Green celebrity: oxymoron, fashion or pioneering sustainability?

Peter Wells and Liz Heming

International Journal of Innovation and Sustainable Development, 2009, vol. 4, issue 1, 61-73

Abstract: This paper explores the interface between celebrity, academia, the media and environmentalism. It examines the scope and extent of green celebrity and of a specific instance in which a celebrity was involved in the dissemination of a report that referred to the problems of inappropriate vehicles in urban areas. The paper is not intended to be definitive or provide answers as such. Rather, the hope is that it will stimulate debate, research and action that may be used to confront these increasingly important topics. Those in the environmental movement may dismiss celebrities as, by definition, the embodiment of nonsustainable and generally reprehensible lifestyles: this paper argues that such a dismissal is an abdication of our responsibility to be engage in the real issues of our contemporary world. Moreover, it is argued that to denigrate all efforts by celebrities to adjust their lives towards more sustainable patterns is less than productive. Ultimately, the paper concludes that some uncomfortable moral decisions need to be reached in terms of how we compromise between our need to reach multiple audiences and our need to retain the precision, sophistication and validity of our analyses.

Keywords: celebrity; lifestyles; sustainability; environmental campaigns; innovative communication; sustainable development; academia; media; green celebrities; morality. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
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