Cop-Out Communicators Are Killing The Planet

Do you know why we're up the creek without a paddle, in a fast-sinking barbed-wire canoe? 

I call it "copout communication." There's a current Youtube ad "... plastic pollution has *flooded* our planet ..." that's a perfect example of this. Why? 

Because no, it hasn't. WE've flooded our planet with plastic. To put the ad like that is BS, pure and simple, and designed to "unalive" our sense of personal responsibility and "hand-jobbie" our sense of righteous indignation at how DARE plastic flood OUR planet. 

And yes I used some other copout mechanisms for demostration purposes - using euphemistic words for "kill" and "wank." So sue me. I did it to show how weak copout communication actually is. Re-read that last paragraph with the right words in place and you can see how much better of an impact it has. 

That one ad also puts the responsibility fair and square on - plastic itself. Not on the Fossil Fuel Cartel which gets such a huge profit out of fossil fuel and needs to be dismantled and the plants and refineries demolished. 

In a way me saying that we flooded the planet is a half-copout in itself. We're only responsible in that we allowed it to get to this stage and didn't put the onus for recycling right back on the producers of the goods we buy packaged in plastic, to recycle their shit plastic. 

Companies recycling their waste plastic is eminently doable these days with energy available in scads from the sun and wind. And if these companies were forced to install enough sustainable energy to run ALL of their operations from making to selling to taking back and recycling, then that would give better profits to the makers of sustainable energy generation equipment, which in turn would make it less expensive for others to buy and put into service. Win/win/win I love hat tricks!

By shutting down 95% of oilfields and refineries, that would certainly mean that a few rich FFC execs would have to try and eke out a living on their last several hundred million dollars - but that's a hardship I'm prepared to endure and so should you. These bastards have names and addresses and a legal presence in courts of law all over the world, people! Start going to get them!

Then There's...

Then there's this article I posted the other day, which also makes my point for me. A cute little seabird that commutes 10,000km each way on its migration. Even that bit of fuzzy-feelgood news is kind of pointless because the first part of the article's just there to convey that we actually know very little about some seabird migrations. It's an anti-article up to the halfway mark. The real headliner was the quiet little heading that reads "Seabird population in decline." To torture the whole story around so it looks like a good-news story is bullshit, it's a perfect example of another form of copout communication. 

Don't be a copout communicator. Share this article in your social messenger, your social networks. It helps me get my words out to more people, this message in front of more pairs of eyes. It's a quick and easy form of activism and it helps swell awareness of the issues we need to solve pretty damn quickly if we want to survive.

Go check out my news stand and subscribe to my newsletter, it's a once a week email that you won't regret receiving. And please use one of the donation buttons (coffee mug or Paypal symbol) and help me keep it going.