bogleech:

xenoplasm:

bogleech:

I think the natural world is intrinsically precious and obviously wildlife means an awful lot to me but I wish all the environmental propaganda I heard growing up had actually touched on all that actual human suffering.

I heard so much about all those poor cute little rainforest animals who need our help because they are so defenseless and innocent yet I was never taught about the indigenous human beings who live in the same fucking rainforest and are afforded no more rights than those same apes and birds getting plastered on posters around my elementary school.

Yes it’s sad that climate change threatens the polar bears but why have I heard so much more about the polar bears than the fact that over 20,000 people have had to flee the Marshall islands due to rising sea levels? Oh, hey, most of them fled to the United States, too, so who knows how many now risk deportation while their original homes are UNDER THE FUCKIN OCEAN.

Why did even environmental groups tell me more about what pesticides do to fish than what they do to human embryonic development? What about people starving to death because poaching and overfishing and banana crops and shit have destroyed their resources?

I hear a little more about these things NOW, I guess, but all I heard growing up was just “SAVE THE PRETTY BIRDS AND DOLPHINS” and it’s just no fucking wonder people as a whole stopped caring about the ecosystem. Captain Planet and Fern Gully and all those endless ad campaigns and grade-school programs somehow expected human beings to get on board with preserving nature while simultaneously treating human beings as exclusively monsters and outsiders to nature.

I don’t think any of those ad campaigns were implying that all of humanity is composed of say, the two guys operating that big logging machine in Fern Gully.

However, as a whole, people in developed nations are starkly ignorant of the effect they have on tropical forests, as well as the people who dwell in them, and I do think it’s fair to demonize or criticize that, because it’s mostly our consumption of various products that destroys tropical forests.

I also agree, however, that the indigenous peoples who have chosen to stick with their culture and live in the rainforests of South America or Borneo need to be featured more frequently in these materials. The crimes being perpetrated against indigenous peoples in South America right now are really unbelievable, and Brazil is mostly to blame.

Yeah, environmentalist materials don’t mean to paint all humans as evil, but often end up doing so – and then you do get those full blown “humanity is a virus to be exterminated” environmentalists, and it isn’t really fair or realistic to throw everybody under the same bus for problems perpetrated most of all by the wealthiest and most powerful minority.

We regular people who aren’t politicians or billionaire CEO’s seem pretty much helpless to do much about a lot of it. It’s just so fucked that a business can basically do what it wants as long as it doesn’t do it in its own country.

White environmentalists who do this kind of stuff are also actively counting om the fact that their white audience is going to value cute animals more than people of color.