You don't really need a degree in psychology to assertain that this is a good idea (in the sense that it will work). Nobody cares about some ugly bush or spider, but by all means please save the dolphins and the koalas! In fact I've already written about this issue previously in 2010, in the post "Who Cares?". Curiously enough, that post also emerged has a response to a news from Metro. Now that I think of it, I believe those were the only two times I've seen the term fluffy being used in a newspaper.What I want to talk about now is not that irrational concern for cute species, but rather how using those images to make people more interventive may not be as harmless as it might seem at first glance.
I'd like to start by going a bit against the generally accepted theory that it's big corporate interests, in all their greed, that are destroying the planet while we all, in our best of intentions, stand powerless against them. There are many flaws to this reasoning. First, we should never forget that these big mean corporations are ultimately working for us. Sure, we all hate oil companies and how they're careless in their handling of oil and so on. But we also get furious when fuel prices rise. Or when clothes get more expensive. We all like to act as if protecting the environment is effortless and comes with loads of advantages and no cost. But, be sure of it, protecting the environment can be very expensive sometimes. As an example, I remember this time when a professor of mine was talking about this project he'd worked on, to install some power lines in Portugal. They had this (cheap) project to make the connection through air cables but then some environment protection organisation stood against it by arguing that it would be harmful for this local bat population. The court decided in their favour, and the cables had to be installed underground. This change made the whole project cost ten times more and of course it's us, consumers, who are paying for it. Another example could be Portugal's heavy investment in renewable energies over the last years, usually loved by the crowd. Thing is, it seems that, were we not to be using any renewable energies at all, our electricity bill would be 30% cheaper. That's a huge cost, when all hell runs loose after each few percents increase. Mind that I'm not defending that we shouldn't care about the bats or using renewable energies; I'm just saying we also need to be aware of the costs of doing so.
Another critic to that line of thinking is that, nowadays, we're far from powerless. Besides changing our habits towards more environment friendly ones, we can also fight those big mean companies through public journalism, by divulging their acts. In fact, internet has made bad publicity so poweful that it's precisely the bigger companies that are most likely to make big contributions and gestures towards environment protection. Of course one can question their motives, but the result is the same.
Back to the initial theme, those fluffy animais are dangerous because they make us blind to the downsides of their (over?) protection. Of course, as the Metro news reported, they're mostly used for higher purposes, such as saving their uglier brothers and sisters. Yet this means that we're somewhat being tricked and manipulated into helping a cause. And if the purpose of any action is ill-defined or hidden, how are we supposed to make just and informed decisions? As I've already tried to demonstrate, going as green as possible might not always be the right decision.
Some might claim that environmentalists are reasonable people with good intentions and so will use this "new" persuasion technique with care, parsiomony and responsibility. Still, as we all know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Moreover, focusiing all important decision making in some enlightened few is both dangerous (everyone is wrong sometimes) and dictatorship like.
Other possible argument in defense of this behaviour is that our consumer habits and lifestyles have led us so far from being green that, even if we turn the meter as far as we can on the other direction, we still wouldn't be too green. Perhaps. Problem is, in all arguments, it's the most fanatic who make the most noise.
In the end, I guess we'll have to hope that reason and good sense will prevail over sensacionalism, both amonst environmentalists and ourselves.
Filipe Baptista de Morais
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