How To Steer Environmental Movements: 15 Year Quarterbacking

I was rather concerned 15 years ago that the Al Gore - led carbon global warming movie was gathering so much steam that it was cannibalizing the "Rainforest" focus of the previous decade. I was concerned that, tactically, it was recruiting people away from Rain Forest action more than it was attracting non-environmentalists (though I conceded it was doing both). My suggestion then was that Gore, McKibben, and cohorts make habitat preservation as a "carbon sink" more front and center than energy generation.

About 10 years ago, a reporter friend, Ingrid Lobet, who had worked on NPR's Retroworks de Mexico coverage let me know she was going on assignment to Indonesia, where the burning of the rainforest was exposing so much peat and carbon sequestered (deep organics under trees) that it was turning the geography (former rain forest) from a "sink" into a top emitter of carbon.



Here's news about an agency making dead rain forest carbon a top issue. https://eia-international.org/our-work/ecosystems-biodiversity/forest

Meanwhile Back in Yaounde Cameroon ... Eden is Noisy Picture

The place has grown since I lived there in the mid 1980s.  My wife is back in Yaounde again, and just shared the photo below by Facebook, the view from her hotel.



One thing is the same.  Electricity.  Yaounde had electricity when I arrived in 1984.  And had the first television broadcasts by the end of 1986 (showing Alex Haley's "Roots" in English to people who didn't speak English... it was awkward).

So, since television stations started broadcasting in 1986, not even counting the CRT televisions people had to watch VCR tapes with before that, how many "e-waste" televisions would you expect to find in the Yaounde dump in 2006?

If you can count over 12 of them in the Guardian's "e-waste Chernobyl" photos, how long were the twelve TVs sitting there on the ground?  Is it so difficult to image the city above can generate as many TVs as the town of Middlebury, Vermont?

Don't the statistics from the UN studies start to sound less crazy?   Doesn't it start to make sense that it's only 9% fallout (unrepairable, tossed) rather than 80%?  If it was only 20 percent reuse, how many containerloads of TVs would they need to set the city up with television?

Or maybe, that's not the point.

"Back to Eden Project".



Ah!  That's better!  That's the way Europe likes to remember Africa.

No TVs, no radios, no computers, no hassle.  A tropical paradise.

Now, cue the crouching children.  Oh, shoot.  No crouching children in the rain forests.  They are still crouching at the city dump.



Pictures of Africa suitable for Europe?   Picture this:  African kids playing free vintage games on used CRTs.  And no, they cannot hear our healthy "tsk, tsks" across the Atlantic.  

LA Times: Beyond 7 Billion People

As long as this number, the world's population, keeps going up, recycling is going to be a very strong industry.  LA Times has a very strong article on "overpopulation", something which was the main focus of environmentalist angst in the 1970s (when I devoted my life to environmental karma yoga).

This is really what is behind global warming, deforestation,, species extinction.  Even if 6 billion of us achieve perfect environmentalist nirvana understanding, the havoc that will be wreaked by the last billion, eating shark fin soup and endangered species platter, and throwing their copper away in the landfill, could easily doom us faster than the population of 3 billion with average environmental ethos.

Recycling will be a good career as long as the population keeps growing, and the work created by human discards will never cease.   I wish I could think the same for rain forests, coral reefs, polar ice caps, and other habitats that are in the way of 14 billion people.

e-Waste Poster Child Telethon from Disney (*Repost from 2011)

Sunday, December 11, 2011

Tomorrow (Monday) is our R2 Audit.  So I've invited a guest writer while I prepare the inspection paperwork.

"Hello, My name is Mowgli, and I am the spokesperson for the Poster Child Workers Union [PCWU].  You know me from my work in Hollywood's "Jungle Book".  But did you also know I was nearly used as a "poster child" for several charitable campaigns?  My creative boss at Disney frowned on that kind of thing.  Last I remember, Uncle Walt allowed my image to be used on an Italian Lira postal stamp - back in 1970 (see right).

"However, there are millions of boys and girls like me, in the developing world, who have no Disney lawyers to protect us from unauthorized use of our images.  For the most part, we don't mind so long as the photographer is trying to accomplish something good.   If my sister is in line receiving food or medicine from CARE, Save The Children, Oxfam, or Unicef, she's hardly in a position to complain, right?

"One group that has been using our images a lot is now being confronted by the PCWU union.   It's a 'watchdog' group which was taking our photos doing recycling work.   We thought recycling is good.  This is better than being a child soldier, a tantalum mine worker, a sex slave, or working in a textile mill.  Sure, our lives are tough, but if you were me, wouldn't you rather be recycling than doing something worse?  I mean, don't white boy scouts earn merit badges for recycling?

Walt Disney. (2023, July 22). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disney

"Now, the official union position is that we can be bought.   Ok, that's so blunt...  But true.  We'll gag and writhe for a peso. But after the photographer leaves, what then?  Oy veh!  It turns out, no pay for the photo, and worse...! Their campaign wants to shut us down entirely!