This Green Peace advertisement I think does an amazing job of not going through the typical rhetoric of just listing random facts and figures saying that Tropical Rainforest deforestation is a bad thing. Instead they get us to see the issue as if someone were to rip into our home and tear it to shreds with chainsaws and bulldozers.
We are then blasted by images of various primates that, as many of us know, are our closest genetic relatives. They capture images that resemble panic, fear, and a very anxious state of being as the process of deforestation begins taking place. The advertisement is very effective at placing those that sympathize with animal rights in a position that would make those individuals want to take action; for those that typically do not care about animal welfare, we see the wasteland that is left after the logging process and see trucks ripping out of the rainforest.
What we later see is the shadow, or perhaps ghosts of the animals that were displaced from the destruction of their home. Where are they to go now?
The politics I feel is the balance of maintaining ecosystems for various reasons, aesthetic beauty, future resources from the plants, ethics such as animal welfare, whatever the reason we should want to stop these things from happening because they apply to us in different ways depending on our culture and what we find as important. As we have discussed in class, urban dwellers are the main people that seek to escape from the grind and get to the great outdoors. What if we had no place to go since we tore it all down? Perhaps we were raised with modern medicine values, what if we could not produce the many organic based drugs any longer because we killed off all the important drug producing plants. Maybe, We were raised with Environmentalists that value responsible deforestation and cycling different areas so we can maintain the ecosystem at that location.
The nature vs civilization aspect also occurs, I feel at the heart of this is do developing nations desire money to bring their country's standard of living to that of Europe, and America, even though that means ripping the rainforest out for monetary gain to drive this economic development.
Great post! The question you bring up towards the end is a very interesting one to ruminate upon. Developing nations are resorting to exploiting the natural resources/goods their lands provide to reach that economic status of more developed nations. While aspiring to further their social/economic capital is great, the cost at which they are aspiring to do this is great, and in the grand scheme of things, is actually short lived. For a short term gain, these nations are forgoing a long term plus for the world. It would be great if the developed nations could step in and guide these developing nations, collaborate and help instead of fight for resources or compete for rankings in the market.
ReplyDeleteThat's a super-smart ad, and I was watching it with my feet on a Honduras mahogany coffee table I built years ago, when that was one of the cheapest lumbers around. Now it's embargoed. Good issue and good appeal to our love of the vanishing / woods.
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