ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to explain culture both historically and in a contemporary frame before examining its impact on the environment and the service it provides to corporate polluters through two core professions—stardom and journalism. Culture has usually been understood in two quasi-Kantian registers, via the social sciences and the humanities. Culture's connection to collective and individual identity and conduct has produced some powerful reactions to dominant and emergent cultural institutions, technologies, and genres. Cultural policymakers mostly fail to do due diligence by connecting upstream and downstream environmental liabilities to the costs of cultural production or reinforcing or insisting on sustainable practices within the cultural sector itself. With the advent of capitalism's division of labor, culture came both to embody instrumentalism and to abjure it, via the industrialization of farming, on the one hand, and the development of individual taste, on the other.
