are represented through television advertising. Using a multimodal critical discourse analysis, they analyze three representations—Clorox Green Works cleaning products, the Ford Escape Hybrid, and Toyota Prius motor vehicles—in order to deconstruct and analyze how specific advertisements operate and how they contribute to problematic environmental discourses.