Global Warming Ready: The Consumerist Sublime in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract:

The majority of London is underwater, making it a perfect site for speed boating in bikinis. The Great Wall of China is nearly buried by desert dunes, requiring a beautiful tourist to stop to empty sand out of her sandals. These images are courtesy of Diesel, the Italian clothing manufacturer, which ran an advertising campaign in late January, 2007. The ads are without text, save the small print in the lower corner reading "Global Warming Ready" and the company's logo. The focus of the ads are its high class, highly sexualized and scantily clad models frolicking in wide angle landscapes shaped by climate change. How does the tongue-in-cheek portrayal of environmental apocalypse illustrate American environmental cutlure?

From Ansel Adams to New Deal filmmakers such as Pare Lorentz, the belief that moral messages were inherent in photographic representations of sublime landscapes structured American environmental reform politics throughout the twentieth century. The Diesel ads occupy an ambiguous place in this tradition, split between an overwhelming natural landscape and a nature that has been tamed through aesthetics and consumer activity.

This paper argues that many aspects of the 18th century sublime experience continue to exist in the "consumer sublime," or the way that the American environmental crisis has framed problems and solutions in terms of consumer actions and identities. Using the Diesel ads as a point of departure, the consumerist sublime is defined by its relationships to traditional categories of the sublime, the postmodern sublime, and American environmental reform media, past and present.

2008