Is anyone else here in this lil’ support group astounded that the Star Wars brand has somehow co-opted an entire day of the Gregorian calendar for itself? How,,, and Disney, one of the biggest multimedia companies in the world just gets that one,,, forever?
Ok, not what I wanted to rant to the support group today about. Today I am taking issue with something I saw on snapchat. Yes, I know I’m wasting my fucking time.
It was an ad for something called NFP – a video series produced by YouTube that was “celebrating what makes earth unique” in a limited video series. The 5 second ad that I had to sit through narrated that exact tagline while a bright yellow underwater newt thing with antennae waddled around for a few seconds behind the giant NFP letters.
Now I understand that nature documentaries like planet earth have inspired tens of thousands of little children to dedicate their lives to conservation efforts, and informed hundreds of thousands of people of the little ways that they can help their planet, but this one really rubbed me the wrong way.
“What’s unique about our planet?” Bro, anyone with that’s taken 3rd grade outer space science and has half a brain knows that every fucking thing about our planet is unique in comparison to… not our planet. Like who came up with that? Wait, lol, I’ll tell you who. It’s a bunch of addy’d up tech executives in Redwood City who romanticize space colonizers and spend their weekends simping their local billionaire friend.
While I think it might be a nice start, I don’t think appreciating the uniqueness of the earth should be something that someone only does while they’re high on a Saturday. And while we’re at it, the whole narrative of “these are unique and exotic creatures – therefore they deserve special attention and treatment” feels very colonial to me. As if filming these unique creatures somehow makes them less susceptible to the capitalism’s reach and appropriation. While your call to save their environment might be loud, ever thought about how you’re also exposing their existence and image to all of humanity’s (currently) wicked reach.
But like, go outside kids. Even in Houston (granted a nicer part of Houston) I see some absolutely amazing pieces of the natural world every day. Birds, caterpillars, weird bugs that have no common name, weeds, flowers, humongous trees, beautiful trees, wacky and quirky trees. I think the more that we understand that there is a whole food and nutrient chain of magnificent creatures in our back yard, the more likely we’ll want to actively protect that part of our earth. To be honest, I could care less what’s happening in a coral reef in the middle of the pacific. I bet it's cool, but you know what! Not my fucking business!
This NFP project to me just feels like a bunch of tech executives saying “hey these things dying, way far away – that’s actually YOUR problem!” “Oh you don’t want to dramatically change your lifestyle to fix that??” “You hate the planet.” “While your at it, go buy some Ziplock baggies.”
I won’t even go into the extremely forced and awkward reference to a pointless asset that is actively destroying the same planet the series claims to care about.
If someone were to give me some money to make a nature documentary (in fact I should probably do a project myself) It would include the fact that virtually every single point on earth is a completely unique environment, each a combination of a long cast of characters (some of which travel long distances across the planet) and is therefore worthy of the delicate and intense observation. I realized recently that with the iNaturalist app, everyone literally is all of a sudden, an expert in their own biome. There is no one studying your space like you are, so therefore you are extremely valuble to research! :)
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