{"id":312,"date":"2016-03-14T02:22:08","date_gmt":"2016-03-14T02:22:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/ps301\/?p=312"},"modified":"2016-03-15T04:57:30","modified_gmt":"2016-03-15T04:57:30","slug":"can-leonardo-dicaprio-help-us-in-the-anthropocene","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/ps301\/can-leonardo-dicaprio-help-us-in-the-anthropocene\/","title":{"rendered":"Can Leonardo DiCaprio Help us in the Anthropocene?"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you\u2019ve stumbled across any website like Tumblr, 4chan, or even Facebook in the last 5 years, I\u2019m sure you\u2019ve head- Leonardo DiCaprio was\u00a0Oscar-less.\u00a0 <\/span>Shocking news to anyone who watched eagerly as he portrayed rolls from a Wall Street Banker to my personal favorite interpretation of Shakespeare\u2019s Romeo.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Leo is known for more than just his extraordinary acting these days, however.\u00a0 <\/span>He is one of the most famous, and most vocal, proponents for climate change legislation and recognition.\u00a0 <\/span>When he finally did win his Best Actor Oscar last month, he used the international platform it provided, with 34.4 million viewers, to promote collective action to mitigate the effects of climate change (full transcript here<\/a><\/strong>). <\/span><\/p>\n

Leo\u2019s speech touched on many aspects of the Anthropocene that we have discussed in class.\u00a0 <\/span>His first sentence, as he shifts from thanking his friends and coworkers to his environmentalist message, ties his message to his award-winning film, \u201cAnd lastly, I just want to say this: Making The Revenant was about man’s relationship to the natural world\u201d. The Revenant, set\u00a0<\/span>in the 1820\u2019s, perfectly shows how we as a species have shifted from the natural environment shaping us (the routes the characters traverse, what they eat, when they can travel- all determined by \u201cthe natural world\u201d), to us shaping it in 2016 (hence the name and definition of the Anthropocene<\/a>). He uses scientific facts and an example of the impact he felt that could easily be found in the pages of Schw\u00e4gerl, \u201c A world that we collectively felt in 2015 as the hottest year in recorded history. Our production needed to move to the southern tip of this planet just to be able to find snow.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>He speaks to the political theories of democracy and collectivism by saying, \u201cwe need to support leaders around the world who do not speak for the big polluters, but who speak for all of humanity\u2026 for those people out there whose voices have been drowned out by the politics of greed\u201d.\u00a0 <\/span>Lastly, he unintentionally points out one of the main criticisms behind naming this time \u201cthe Anthropocene\u201d, as certain people are very responsible for the current climate, while \u201cbillions and billions of underprivileged people out there [will] be most affected by this\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n

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As millions of people watched this speech, the question still remains- will people remember DiCaprio\u2019s call to action, or just Heidi Klum\u2019s dress<\/a>? The Donella Meadows<\/a> reading on systems theory points out that a strong leverage point is changing the structure of information flows, delivering information to places where is previously wasn\u2019t going.\u00a0 <\/span>While there isn\u2019t much data on the overlap of scholarly climate science article subscribers and Oscar viewers, Leo\u2019s speech likely reached thousands, if not millions, of people who were not previously seeking this information actively. Celebrity advocacy has been a rising trend for many causes (as seen in the other speeches and performances of The Oscars<\/a>), including environmentalism in recent years<\/a>, so it is difficult to gauge if DiCaprio truly changed the flow of information. <\/span><\/p>\n

However, if all of his fans put as much passion and effort into environmentalism as they did attention to his whereabouts, girlfriends, and award-show loses- perhaps the Anthropocene could have a slightly better outcome. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you\u2019ve stumbled across any website like Tumblr, 4chan, or even Facebook in the last 5 years, I\u2019m sure you\u2019ve head- Leonardo DiCaprio was\u00a0Oscar-less.\u00a0 Shocking news to anyone who watched eagerly as he portrayed rolls from a Wall Street Banker to my personal favorite interpretation of Shakespeare\u2019s Romeo. Leo is known for more than just his extraordinary acting these days,… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,22,1],"tags":[75,76,74,73],"class_list":["post-312","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-climate-change","category-governance","category-uncategorized","tag-informationflows","tag-oscars","tag-systemstheory","tag-x-celebrity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/ps301\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/ps301\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/ps301\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/ps301\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/ps301\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=312"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/ps301\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":315,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/ps301\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312\/revisions\/315"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/ps301\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/ps301\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/ps301\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}