Environmentalism and Satire By Cedulie Benoit-Smith
Intro I have spent the better part of my secondary and higher education worrying that my two passions, climate and humor, are completely incompatible. This piece will explore the possibility of an intersection between environmentalism and satire, which, for brevity, I will refer to as “green satire.” My worry is that the seriousness of climate change coupled with the lightheartedness of satire would ultimately break even at zero: not funny, and not helpful. So, I began my research for this piece with Mark Usher, professor of Geography and Classics at UVM. He reminded me first that most satirists are, in fact, serious people. Especially in the era of Trump, satirists were making fun of him due to genuine discontent with his policies, past, and personality. To this end, green satire could come from satirists with genuine discontent with the climate crisis. But, finding people with the motivation to write or produce green satire is only a scratch on the surface. Green satirists must consider: When can we begin, what is the point, and what rules must we follow? Is it too soon? Is climate change still too fresh to joke about? What if writing jokes about climate change delegitimizes the issue, or worse, pushes people who are on the fence about climate change (namely those who have not had access to an accurate climate education) to back away from the issue altogether? Professor Usher stopped me here with the assertion, “nothing is sacrosanct.” This idea makes me squirm a bit, but he told me about one of the most successful satires of all time, a South Park episode released just weeks after 9/11. The episode addressed American life after the attacks and the American invasion of Afghanistan, and it ultimately received an Emmy nomination. This example suggests that even the most taboo of topics can be joked about, but what about the fundamental timeline of these jokes? The events of 9/11 happened for one day, with a foreseeable end in sight to the terror. Climate change, however, is never-ending. Is it different to make jokes about a tragedy that is still actively happening? Climate change is an omnipresent issue in modern politics, but so is war. Perhaps it depends on how far you zoom out. Climate change and the dawn of the Anthropocene are more than a period of modern war. War can be stopped when elites call for it to stop, while climate change is a rolling ball that we can only really get out of the way of. Should we make jokes about things profoundly out of our control? How big of a difference even is there between climate change and war? Both are controlled by agents that average people are so far removed from that perhaps they may as well be one and
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the same. That’s why satire is so invaluable. Satire serves as a weapon against a force we cannot otherwise reckon with. Can satire be used as an agent of change? Short answer: it’s complicated. No matter how hard you look, you will never find a piece of satire that can be directly attributed to political change. “Change” can mean many things, however. Professor Usher and I started our conversation by deciding what the point of green satire should be. Are we trying to change people’s minds? Impossible. The people whose minds need changing are the people we are satirizing. Are we trying to influence policy? Nope. There are plenty of climate-conscious lobbyists who don’t need our help. So, why do it? Reprieve. As Professors Singer and Gini from Loyola University of Chicago put it in their book The Sanity of Satire, “Joke telling and satire are, at the very least, a pleasant distraction…Jokes may not provide definitive answers, but they can alleviate some of our fears, afford comfort and distraction, and perhaps, just perhaps, offer us some perspective, some illumination in regard to these fundamentally irresolvable and yet unavoidable issues.” Green satire can be cathartic! And yet catharsis and release from the eco-anxiety are not the only functions of humor. In 1999, Ted Cohen wrote, “joking about a deep or dangerous topic is a way of talking about it, examining it in a way that doesn’t scare us.” Just talking about climate change is in itself an act of environmentalism. Research by Ballew et al. in 2019 reported that only 36% of households in 2017 were discussing climate change. They go on to explain that because people are not talking to friends and family about climate change, they begin to grossly underestimate how many other people are concerned about it. They dub this the “spiral of silence” and go on to assert, “Ultimately, [this] impedes public engagement because interpersonal interaction and awareness of social consensus are instrumental to public recognition and collective action.” All this is to say, perhaps if people felt more comfortable talking about climate change at home, they would feel more comfortable demanding action from elites. Additionally, green satire is accessible. Anyone can write or consume green satire, while not every person can afford green lifestyle changes. A stellar example of accessible green satire is Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up. The movie was released by Netflix on December 24th 2021, just in time for college kids like myself to come home and watch it with their families. The movie features big names like Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, and the list goes on. The film is a green satire making fun of the United States’ response to a scientifically proven, in-coming