Sustainable appropriation: Consumption, advertising, and the (anti-) politics of (post-) environmentalism.

This thesis extends ecocritical thought into the sphere of popular culture, particularly televised and online advertisements, by examining the ways in which environmentalist discourse is appropriated and obfuscated by corporations for promotional purposes. Moreover, it argues that such an appropriation, which paradoxically utilizes environmentalist discourse to promote consumption, is a manifestation of post-environmentalism, a term derived from a critical synthesis of Angela McRobbie's notion of post-feminism and Slavoj Žižek’s extended discussions of eco-capitalism.' The critical term functions as a way of semantically differentiating between environmentalism and its co-opted counterpart. Ultimately, through analysis of advertising and promotional campaigns from major corporations, I argue that this trend of appropriation threatens environmentalism as a radical politics by conceptually and literally relegating environmentalist activism to spheres of consumerism and through acts of consumption, which has larger ramifications for all hegemony-challenging, radical politics. --[Leaf ii.]