Celebrity and the Environment: Fame, Wealth and Power in Conservation

Celebrities are increasingly lending their name to conservation causes, and conservation itself is growing its own stars to fight and speak for nature. In this book, Dan Brockington argues that this alliance grows from the mutually supportive publicity celebrity and conservation causes provide for each other, and more fundamentally, that the flourishing of celebrity and charismatic conservation is part of an ever-closer intertwining of conservation and corporate capitalism. Saving the World diagnoses an ironic impoverishment of our relationship with nature. While wildlife television documentaries flourish, there is a significant decline in visits to national parks around the world. Far from restoring a relationship with the wild, many people do so by proxy by following the exploits of celebrity conservationists.