Environmental destruction, political power, and self-promotion in the arts

Summary

Patricia Macdonald: In your socio-economic research projects on the politics of energy and development, Flammable Societies and Contested Powers, you identified a number of problems with much of current mainstream photographic practice, particularly the widespread use of ‘pathos’, and the ‘legitimation of consumer sovereignty’. Could you summarise your critique regarding these topics and how they relate to environmental issues?

Owen Logan: One of the measures which suggest that ecosystem damage has become a far more obvious and visible aspect of public discourse over the past decade is simply the amount of photography orientated towards the issue. Attention to ecosystem damage on the part of talented photographers and writers wins admiration and shows that institutions, the media and a free press are ‘paying attention’. While a large majority of those involved are utterly sincere in making and promoting this work, far from influencing the sort of socio-economic reforms required, we are now seeing a number of elected governments turning from ineffective policies towards more aggressively anti-scientific positions. But is this really a denial of science? Or is it, as the economics writer and broadcaster Paul Mason suggests in his book PostCapitalism, that the costs of the precautionary principle concerning climate change are now the object of war-prone treaty negotiations? If so, one needs to consider what the concept of the Anthropocene means to those who view it from the perspective of the political far-right, which has recently been gaining influence and re-entering government in several countries. As radical scholars point out, liberalism has only survived by incorporating its alternatives from both the left and the right. Liberalism itself no longer appears to be a coherent or self-contained doctrine and it is definitely not the same thing as substantive democracy. The only thing that can be said with certainty is that notwithstanding the broadcasting of dramatic ‘natural’ disasters in the mass media, most of humanity experiences environmental crisis as a set of related economic and political struggles.

From a far-right philosophical standpoint there is no inherent need to deny the ecological factors – rather, the limits of nature are seen to impose an entirely natural struggle for human survival and inter-group supremacy. While most become losers in this struggle there will be some winners, no matter how small a minority.