Description
The link between celebrity and conservation is hardly new. However, with the advent of television this link was significantly strengthened. Today’s celebrity conservationists, many of whom made their reputations through television and other visual media, play a major role in drawing public attention to an increasingly threatened world. Nature’s Saviours, one of the first books to address this contribution, focuses on five key figures: the English naturalist David Attenborough, the French marine adventurer Jacques-Yves Cousteau, the American primatologist Dian Fossey, the Canadian scientist-broadcaster-activist David Suzuki, and the Australian ‘crocodile hunter’ Steve Irwin. Among the issues the book addresses are the following: What is the changing relationship between western conservation and celebrity? How has the spread of television helped shape and mediate this relationship? To what extent can celebrity conservation be seen as part of a global system in which conservation, like celebrity, is big business? These and other issues are addressed via five household figures whose conservation media work has accorded them heroic status. The book ‘s aim is not to debunk; it is to examine this status critically. In assessing the various discourses around nature, science, nation, gender through which its main figures and their work have been presented to us, the book aims to fill the cultural, historical and ideological background behind contemporary celebrity conservationism as a popular expression of a chronically endangered world.
