archive: Entertainment as Activism

First published in 2009 on artsHub as part of a column I wrote for them on arts and environmentalism.

Entertainment as Activism

I was raised to be a hippy. My parents were part of that era, back in the 80s, when we knew for sure that we could break things, that global warming was a problem. When we watched Mad Max and Waterworld and knew for sure that that was our future.

As a kid I knew that if I asked to eat McDonalds my parents wouldn't refuse by saying "It's bad for you, it causes heart disease" but by saying "It's bad for the environment, it causes litter" and pleas for some funky new toy with batteries wouldn't be turned down with "It's a waste of money" but with "It's a waste of resources."

Some of the biggest brawls between my sister and I were about whether we could leave the light on at night. I can't remember who was on which side, but I remember what the sides were - our fights pitched the fear of the dark against the fear of the death of the planet via squandered electricity.

It must have been like being brought up catholic: with the guilt, and the sins, and the imagery of hot hell. I even have a disdain for born-again hippies, especially the ones who have trouble realising that their dreadlock wax and their rag-brown cheesecloth wraparound pants have been made in a ship-distant sweatshop.

Every part of my life is still ritualised in hippy habits: almost everything I own is second-hand or found, my garden is a shower-fed miracle, my power is green, I've eaten a monk's diet since I was fourteen, and my friends are slightly irritated at my preaching.

With all this you'd think that I would be comfortable living as an activist, but I'm not. I think Gunns are a bunch of bastards, but I won't go down to Tasmania to stop them logging. It's not their fault: somewhere down the other end of the line someone is buying toilet paper made from old growth forests. Demand for the product needs to stop so that production can.

Which brings me to art, and me, and why I'm in the art/ entertainment industry.

I followed the news media on every protest I went to, and never did I see a spread that gave the public a real analysis of the reasons people have for risking injury and criminal charges to throw themselves at bulldozers and fences and ships.

Protest is effective as a short-term rescue plan, and it brings attention to broad words like "sustainability" and "war" and "rights", but I've never seen it change the bad habits of the warm watchers sitting at home. There's rarely a nicely constructed argument in Tuesday's paper for people to engage with, interpret, learn from. News never gives a clear vision of the world we're moving towards if we don't change our habits. But that's ok, it's not the media's fault.

That's what Mad Max is for.

It never mattered that Mad Max's environmental/ resource catastrophe was probably caused by nuclear war, it gave us a visual reference for ideas that would otherwise have been too abstract to have a long-term dedication to.

Just as the church has always needed art to supplement its heavier texts, so environmentalism needs entertainment to drag the facts from science and explain them.

© Laura Smith 2009