Spectacular reassurance strategies: how to reduce environmental concern while accelerating environmental harm

Abstract

ABSTRACTSpectacular reassurance strategies, drawing from Guy Debord’s concept of the spectacle, refer to tactics that mitigate environmental concern and action while simultaneously maintaining or accelerating the social-structural causes of environmental harm. Three such strategies are identified here, each of which advances a critique of image-based, consumerist-oriented, and ineffective environmental politics. First, spectacular justifications for environmental harm are legitimations of environmental degradation based on values that paradoxically presuppose a livable environment. Second, spectacular environmental communication is the use of ‘green’ images and symbols that mitigate environmental concern and action. Third, spectacular environmental reform refers to policy or lifestyle changes that fail to alter the underlying systemic causes of the environmental crisis. Debord’s prescriptive environmental politics are explicated and his conceptual framework is brought into conversation with overlapping theories and concepts influential in contemporary environmental political analysis: social practice theory, green governmentality, hegemony, and post-ecologist politics.