Mixed Messaging

drawing, words

We’re staring at a huge environmental crisis, we are told every day by the media. 

If we don’t reduce carbon emissions drastically, the world is going to be unliveable in a few decades, they tell us. 

Micro plastics are now found in human blood, not just in turtles a long way away, so we must give up plastic, today, they inform us. 

Recycle or you are a bad person, etc., etc., etc., etc. 

Whatever is happening to the world’s climate, it is happening, and whether or not we humans have been the main cause of it or not, well, I don’t really care. It shouldn’t really matter. Things are changing, species are dying, and there are things that we could do to help make it a nicer place to live for everyone. 

Pumping the atmosphere with carbon while cutting down forests is a stupid thing to do. Killing turtles with micro-plastics in their blood and macro-plastic bags wrapped around their guts is cruel and ugly. Flushing your toilet with drinkable water when so many people in the world have no access to any within kilometres is really quite vile. 

So, the media tell us every waking moment that we must do all the things to turn it around, and to be virtuous. 

The corporations are doing that too, telling US to be good humans, just like they are trying to be good humans and saving the planet, but, like with so many other things, what they’re doing is just virtue signalling bullshit. 

They know the power of marketing, and how messaging gets into our stupid people brains, so whatever lip service they pay to helping the environment: 

  • they tell you that you need a car to be groovy. It can be a brand new electric car. It doesn’t matter how much water, electricity, carbon, plastic goes into the MILLIONS of new cars that are being built, it’s electric so it’s all cool. 
  • they tell you that your hair needs to be shiny as all hell, and here’s yet another new invention to make your hair shinier than it was yesterday. Huge plastic bottles of gunk to put on your hair, an excretion of your body. 
  • they tell you that you and your clothes need to smell fresh (a.k.a. smell of perfume) at all hours of the day, and that you must use vast amounts of drinking water every day and more huge plastic bottles to achieve this. If you lived before the 1990s, you should know that it is quite possible to live without being scrubbed clean morning and night. 
  • they tell you that this new range of clothes is made out of recycled plastic water bottles, for clothes you don’t need to buy and water you could have drunk from the tap. And who knows how much more carbon and water went into the recycling. 
  • they tell us to eat ever more takeaway food that needs to packaged in huge quantities of plastic and cardboard, and that it is our god-given right to fly wherever we want to whenever we want to, and to disinfect our house to within an inch of its biosphere life with chemicals and even more drinking water. 

Then they tell US to recycle all the plastic and cardboard and glass that we have bought wrapped around all the products we buy to live a modern life that we believe we have a right to do, to live a life unsullied by dirt and smells (because what would the neighbours think?), while we look pretty. 

No wonder people don’t really believe, deep down, that the climate is changing. 

Every subliminal message out there is telling them that everything’s FINE, because if we were really in a crisis, shiny hair would be the least of our problems.