I'm reading a depressing Yahoo! News factlet about the government of Uganda reneging on preserving a tract of its endangered rainforest. (Whenever I hear about petulant developing-world leaders gleefully despoiling their own countries while wilfully ignoring international pleas to cease, I'm reminded of that old girl-group song, "And don't tell me what to do...and don't tell me what to say...'cause you don't own me.") As I'm reading this I'm watching, from the corner of one eye, one of those decadent consumer-fantasy Target commercials...followed by the opening shots of a television drama about a serial killer who gets his gets his jollies watching people burn to death.
I think I'd like to be in a different species.
7 comments:
Is that the story about the sugar plantation? I'm trying to get some knowledge of Uganda because I'm supposed to go there in Nov.
Considering the genocide in Northern Uganda has taken three times more lives than the the one in Darfur, I wouldn't really be looking to their government for any sort of moral compass.
No other species has the ability to change the way things are going. It might be a long hard struggle but with God nothing is impossible.
Yes -- they want to start a sugar plantation.
The irony of the mentality of "Environmentalism is just an imperialist plot of developed countries keeping their jackboots on the necks of us poor developing countries so we can't catch up, so we're not going to listen to you telling us what to do with our environment" is -- all these countries are doing is substituting one colonial power for another -- in this case the multinational corporations that will come in and exploit their natural resources. And the poor will bear the brunt of this...people who may be cash-poor but who are fairly self-sufficient via agriculture and artisanship are now doing to be forced, by economics, into the plantation system...they'll be in thrall to The Company. And, sadly, I predict that the mad rush into biofuels without thinking hard about the various costs involved in producing them is going to ravage our planet more than it's ever been. And a lot of developing countries, looking at countries like Brazil, think that biofuels are their ticket out of poverty. Heck -- that's the mentality here in outstate Michigan.
after-thought:
Any possibility that in real life you're George Clooney or Angelina Jolie or even a minor B-list celeb hoping for some quick publicity? Because the genocide in Uganda desperately needs to have the kind of light shined on it that apparently only happens in our country when Brad Pitt gets off the plane and poses with a starving infant. So, please, when you visit in Nov, use whatever pr you've got going for you to shed some light, and I promise to buy/watch your latest CD/movie/TV show/whatever no matter how crappy it is.
As much as I would like to possess Brangelina star power, I don't think anyone would buy a copy of LutheranChik's Inconvenient Truth -- especially with my picture on the DVD.
Ha ha, I think anon. meant when I visit Uganda. But I'm not the shiny type. I'm more the "hide it under a bushel" type. Just going to pitch in for Habitat for Humanity.
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