I was stuck by this image, which is being used by Environmental Defense as part of a “how you can stop global warming”-type promotion:
We see a cartoon anthropomorphized earth flexing its muscles happily while a tape measure is cinched around its quite unnaturally narrow waist. It’s an interesting collision between the longstanding metaphor of environmentalism as seeking the “health” of the environment, with the modern idea of obesity as iconic of poor health.
Unpacking the idea of ecological “health” as the goal of environmentalism is something I’ll mostly set aside here, except to note that it is a non-inevitable conceptualization (contrast the alternate framing of conservation/sustainability). The important thing to keep in mind is that the idea of ecological health involves conceptualizing the ecosystem, or even the entire planet, as a mega-organism — and in particular, a mega-human-body — for which health consists of an approximation to a particular ideal state. For a human body, health by this conception involves having all the normal parts (2 legs, both eyes, smooth skin, etc) functioning in the normal way.
What caught my eye about the ED ad was the change in the representation of what constitutes “health.” A quick Google image search on “sick earth” brings up lots of examples of the old way of representing health. We get lots of earths suffering from common cold and flu type symptoms — flushed, sweating, excreting mucus, and making use of thermometers and hot water pads.
The archetype of ill health here is infectious disease, an invasion by microbes that upsets the system’s functioning. The metaphorical parallels between viruses and pollution (including, in some cases, human beings) have been powerful for environmentalism.
But over the past few decades, we’ve acquired a new archetype for poor health: obesity. Being fat has become synonymous with being sick, and vice-versa. What I’m interested in here is not the scientific/medical question of how bad for you being fat really is (though I’ll admit to skepticism of the obesity panic on these grounds), but rather the sociological question of how obesity became the key trope in our discourse about health. Thus, a healthy earth can be easily represented as one that has slimmed down, because we all know that getting skinnier equals getting healthier. The metaphor is extended in the “Low Carbon Diet Guide” that the ad encourages you to download, which talks about how “counting carbs” should apply to carbon dioxide as well as carbohydrates. Interestingly, the guide sticks to energy conservation tips, thus both continuing environmentalists’ reluctance to address food habits as a contributor to climate change while mercifully avoiding blaming fat people for causing global warming by stuffing their faces.
An important element to the conceptualization of obestity as the archetype of ill health is the way it’s tied to ideas of personal responsibility. While genetics and social conditions play a huge role in determining who gets fat, our discourse about obesity promotes the idea that on the one hand you can control your own weight, and on the other fat people can be blamed for their condition. This is reflected in the content of ED’s Low Carbon Diet brochure, which is is a fairly standard compendium of personal behavioral changes that will make you a better, less-carbon-emitting, metaphorically slimmer person. Obviously this sort of thinking long predates the ecological-health-as-thinness metaphor, but there’s a synergy between them in terms of the emphasis on the small scope of personal control within a larger issue.
This is not the first, or most extreme, time environmentalists have tried to link up with the concern over obesity. But it was striking to me that the thin = healthy idea is so engrained that it can be used as a metaphor by causes outside of the public health field.
Stentor Danielson is a professor of Geography at Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania. His research focuses on the relationship between humans and their environment. Specifically, he’s interested in how people understand the risk of wildfires. You can read more from Stentor at his blog, Debitage.
Comments 64
Skada — January 13, 2010
I did read the entire article and I do find it interesting (and upsetting) that obesity is now associated with environmentalism. However, I wanted to point out an issue in the discussion of obesity.
Although I do agree that obesity can cause problems, I am frustrated with the chronic belief that food consumption is irrevocably tied to weight. This belief is evidenced by comments such as: "...avoiding blaming fat people for causing global warming by stuffing their faces." (Note: I am not saying that Benjamin necessarily supports this view, only that it is commenly expressed.)
I am overweight. I also do not "stuff my face" or eat unhealthy foods. I am a vegetarian and my meals mostly consist of granola bars, fresh fruits and veggies, rice, and whole-grain pasta. I do not eat "junk food" such as chips, candy, or fast-food. I drink water, milk, and sometimes fresh orange juice; I never drink soda.
Some "thin" people eat unhealthily all the time and some overweight people make healthy eating choices. Excess weight does not mean that a person is lazy, obsessed with food, constantly eating, out of shape, or neglecting his or her body. We need to stop vilifying overweight people through these ridiculous assumptions that fat = gluttony and sloth.
