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11 BEARING WITNESS AND THE LOGIC OF CELEBRITY … 143

I’ve never experienced something so first-hand that was so dramatic. You see
the fragility of nature and how easily things can be completely transformed
with just a few degrees difference. It’s terrifying, and it’s what people are
talking about all over the world. And it’s simply just going to get worse.
We were in Calgary and the locals were saying, ‘This has never happened in
our province ever.’ We would come and there would be eight feet of snow,
and then all of a sudden a warm gust of wind would come (Tapley 2015).

What DiCaprio actually experienced was a Chinook; a weather phe-
nomenon which occurs when warm winds blow in from the eastern slopes
of the Rocky Mountains causing rapid snow melt as well as temperature
swings of up to 20 °C (CBC News 2013). Far from being unprecedented,
as DiCaprio claimed—it is not uncommon in Calgary—this very public lack
of local knowledge was immediately jumped upon with local tabloid the
Calgary Sun running a front page headline “LOAD OF DICRAPRIO”
using different sized bold black and red capital letters so that “load of crap”
clearly stood out. Meanwhile, oil sands industry supporters, Albertan
politicians and critics ridiculed him for conflating a localized weather
phenomenon with “terrifying” climate change (Nerman 2015). Critics
used DiCaprio’s mistake not only to engage in name calling (see Levant
2014) but to delegitimize his claims of negative environmental impacts and
consequences of oil sands development arguing that if he did not under-
stand the difference between a Chinook and climate change, how could he
understand the impacts of oil sands development or even global warming?
These critiques were frequently delivered with vitriol and disdain. As with
James Cameron and Neil Young, critics also sought to emphasize the
hypocrisy and disconnect between DiCaprio’s carbon-heavy lifestyle as an
A-list Hollywood celebrity and his call to keep carbon in the ground.
DiCaprio’s mistake demonstrates that while celebrity endorsement can
provide a valuable resource for environmental movements in their pursuit
of publicity and legitimacy for their arguments, it is also a risk, with
ill-informed or ill-conceived remarks providing ammunition for critics that
may result in further polarizing publics.

CONCLUSIONS
Taking protest against the tar sands in Canada as a case study, this chapter
has explored some of the ways that environmental movements have set out
to navigate a media saturated political environment and secure both