G’day friend,

how are you today?

I’m pretty well myself, the sunshine is reflecting from the leafs of the coconut-trees in the garden, there is a mild breeze, and the sound of yoga music drifting over from our new ageish new neighbors is nearly drowning out the sound of chain saws.

Somebody is chopping down coconut-trees, they’re probably aggravated from the reflection of sunshine on their smart phone, which might play new-ageish-yoga-music, or not.

In Russian.

I’m not a racist, but these Russians are really noisy.

I’m slightly aggravated myself, not because of the Russians, I adore Russians ask my Russian friends, but because of other people, that are totally not racist, being infuriatingly racist in the name of love. For nature.

I’m a bit of a nature lover myself, and I take offense to such behavior.

Bigotry is not a good excuse for racism (Src:weknowmemes.com)

I’m not a racist, but especially rich Europeans and North-Americans seem to have a sometimes slightly twisted approach to loving nature.

By calling to eradicate the entire population of other regions of Earth in the name of conservation, for example.

Which is quite racist, in a way.

Let me try to explain my opinion:

As an ocean lover and social media user, you might have seen images of shark slaughter houses, and similar visually unbearable stuff.

People’s reactions to this type of sledgehammer marketing is usually predictable: they are outraged.

Then, they usually express their anger by commenting on the internet.

This is usually intended by marketers, because it’s a great strategy.

It increases campaign traffic, and that really helps with the fundraising. It also helps “campaigners” to communicate with the “general public”, and adjust according to “public opinion”, which is a form of democracy, and I really like it.

Good fundraisers know this, and they want this, but they also know what happens next:

Comment 1: “WTF! are they serious?? Why is nobody stopping this?????”

Comment 2: “Maybe somebody should chop THEIR arms off!!!!”

…

Comment 9: “I hope somebody exterminates the Chinese!!!!!!!!”

You probably think I’m over-exaggerating, but this is actually on Facebook, in German, which adds a certain flavor the entire mess.

You might have heard of this small middle European country.

It’s hard to explain in brief, but it was the location of one of the worst things that ever happened in human history, and it started with rumors like “They are poisoning wells” and similar idiocy, a long time before the actual event.

One of the more embarrassing sides of nature conservation, is dealing with the fact that horrible people are allowed to love nature, too.

I’m not a racist, but nature protection, is national protection.
(src: de.wikipedia.org)

It’s not a big secret that popular national socialist party members were glowing fighters for the conservation of nature. Only for Germans of course, it’s also not a big secret that they used it for their own “marketing plans”. Read about it here and here. European Neo-nazis still use it today.

Don’t be a litter bug! Put your racism where it belongs. It’s non-recyclable, but fortunately bio-degradable
(src: www.lautgegennazis.de)

Please don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to insult passionate nature lovers and myself by using the nazi-hot-button, but it sends shivers down my spine reading this, because it’s just plain racism. (Ok, maybe I want to insult them a bit, because covert racism is really stupid.)

It’s green advertising gone awry, and basically just a big misunderstanding:

since obviously it’s never OK to tell people to go kill people in the name of love for nature.

Because humans are mammals, which are animals, which are part of what we call nature.

So, one could argue that loving nature includes loving humans. We can’t exclude them, just because we don’t appreciate their culture, food or the weird noises they make when they’re eating.

We can ask them to stop, but maybe you agree that we also need to find an alternative way to provide income to fishing-women and -men, who might literally starve, if shark finning literally stops today.

Because they too, are a part of nature, and we should love them.

I’ll pop over to the new neighbors in a moment and ask them to play this: