Page 154 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

144 P. McCURDY

visibility and legitimacy for their claims. Over a third (36.5%, n = 35) of the
protest events mounted in the decade covered by my study employed a
logic of physically “bearing witness” by demonstrating outside centres of
political power or key sites of extraction. As noted, such interventions
frequently employed playful and spectacular images, slogans and visuals
which had been purposefully designed to capture public attention through
both social and legacy media. However, as we have also seen, a larger
number of events (40.5%, n = 39) involved the participation of celebrities
raising questions about their increasing role in underwriting, orienting,
facilitating or constraining political action.
More broadly, there is also a need to acknowledge the logic of celebrity
as a mobilising logic of protest together with the logic of numbers, the
logic of damage and the logic of bearing witness. To recognize the logic of
celebrity is to acknowledge that the politics of late modernity are a politics
of celebrity and media (Street 2004, 2012; Wheeler 2013). It is to rec-
ognize that celebrity is something that may be manufactured, refined,
crafted, honed and exploited. As we saw in the cases of Neve Campbell and
James Cameron, visits to the tar sands by famous individuals, particularly
those drawn from the film and music industries, can amplify and transform
the practice of bearing witnessing by propelling issues onto a popular news
agenda in which the activities of celebrities have come to play a central role.
As Neil Young’s remarks confirm, celebrities are well aware that they
possess cultural capital that may be deployed to support social justice
campaigns. Reciprocally, as mentioned earlier, eNGOs have long been
aware of the mobilizing potential of celebrity endorsements and the
potential for their off-the-cuff remarks about issues to be quickly picked up,
creating an enlarged space for discussion as with Neil Young’s comparison
of the devastated landscape around Fort McMurray with Hiroshima.
At the same time, as we saw with wave of orchestrated derision that
greeted Leonardo DiCaprio’s comparison of accelerating climate change
with the familiar localised sharp variations in temperature caused by a
Chinook, poorly informed comments can undermine a celebrity’s credi-
bility and reinforce doubts about their sincerity in defending environmental
and minority rights carried by coverage of their lavish, and carbon
dependent, life styles. The resulting public attention may weaken cam-
paigning by deflecting attention away from core issues to focus on the
character and motivations of the individual celebrity.
As long as the potential gains in increased visibility and legitimacy for
campaigns are seen to outweigh the risks however, involving celebrities in