Kua — January 13, 2010
Perhaps they're reluctant to address eating habits as part of counting CARBon dioxide because the recommendation would be to eat less meat and more (complex) CARBohydrates... Skews the metaphor, doesn't it?
Tab — January 13, 2010
I can kind of see how the parallels might be drawn, in that both climate change and obesity are often thought of as conditions of modern living and over-consumption... but at the same time, it's deeply problematic that 'fat' is being used as shorthand for 'sick'. Not to mention kind of daft in terms of metaphorical imagery, given that the Earth is a sphere...
I will say that this is the first time I've personally come across the 'overweight Earth' metaphor, whereas I've seen the 'Earth with a cold' image used quite frequently. Not exactly a welcome development, at any rate.
Vidya108 — January 13, 2010
This is an excellent analysis of a trope which is increasingly common and extremely harmful.
What's really appalling is the way discussions on 'overconsumption' often prompt people to contrast the supposedly uniquely fat population of the US/North America/'the West'/Developed countries with the (imagined) weight ranges of people in notoriously famine-prone areas of the world (even such societies actually do have many 'fat' people in them, of course).
The seemingly widespread acceptance of the idea that it is the well-nourished bodies of people with liberal access to food, and not the undernourished bodies of those facing starvation and backbreaking physical labour, which are the "problematic" body-subjects (ill, greedy, etc.) is deeply disturbing and bespeaks of the extent of the moral panic constructed around fat bodies.
david mattatall — January 13, 2010
Vidya108:
I think the Fat/Global North / Super-thin/Global South dichotomy is usually used to illustrate a problem with global food distribution and disparity of wealth more than anything else.
Also, to deny a very solid causal link between individual weight and food consumption would require more evidence than that which has been put forward here (ie. None).
This article, however, is about the (less solid) inference that being fat is by definition unhealthy.
maus — January 13, 2010
How else do you propose someone displays overconsumption in an easy to understand cartoon?
Jennifer — January 13, 2010
The obesity comparison is referring to the EXCESS part of the environment problem. The problem with obesity (and yes, IT IS A BIG problem that costs millions of tax dollars) is that people can eat healthy or unhealthy, but excess is the reason why people become obese.
This blog is interesting, well written and enlightening, but if all this blog does is find reasons to be upset at all things that represent other things all it does is cheapen the content.
Melissa — January 13, 2010
I think your point about the personal responsibility issue which is inherent in the obesity comparison is very insightful. One of the things that annoys me the most about much of the public messaging about the environment is the manner in which the emphasis has been put on individual responsibility, while big business can get away with doing bugger all. Even the "Think global, act local" messages are all about what "you" can do. It is a classic ideological approach which obscures the real problem of environmental damage which is cited well beyond the control of the individual. Not that means we should ignore the message to act individually, but we should also not be lured into complacency that our individual actions will address the overwhelming issues of climate change.
lilwatchergirl — January 14, 2010
For me, and this relates to Melissa's comment above, the most interesting thing about this shift in ideologies of health (and one reason it's linked with environmentalism) is the concept of personal responsibility. Health used to be understood as something that 'happened to' people. That, too, was a mis-reading of the situation, since disease usually spread because of poor living conditions related to poverty, and this wasn't acknowledged in social policy until about the early twentieth century. Nonetheless, for centuries a person's health status was not understood as something that they could do much about.
But today, in our consumer society, health is seen as an issue of personal responsibility. Need to lose weight? You should be paying for the best gyms and the most expensive fresh, preferably organic meat and produce. You shouldn't be poor and stretched for time, without the means to make decent meals and without access to exercise facilities, and with all manner of difficulties relating to living conditions or educational background. Need to recover from an injury? Pay for the best healthcare practitioners, so that you can be back to work and contributing to the economy as quickly as is humanly possible (preferably quicker). If you can only afford to wait for the NHS, be careful - if long-term impairment results, and it affects your employment potential, you'll be punished for it later. Do not ever make the wrong health-related choices. You will be forever reminded of this - while other situations, like doctors' mistakes, will go easily forgotten.
