The Convergence of Eco-Activism, Neoliberalism, and Reality TV in Whale Wars (original) (raw)

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Whale Wars and the Public Screen: Mediating Animal Ethics in Violent Times Cover Page

Sustaining Environmental Action: The Sea Shepherds, Conflict and the Politics of Communication

Environmental groups today are operating in a political climate that for many is characterised by an increasing threat to democratic values in democratic countries. At the same time, a functioning democracy is seen as the pre-requisite for environmental protection. The problems arising out of this tension for environmental action and debate are evident for example in the debate over climate change denial and the question of political funding by corporations. Within this context, this paper will discuss current conceptualisations of the cultural and political role of environmental action. The campaigning and media communications strategies practiced by Paul Watson’s Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, and of this particular form of radical environmentalism, are used as a case study to analyse the role of various forms of communicating environmental risk and conflict by various groups in putting environmental problems on the social agenda. But rather than focusing exclusively on the Sea Shepherd’s media practices, the focus in this paper will be on Paul Watson’s whole philosophy of conflict. What kind of environmental risk communication and framing of environmental issues is actually brought into being by Sea Shepherd? What kind of debates and actions actually develop out of and around the symbols produced by Sea Shepherd’s activities? What has been developing as the recognised risk or crisis within the media sphere and public debate around the Sea Shepherds is not whaling as an issue, or even the wider environmental crisis of species extinction, but a number of other political issues, such as the risk to international relations and the handling of social conflicts over environmental issues. Hence, is Sea Shepherd’s symbolic politics further polarising existing antagonisms in the conflict over whaling rather than growing environmental awareness and fostering possible action, and what would be the implications of this for the question of the current and future role of environmental action?

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Consumers, crazies and killer whales: The environment on New Zealand television

International Communication Gazette, 2011

This study is an analysis of environmental content on New Zealand-produced television. A quantitative and qualitative content analysis was undertaken of 140 hours of programming, across all genres, from four New Zealand television channels. Programmes were analysed for the prevalence of environmental content, which specific topics were mentioned and how the environment was positioned in relation to the programme’s narrative.

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Consumers, crazies and killer whales: The environment on New Zealand television Cover Page

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Fishing For Animal Rights In The Cove: A Holistic Approach to Animal Advocacy Documentaries Cover Page

Make love, not war?: Radical environmental activism’s reconfigurative potential and pitfalls

Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2020

New radical environmental action movements are attracting large numbers of diverse actors who inevitably will take inspiration and learn from mistakes of those radical environmental organizations that precede them and continue today into middle age. The representational strategies of these established organizations are of specific interest as they enter a maturity phase that coincides with the planet experiencing an unprecedented anthropogenic moment of reckoning – a time when more broadly engaging and transformative activism is paramount to reconfiguring ecological, societal, and spatial orientations. We focus on Sea Shepherd, a global ocean protection organization founded in the same decade as many other formatively radical organizations, to examine its historic and current representations of its direct action stance; its multiple and at times conflicting positioning of cetaceans; its emphasis on celebrity and timely campaigns; and its longstanding military, war, and piracy framin...

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Make love, not war?: Radical environmental activism’s reconfigurative potential and pitfalls Cover Page

Whale Wars and the Axiomatization of Image Events on the Public Screen

The essay interrogates Animal Planet’s television show Whale Wars, and the use of footage from that show in a commercial for one of the network’s other shows, How Stuff Works, to examine the way these texts interact within the public screen. I argue that the (re)presentation of whale kill footage further instantiates an image event as a commodity and rhetorically reconciles the image event into a capitalist ideology counter to the social movement message constructed on Whale Wars*and by proxy allows the image event to play out only via a profit-motive tied to the death of the whale.

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Saving Whales: The Origins of Cetacean Advocacy in Protest and Policy, 1960-1972 Cover Page

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<i>Blackfish</i>and SeaWorld: A Case Study in the Framing of a Crisis Cover Page

Arrested Development: The Fight to End Commercial Whaling as a Case of Failed Norm Change

European Journal of International Relations, 2008

The International Whaling Commission's moratorium on commercial whaling took effect in 1986, seemingly marking the adoption of a new norm, that commercial whaling was no longer acceptable. But this norm has failed to become institutionalized. This article uses the norm life-cycle approach as developed by Finnemore and Sikkink (1998) to account for this failure. The effort ran aground because the norm proved unexpectedly ambiguous, a supporting epistemic community failed to emerge, the norm conflicted with other powerful norms, the prestige of the key anti-whaling states declined relative that of whaling states, and NGO tactics failed to win over the publics in key whaling states and instead created a counter-boomerang effect. The attempt may have resulted in the emergence of an alternative norm, but actors must act now to institutionalize it.

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It is not easy being green: A critical discourse and frame analysis of environmental advocacy on American television Cover Page