Apple and Mother Nature

Apple yesterday released an advert, 2030 Status, which provides "mother nature" with a status update on its goal to have zero carbon footprint by 2030. It is tongue in cheek but serving the purpose of sharing factoids with Apple fans and beyond. It is not about just about the corporate reporting, but how cultural signs and symbols are marshalled consciously and what they also communicate subconsciously.

Environmentalism is made up of myths

Myths don’t necessarily mean imagined stories and events. Oft-repeated stories and narratives are also myths. Thus, certain myths of nature circulate amongst various stakeholders. 1) Nature is volatile and unpredictable; 2) nature is fragile and if not taken care of it will degrade and impact all natural life and threaten human civilisation; 3) nature is robust; 4) and lastly, nature is only robust within limits.

Each of the myths leads us to different cultural, societal and managerial responses to how we deal with or manage nature and its resources. Our positions on environment is based on which myth we tap into.

Mother Nature interrogates Apple

Octavia Spencer presides over, no interrogates, members of an internal Apple review meeting that includes Tim Cook, Apple CEO and various executives. It is a very diverse cast in terms of ages, genders, ethnicities. Midway through the advert we see a nervous but excited Gen Z underling employee ventriloquising mother nature’s lines.

They might as well have recruited Greta Thunberg thundering “How dare you” ?at Tim Cook.

Brands are getting smarter at their social and environmental justice messaging, not being too overt in coopting Gen Z or project onto to them the burden of sorting out the ecological impact of consumerism.

But there’s something else about Apple's 2030 Status advert in that how nature and mother nature are represented. At the start of the advert we see a plant that has withered away. Mother nature comes thundering and demands answers. Even a lay person can tell that mothers are mythologised or stereotyped as providing sustenance and nutrition, affection and love, welcoming comfort and shelter and protection. But from the point of view of zeitgeist, a demanding mother earth makes sense. In this instance, the demanding mother is a representation of women with agency. The #metoo, equal pay, representation, breaking the glass ceiling movements have brought this to the fore. To that extent a demanding mother nature makes sense.

At the same time, the co-optation of mother nature for commerce or popular culture is not new. But it takes a rather ominous tone with a rather vindictive mother earth. Adverts for Chiffon Margarine in the 70s represented mother nature who could rain hell on earth if she came across artifice;

Aidy Bryant as Mother Earth on SNL berates people for eating burgers and using coal (“This is going to go one of the two ways… you help me or I am going to kill you”).

The Keep New Zealand Beautiful advert, 2019, went for irony and presented “Mama Nature” as an angry and vindictive man dressed as a woman who rains hellfire on a woman who litters.

Recycling the myth of the bossy and vindictive woman

It appears the more we try to progress we keep recycling old semiotic codes of nature, women, environmentalism. The Apple advert combines the second myth of environmentalism, that nature is fragile with the stereotype of the demanding and bossy woman. In the advert, all employees in the meeting are reporting to her and not to the CEO Tim Cook and shareholders. Mother Nature has a meek male as an underling. It almost descends into self parody with its mish mash of various cultural tropes - intended or unintended. It would probably have been advisable for Tim Cook to speak to the camera and rattle off what Apple has achieved so far. Apple speaks for and to mother nature and co-opt myths and discourses about nature without letting the world participate in its dialogue.

Comments are turned off for the video on YouTube.

It will not stop the incoming social media memes though.