Archive for the ‘Environmentality columns’ Category

It’s a tale as old as time. Blue aliens with loin-cloths and (ever so slightly unsettling) wormlike tail ends, live in a harmonious natural rhythm with their planet until corporate America comes to blow it to damnation in an attempt to amass a fortune selling “unobtainium” (who knew Bush had discovered an element).  But it’s the tale going on outside of the cinema aisles that had me thinking.

The page “ways to cope with the depression of the dream of Pandora being intangible” on avatar-forums.com is 52 pages long. One user, ‘Okoi’, states “after I watched Avatar at the first time, I truly felt depressed as I “wake” up in this world again”.  For many, this will seem a strange and potentially odd reaction to a trip to the cinema. However, a remarkable number of people are not only claiming to feel the same, they go further and express the newly awakened suicidal thoughts they are experiencing. Inevitably these cases seem to be helping Cameron’s bank balance comfortably into impropriety by their incessant need to re-immerse themselves in the Na’vi world. But perhaps there is potential here for a deeper and more earth-based contemplation. Maybe this is a moment where real discussions can be had and real changes can be enacted… but only if people can pry themselves from the popcorn long enough.

Another user stated that,  “even if you wanted to strive to be more like the Na’vi you would be eaten alive in this world”. I’m not going to pretend that he is wrong in thinking that going out into a forest wearing very little and attempting to reenact your favourite movie moments wouldn’t be seen as canon fodder for ridicule, but in what sense would that really be striving for the Na’vi ideals?

Without getting into the politics of the global warming hoax or horror-filled apocalyptic message debate, it has to be admitted that there are real problems in this world. If not our wasteful disregard for our planet, then equally our often disdainful and destructive approach to those who still feel a real, organic connection with it. Vine Deloria wrote of the plight of Native Americans living in the USA in 1988, one particular example used being that of the Pyramid Lake Paiutes who “are poor because they have been systematically cheated out of their water rights, and on desert reservations water is the most important single factor in life”.  To tow the environmental lobby line of the last few decades, we need to make changes. And possibly what the reaction to Avatar has shown us is that people are ready to be receptive. Why not turn this strange outpouring of emotional solidarity with an imaginary world into a real sense of responsibility for our own. To the environmental groups I’d say you have some people willing to paint themselves blue and chain themselves to a tree, the question is, can you make them?

Perhaps ‘Neytiri’ puts forward the point more aptly in a way that will better reach the potential depressive pill-poppers of the generation, “your life has only two switches, to shine or not to shine. There is no “apathy” setting. If you’re on apathy setting you might as well sign your world away to destruction. When you get discouraged by everyone around you, be courageous like Jake, and jump on the leonopteryx”. As for the rest of you whose apathy setting isn’t controlled by the will to jump on a weird dinosaur, maybe a more stringent recycling regime would suffice?

Ok, I’ll be honest with you. I am no eco-warrior. I like having baths, I often relish being given plastic bags in shops and the only animals I care about are ones with sleeves and a zip. But this is not to say that I don’t care about the environment, or the wasteful way that people, particularly shops and companies, waste electricity.

Having worked in a small shop in Covent Garden for the past two and a half years, then prior to that a big national DIY chain, I have seen and experienced first hand the lack of attention paid to conserving electricity in the workplace. If you’ve been down Oxford Street at 3am and glanced at the shops then you’ll probably know what I’m talking about. Every single shop you come across has at least some of its lights on. All day and all night. While I understand that this is believed to increase the number of people attracted to your shop as they drunkenly ogle your products through the window of an evening, lusting after a pair of shoes or a gorgeous leather jacket, is it really worth the continuous, never ending waste of electricity?

In both places I have worked, the computers, tills and most lights have been left on all night, which always seemed unnecessary and wasteful to me, and no matter how many times I suggested acting to the contrary my suggestions fell on deaf ears.

We all know how often being energy efficient in our homes and in our daily personal lives is rammed down our throats. I know I shouldn’t throw away plastic bottles or tin cans, I know I should shun the evils of driving in favour of public transport and I have had the fear instilled in me that should I leave the tap running I will almost be single-handedly responsible for the polar ice caps melting. However, why are businesses not constantly choked with such information? As a consumer, there is only so much energy I do use day to day which is surely a hell of a lot less than, say, all the department stores on Oxford Street or every computer in a giant office block so surely it should be them who should be making more of an effort to cut their energy consumption?

If we’re going to save electricity and actually do it properly we need to all have the same rules. If I’m going to feel guilty about leaving the lights on in my bedroom when I step out to get a cup of tea then so should everyone who works in or is part of high-street retailers. I am aware that there are guidelines for businesses on energy consumption, and quotas for recycling, but if any real change is to be made then instead of targeting the consumer to cut electricity, it is the big businesses that should be targeted. Rather than local councils concentrating their efforts on catching out people who’ve put cardboard boxes in their ordinary household waste, they should be catching out shops who have all the lights, tills, computers and heaters in Christendom on and penalising them.

I did something today that you should never do.  I went on youtube, searched for ‘pandas’ and read the users comments.  Skipping over the usual display of unabashed ignorance (“are they like going extinct and stuff?”) one comment in particular caught my eye.   The self-styled user “BambooSue” had commented “LOL LOL LOL! OMG, soooooooo cute, donate to pandas now! ”

Batshit insane though she clearly is, the comment reveals something deeply worrying.  The fact is that an inordinate proportion of conservation money goes to fur balls with eyes. So called “T-shirt species” are haemorrhaging funds from arguably more worthwhile but less popular conservation efforts. Such views are not popular with the likes of BambooSue. In fact when, last month, BBC Wildlife presenter Chris Packham recently called for pandas to be left to die out so that conservation money could be spent on other things, the public outcry (and Daily Mirror campaign) was so great he was forced to issue the following (slightly sarcastic) apology whilst hugging a toy panda “I don’t hate pandas. I love cuddly animals.”

Though Packham is wrong to suggest that pandas are “an evolutionary cul-de-sac” (recent evidence suggests that genetic diversity is strong enough for evolutionary adaptation) he has a point and the problem goes further than just pandas.  In the last published accounts of the World Wildlife Fund, more money was spent on giant panda conservation than towards the protection of an entire rainforest in West Papua and income from donations for rhinos and tigers was 12 times bigger than donations for the entire global marine ecosystem.

So if fluffiness and size of eyes is no justification for conservation, what is? Environmentalists over the years have chosen to highlight the human benefits; medicinal plants, carbon dioxide capture, natural disaster prevention, sustainable fishing, gene banks for growing better crops to name but a few.  Worthwhile and scientifically justified those these are, they are simply excuses to appeal to the selfish interests of humans.  For me the only true justification can be found in, not what species are, but what they mean.  The phenomenal beauty, complexity (and cruelty) the resulting perfection of 3.5 billion years of trial and error.  The fact that every individual organism alive today is here because every single one of its ancestors for millions of years has fought and tricked its way into reproducing.  Despite the millions of dead-ends that litter the graveyards of evolution, these are the ones that made it. For now anyway.