Among the most affected by this new ideology of health-as-personal-responsibility are disabled people, who are seen by practitioners and the public alike as being personally responsible for disability. We are not, of course, because disability is a socially created form of oppression. But you'd never know that to listen to a doctor or physiotherapist talk to a disabled person (or to read the Daily Mail reflecting on Incapacity Benefit). We must do our exercises and buy the best rehabilitation equipment and work impossibly hard towards 'recovery' and definitely, definitely not end up dependent on the state for our unreasonably high living expenses.
Like Melissa says above about the environment, then: the concept of personal responsibility in health is being used to distract us from the social, political and economic causes of poor health. We need to refocus social policy on reducing health inequalities, as well as onto education, social welfare and (not least) health services. A healthy society would be a society where everyone could afford, and was empowered, to make healthy life choices. It's a shame that the 'obesity project' gives us the opposite message.
Sick Earth = Fat Earth « I AM in shape. ROUND is a shape. — January 14, 2010
[...] came across an interesting post at Sociological Images which explores the fairly recent shifting of environmentalist marketing strategies to equating a “healthy” earth with a “thinner” earth. Whereas pulling up a [...]
Scapino — January 14, 2010
A technicality: There IS a causal relationship between additional caloric intake, lack of exercise, and obesity. There is NOT a biconditional relationship.
Very few people would argue that, if one doubles one's caloric intake and switches from an active lifestyle to a sedentary one, then weight gain will occur. The issue becomes problematic when people assume that everyone started out at a svelte x pounds, and everyone who is over that magic number has therefore been eating "too much" and not exercising enough, and, furthermore, that the number of pounds over x is a measure of their personal failings. The issue is that the public has a very limited understanding of causality to begin with, let alone conditional versus biconditional statements.
Additionally, I was interested in the following sentence in the OP:
"We see a cartoon anthropomorphized earth flexing its muscles happily while a tape measure is cinched around its quite unnaturally narrow waist."
This is where my first point comes into it; most of the global warming rhetoric aims not to improve the earth on an absolute scale, but to stop harming the earth. Very few (non-radical) environmentalists advocate a return to the pre-human levels of carbon dioxide; they merely want to freeze/slightly reduce current emission levels. Thus, not weight loss, but weight maintenance. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but weight maintenance, to my understanding, is almost universally prevented as a good thing in the literature.
To extend the analogy, as the earth has been around for a minimum of 6,000 years, I would say that it has settled upon its naturally occurring weight. If I change my diet or level of activity, and begin to gain weight over my "natural" weight, I would stop that weight gain by returning to my previous diet and level of activity. This is the message advocated by most global warming organizations; go back to previous levels of emissions, so that we can stop or slow the change. Linking their message to anti-obesity is not strictly accurate. Linking their message to the health-related flavors of anti-obesity when the website makes no prominent mentions of the planet's "health" is especially unfounded.
Stentor — January 14, 2010
Thanks for the feedback, everyone (I'm in the middle of frantic syllabus-finishing, so I may not have time to get involved in all the discussion). But a quick correction to the post -- my last name is Danielson. Benjamin is my middle name.
E — January 14, 2010
The saddest thing about the obesity "epidemic" to me is that there are so many unhealthy thin people that don't exercise and eat diets full of HFCS that somehow think they are morally superior to heavier people (healthy or not). And then when they have a heart attack everybody says, "Well they looked so healthy."
Natalie — January 27, 2010
I think that it's probably a good (ie. effective) way of expressing over-consumption to a western audience. Even if the correlation people are making between obesity and overconsumption is untrue, unfortunate, and/or perpetuating a stereotype, it still makes the point quite well.
Most of the people who this advert is aimed at would probably rather get a cold than be obese... So it's probably a more powerful message to them anyway. And the fact that it is liked might even lead to more discussion!
Plus the 'sick earth' has been slightly overused, I feel.
To be honest, I wasn't aware that there was any evidence suggesting that obesity isn't linked to health or to over consumption! So I admit I'm not very well read on the subject and I'm probably influenced by the 12938192083 images a day I probably see inferring that they are linked. Perhaps I would be a little more adverse to this otherwise.
But also, I feel I should say, that the earth in the cartoon doesn't look like he's starving himself, he looks like he might have been putting on muscles if anything since he's flexing them! And he's not weighing himself, which was how I thought obesity was defined anyway (could be wrong there!).
It's not being inferred that the earth should go on a diet, really, more like he needs a detox and he's hitting the gym! If obesity's not connected to over consumption or lack of health, then surely there's no reason they can't hit the gym too?