Consume, Connect, Conserve: Consumer Spectacle and the Technical Mediation of Neoliberal Conservation's Aesthetic of Redemption and Repair

Abstract

Global green grabs are facilitated by a logic in which environmental damage of economic growth is putatively mitigated by environmental repair elsewhere (Fairhead, Leach, and Scoones 2012: 242). A remarkably similar logic informs green consumption, whereby “the very consumerist act buys your redemption from being a consumer” (Žižek 2009).1 Indeed, experiences of consumer redemption are visually linked to environmental repair at a distance. While direct causation between these experiences and grabbing green are practically impossible to discern, their parallels and interactions reflect larger shifts in the political ecology of capitalism. I situate these parallels and interactions in my introduction, before turning in detail to visually mediated relationships between consumers and conservation, based on promises of redemption and repair. I conclude with the relationships of green consumption to realignments of conservation and capitalism, and their implications for environmental awareness and collective political action.