Throughout history, individual figures have captured the imagination of our civilization. Cleopatra and Julius. Michelangelo. Confucius. Lesser known names like Montezuma (Aztec) and Mansa Mussa (Mali). Today, we have more celebrities than we know what to do with. It used to be Hollywood movie stars and rock stars but now YouTube, Instagram, and reality TV have created celebrities out of thin air. I've met my fair share of public figures, from Latin American presidents to the Rolling Stones to
Amitabh Bachchan, the Sean Connery of Bollywood.
Most recently, though, we've seen a new kind of celebrity. Primarily female, they're the representatives of the fear, anxiety, and passionate determination to right the social and environmental wrongs of past generations. They're the
Gretas and the
Alexandrias. Completely unknown just a few years ago, they're now household names.
It's a telling sign just how badly we've messed up our planet, how far we've let things go on a societal, economic, political, and environmental level. These young women have ignited the collective angst and anger of millions. But they're not the only ones to take action. Thousands if not millions of other, still unsung, heroes and heroines, work day and night on the issues that these celebrities lend their voice to.
It's important to have figureheads like these, to inspire the millions of people it will take to turn things around. Because they, in turn, inspire other leaders, who in turn galvanize their communities, and so on.
And perhaps inevitably, there's a fair amount of the "I" in some of these stories. Selfies of the same faces as they travel from conference to conference, country to country (what about those emissions?) Swiping through social media, you'd be hard pressed not to begin to think all this environmental activism is turning into a frenzy of king and queenmaking. Whether or not it's true, the mere perception is dangerous enough. Worse still, as individuals rise in popularity, their previous accessibility dries up. They breathe the rarified air of a public persona who has neither the time nor, perhaps, the willingness, to engage with everyone who contacts them. This is in part due to the fact that public figures, especially if they are female,
face harassment. Just as there are fans, there are also the "haters," some of whom are more actively resentful than others.
Complicating things is the blurring of lines between objectification of the female body and environmental activism. A few days ago one of the Instagram accounts we follow, @coralgardeners, announced a collaboration with Alexis, an Instagram model with 13.3 million followers. It struck me as savvy, cynical, and disingenuous all at the same time. I'd never heard of this woman, but a quick scroll through her feed revealed a river of... well, revealing images. A number of commenters on @coralgardeners were outraged by the association, expressing their disappointment with the organization.
Alexandria and Alexis couldn't be farther apart from one another, and yet each plays a powerful role in our society, a society profoundly fascinated with celebrity and female power. But the meaning and value of celebrity doesn't depend on what those celebrities do or say as much as how we, individually and collectively, respond to them, and the power
we impart to them as a result. Let's make sure that response skews well for the future of our children.
~ Birgitte
