Ecoporn: For Pervert's Eyes Only?

Increasingly, images fetishising nature seem indivisible from everyday digital life. Critics, such as Lydia Millet, highlight the failure of these digital images to provoke substantial discussions regarding environmentalism (2004). Coining the term 'ecoporn', she described the consumption of these images as delivering:

“picture-book nature, scenic and sublime, praiseworthy but not battle-worthy. Tarted up into perfectly circumscribed simulations of the wild, these props of mainstream environmentalism serve as surrogates for real engagement with wilderness, the way porn models serve as surrogates for real women.”
(Millet, 2004)

Yet, it may not be as perverse an action as this dramatised commentary would have us believe.
If we take pornography to mean a distortion of reality for pleasurable consumption, when locating the pornography of ecoporn, we find it not in the corrected, artificial images themselves. Instead, it is their captions, the anchors to reality, which always accompany an image with the name of the place they supposedly represent, and which credit the photographer akin to an artist, from where pleasure is derived.

Consuming ecoporn is less an act of naively enjoying the fine-tuned, cherry-picked image, and more of a willing disavowal of one immediate reality for another constantly detached fantasy.
The perversity of reframing and the voyeuristic tendency is found throughout photography as a form itself and is not unique to images of ecoporn (Berger, 1972). Yet what I think we can see is a juxtaposing of place, a clear distinction between the Here and There. If we look to the caption attached to this prominent and popular /r/EarthPorn image, Texas is the monotonous, prosaic Here, where Alaska is the detached, fantastical There, ever separated from our everyday experience of a natural world.

At its core, ecoporn exists as a fantastication of the mundane and everyday; an escapist promise for those trapped in post-industrial urban melancholia of nature's magical qualities. That it is a longing for something more real than reality is similarly important- what's the point in a heaven, not on Earth?

 
Ecoporn may be cynically developed by the wealthy, those who possess the time, skills and high-grade equipment required to produce such images, but its consumption occurs at the popular level. The "gratification without social cost" (Millet, 2004) may prove insulting to the environmentalist, immersed in nature, but to those who see nought but concrete, ecoporn can take on a form of popular imaginative liberation. Though the fetishisation of the natural world absolves us of guilt for the human role in environmental destruction, it is rarely targeted towards the people in positions of transformative power. No one's tagging the Fortune 500 in their holiday pics.

When we read ecoporn as merely a mediation of nature's reality, we deny this imaginative potential. Beyond personal liberation, activist movements have drawn off the principles of ecoporn in spite of this contemporary cynicism towards it. Historically, pre-digital ecoporn had yielded significant victories for green movements long before the Instagram filter: notably, in the campaign for the 1964 Wilderness Act in the US (Meisner, 2010). Similarly, is it not the convergence of biophilic fantasy, of mass anthropomorphism and the proliferation of widely accessible and emotionally moving ecoporn that has yielded a modern, resurgent green movement? If we look to the recent youth climate strikes, this sentimentality abounds. Concerned with the failings of humanity as nature's paternalistic caretaker, progressive views on the natural world have come about not in spite of ecoporn, but because of it.

Photo from the Youth Climate Strike, by Ting Shen.

Works Cited:

Berger, J. (1972). Ways of seeing. London: Harmondsworth: British Broadcasting Corporation ; Penguin.

Meisner, M. (2010). Blinded by Ecoporn. Alternatives Journal, 36(1), 7.


Millet, L. (2004). Ecoporn Exposed. Utne, (125), 34-35.