in passing, here’s a nugget i’d written last year regarding greenpeace’s campaign against kimberly-clarke, logging magnates and coreners of the kleenex and toiletry market. have a look at both the tp and the plastic dispensers in most public washrooms and you’ll notice the high incidence of full-package k-c units. my thoughts on greenpeace are that they do well when tactical-minded, which is to say they hit the mark from time to time. i’m often skeptical about their long-term strategy and agree they raise consciousness but also suggest they fail to make in-roads on the policy side (like, say, the sierra club and ducks unlimited, who certainly must be read in their own political context).

anyway, here’s a link to the campaign, which i assume is still in progress:

http://kleercut.net/en/theissues

here’s what i composed and sent to the greepeacers at the outset:

Kudos on your consciouness-raising mandate and your mission to make Canadians aware of what happens behind the thin 20 metre treelines off Highway 43. I planted trees and worked silviculture for nine years, always balancing the free-wheeling but always beneficial reforestation imperative with the coporatization of the environmental ethos, a thing always-already sliding on a slippery slope. Treeplanting has really changed in teh last ten years, as has logging and production in most forestry sectors.

A few comments. Rhetorically, your Kleercut campaign approach depends on facts, figures, stats, and anthropomorphic presentations of other animals and species affected by the ecological fallout of cutting practices and clearcut logging. The
juxtaposing of images and the free play between iconic renderings of our industrialized landscapes, geographies, and displaced inhabitants generates a sympathetic response. Yet, you abstract the forest; you speak of the boreal forest, its age, its hinge-status as the ancient forest’s place of demise and the mythic last-stand. I think you should, instead of mythologize, concretize the boreal forest; throw a few maps up. Locate KC’s Canadian operations. I am sure you don’t want to instigate
an inappropriate response on the part of constituents by providing specific information but you need to add some substance.

As artificial as our logging practices are, we are still internal to and ineherent of the natural systems we’re altering and telescoping at alarming rates. Daunting? Yes. Yet, making the “forest” this opaque and external thing to us, into which we
descend to purge and harm, is a maligned rhetorical tactic. While it may be internal to Greenpeace’s discursive and ideological outlook, its affect and effect is, to some degrees, alienating. The ecology of the boreal forest is enchanting and
you need to cultivate an awareness that fosters people’s entry into that enchantment in order to produce a realistic rendition about what our responsibilities as technologized and capitalizing animals entails in relation to stewardship and some ideal version of palatable environmental mangement. The narrative thread is important; it establishes causality and is the “optics” through which Greenpeace presents its arguments. Insert people into the narrative.

That said, regardless of my criticisms, I applaud your efforts.

–

n

“Human settlement, logging, mining and disease mean that orangutans in parts of Indonesia may lose half of their habitat within five years. “All of the great apes are listed as either endangered or critically endangered,” co-author Lera Miles from the World Conservation Monitoring Centre near Cambridge told the BBC News website.

“Critically endangered means that their numbers have decreased, or will decrease, by 80% within three generations.”

One critically endangered species is the Sumatran orangutan, of which around 7,300 remain in the wild.

Most live in Aceh province at the northern tip of Sumatra, which saw armed conflict for decades between the Indonesian government and separatist rebels, and which suffered heavily during December’s tsunami.

n mid-August, a peace deal was signed which may end the 29-year conflict.

“The irony is that just as things are getting better for the people of Aceh, they’re getting worse for wildlife, with people collecting timber, dormant logging concessions being activated, and illegal logging as well,” said Dr Miles.

“Projections show that in 50 years’ time, there could be as few as 250 left in the wild; but that’s not a viable size for a population.”

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4202734.stm