Monday, October 15, 2007

Blog Action Day...Environment

Blog Action Day...an excellent idea.

Here's my post for blog action day.

I recently changed over from a 6 cylinder car to a 4 cylinder car. I also bike to the grocery store once in a while. So on this topic I'm not doing as bad as I was a few years ago. Here's a few random thoughts.

I was watching a show about Greenpeace a few days ago and Greenpeace members succeeded, at great personal risk, in bringing an end to the hunting of whales, by simply filming and showing the public what was going on. They ran around the whaling ships in small inflatable craft taking pictures of the hunting as it happened. One of their first films shown on TV around the world was a harpoon being shot at a whale.

Public opinion and political opinion soon changed as a result of those efforts. A simple but powerful idea....just show the pubic what people were doing. Bring our attention to it. Get peopole thinking and talking about it. I expect that after that event, anyone associated with whale products, buyers or sellers, started to feel a little guilty.

It makes me wonder if that same tactic could work for other "big city" things? For example, if Greenpeace were to film people doing things such as filling up a large gas guzzling luxury car at the pump or filling up a large motor yacht at the dock, would that help change things? Would people feel guilty owning such things?

I guess today...anyone with a digital camera could start doing it and just put the footage up on U-Tube. If the footage is interesting enough, especially if it is a well-known person, it may make it to TV.

1 comment:

S. B. said...

Disclosure is a simple idea, yet it is often very powerful and effective.

For example, when the government required food packagers to list the amount of trans fat on the labels of all products, most of the companies stopped using it altogether within a few months.