Rich Americans and Europeans are saving Africa from the Africans, don't you know?
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Originally posted by anton pulisov View PostI had posted this in the Extinction thread, but forgot bout this 'ere thread.
What if All That Flying Is Good for the Planet? https://nyti.ms/2OuX25Z
"Without tourism, it’s easy to imagine the Serengeti turned into cattle ranches."
Amazing mental gymnastics.
As the admittedly self-serving article states: "Aviation accounts for approximately 2.5 percent of human-induced C0₂ emissions. By contrast, deforestation, according to some estimates, contributes nearly 20 percent, about as much as all forms of transportation combined. If we want to truly take a clean sweep at reducing global greenhouse gases, then we must stop clear-cutting the world’s forests."
It has proven very hard to convince countries, even rich countries like the US, to save wild places or charismatic megafauna just for the sake of it. "Think of the tourist trade" seems to be the only hope. I wish that weren't true, but I don't see much evidence that it isn't.
I get that everybody hates a tourist and all those pictures of pretty white girls using cute black children as props. That is obnoxious. But this isn't about white people swooping in to save these things from the ignorant natives. It's about finding a way - any way possible - to funnel money to local people to help them save the land and the animals against the onslaught of global capitalism and extraction industries. Ideally, we would just send them the money and not send any tourists, but realistically that's harder to make happen. We don't spend much on international aid, and some of these countries - Brazil most notably - have governments hell-bent on burning it all down just to own the libs. These are desperate times. If a few asshole tourists can give those governments a reason not to burn it down, that's a price worth paying, I suspect.
It is also a reason why zoos - despite their many problems, may actually help save some of these species. Unfortunately, many zoo animals will no longer be ambassadors for thier wild cousins. They will just be the last of their kind on the Ark. And then we'll create robotic versions of them like in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.
I also recently read a study that showed that the carbon impact of transporting food around the country is negligable compared to the carbon impact of raising livestock for meat. So the same would probably apply to ecotravel, I suppose. The transportation isn't nearly as big of a carbon contributor as we might think.
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All of this article made me want to punch a wall.
Things took a political turn for Lingua Franca after Trump initiated the January 2017 travel ban. At the time, the brand had three F.I.T. students from Iran who were sewing for the company. When Hruska MacPherson came into the office, they were crying, wondering if they could ever go home or see their families again. “It was the first time in my white privileged life I had politics affect me. It’s insane and ridiculous, but it’s the truth,” Hruska MacPherson says. So she told the F.I.T. students to channel their feelings into embroidery and made a sweater that read I MISS BARACK. Hruska MacPherson owed Anna Carter, wife of Graydon, a gift for writing her family a preschool recommendation, and gave the sweater to her. (“Anna’s really sophisticated, and it was camel-y color,” she notes.) Thousands of email orders followed, and just like that, Lingua Franca became the official cashmere of the resistance.
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Yeah, sixth line for me; "...picking at a hamburger". These articles always mention someone 'nibbling', 'munching' or 'picking' at something. Never just eating it, or not mentioning it at all.
They're also usually 'sprawled' or 'lounging' or 'stretched out' on a couch of some kind. I'll keep reading...
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I have never and will never ever ever want to read about what an interviewee was wearing, eating or drinking and I don't care about the house, apartment, bar or restaurant where the interview happened. The exception might be if something noteworthy happened during the interview, like they walked out or got into an altercation with somebody at the bar, but otherwise, just talk about the movie/company/band/book, etc.
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Originally posted by TonTon View PostCapitalism is great.
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