Review: Ecopiety: Green Media and the Dilemma of Environmental Virtue, by Sarah McFarland Taylor

Abstract

Add this book to the growing list of texts on religious dimensions of environmentalism. In this case, the religious dimension is “environmental virtue,” introduced in the title as a dilemma and shortened to “ecopiety.” This is Sarah McFarland Taylor’s term for “daily, voluntary works of duty and obligation—from recycling drink containers and reducing packaging to taking shorter showers and purchasing green products” (3). The dilemma here is that these acts and their sacralization seem to present an opportunity for constructive individual responses to the “monumental environmental challenges facing us,” when in point of fact they “are not simply inadequate to the task but in some cases are counterproductive in the worst possible ways” (5).Ecopiety, then, is a cultural problem, a sort of sacred delusion that leads persons to believe they are acting as good stewards of the environment when actually they are perpetuating the very systems driving the ecological crisis. There are affinities with Marx’s opium here, Jameson’s “infernal machine” of consumerism, and the critiques of environmental naiveté found in recent works by David Wallace-Wells, Howard Kunstler, and notably Roy Scranton, whom she cites. Taylor’s nuanced analysis of the cultural milieu generating naïve (ecopious) responses supplies the platform for her argument “that rather than functioning as a mere hegemonic delivery system for dominant cultural narratives, mediated popular culture performs a crucial role in dynamics of environmental moral engagement and processes of civic social transformation” (9).Make no mistake, this book is an argument, and a good one. Carefully constructed and supported with well-chosen examples, Taylor develops the case that narratives promoting responsible environmental action are typically articulated in the language of consumerism, so that ecopiety, “often requires the performance of a correlative ‘consumopiety,’ or actions of ‘virtuous consumption’” (4). Ecological virtue thus follows a script little different from that routinely followed throughout consumer culture, with virtue confirmed and concretized in consumerist activities—in this case, the acquisition of goods and services presented as green by the corporations that produce and market them. For Taylor, the corrective is “mediated popular culture,” which includes tools such as restorying, “agential cultural work,” media interventions, and the critical analysis of ecopiety as consumopiety.The book’s seven chapters are framed by a strong introduction and a forward-looking conclusion, both featuring the work of Drew Dellinger. After the first chapter, which presents key terms and theoretic concepts to be deployed in the text, the rest of the book offers “a series of environmentally themed media case studies or sightings drawn from popular culture” (8–9).Each chapter can be engaged as a standalone study, focusing on a distinct popular culture “sighting”—from Fifty Shades of Grey (chapter 2) to Prius ads (chapter 3), and vampire stories (chapter 5) to “skin media” and hip hop (chapter 7). Taylor skillfully uses the various tools of “mediated popular culture,” noted above, to both critique and intervene in the “sightings.”The book is copiously annotated with 70 pages of notes and professionally indexed. Taylor’s style is clear and straightforward. This is a very readable, accessible text, which could work nicely in graduate and upper-level undergraduate courses. It seems best suited for courses in American Studies, Media Studies, and Religious Studies, especially as these fields relate to popular culture and ecology.Taylor’s treatment of religion, per se, and the field of religious studies is brief, and may be too cursory for some, however. Citing Anne Lamott and Stuart Hall, she understands religion as fluid, like water and language, a “representational medium and set of dynamic sociocultural practices in which contextually defined meanings are produced and exchanged according to a variety of vested interests” (6). Of potential value to the study of new religions, and consistent with approaches to religion and popular culture, Taylor seeks to widen the scope of religious studies from its “tight focus on more vertical institutional and formal expressions of religion to include more horizontal, lateral, informally practiced DIY, ‘on the ground,’ expressions” (27).The most notable contribution of Ecopiety to the study of religion is its sustained exploration of the intersection of religion, popular culture, and ecology—an area of enormous importance on which there has been far too little research. Taylor’s negotiation of the terrain of this intersection demonstrates how to recognize, analyze, and mediate the cultural drivers of our environmental crisis, especially the ineluctable linkage of consumerism (even green consumerism) to this crisis. The growing possibility of ecological collapse adds urgency to Taylor’s research. For many this collapse seems inevitable. If so, we are only hastening its arrival with our consumerist lifestyles, no matter how ecopious they may be. Hence, the dilemma at the center of Taylor’s book and at the heart of the world as it is.