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Tragic as it is I feel this piece illustrates the idea of bourgeois sentimentalism quite well.[0] Some animals get a ton of support and money thrown at them wh
by Bakary 7y ago
Tragic as it is I feel this piece illustrates the idea of bourgeois sentimentalism quite well.[0]
Some animals get a ton of support and money thrown at them while less marketable animals tend to produce no reaction when treated horrifically.
Whenever there is a tension between a group of poor locals and first world emotional interest around ecological conservation, the problem is that the locals can sense quite clearly (as the father does at the end of the piece) how little their lives are valued compared to that of animals. You can have a non-human species get a Swiss surgeon flown in, while they would never experience this level of medical care of attention themselves.
I'm certainly not condoning the horrific actions towards those animals, but underneath that tragedy there is a bigger issue at hand and a big reason why certain ecological projects fail due to zero interest in incentivizing locals. The best conservation programs tend to involve the entire community.
In the end you have frustrated first worlders wondering why the locals won't cooperate and do as they are told, even though the reason for this lack of interest is precisely the barely concealed contempt that emanates towards them. Sending trash in the guise of recycling, pollution and outsourcing negative externalities their way such as the palm oil industry while forbidding them from doing whatever might have a negative externality on first worlders.
[0] https://www.marxists.org/archive/lafargue/1881/12/25.htm https://www.marxists.org/archive/lafargue/1881/12/25.htm
- 4ntonius8lock 7y agoThank you for stating so eloquently what I feel. Having grown up in the third world, and now living in the first, I get the very distinct feeling of people in the first world wanting to push away the latter they used to rise up, since it is 'dirty'. Not to say I support the barbarism mentioned in the article.
- monktastic1 7y agoThis is such an important point that's easy to lose sight of. It's so easy to imagine ourselves as better than others; all the more so when those others live lives unfathomably different from our own. On that note, I want to share a favorite quote of mine, about the burgeoning of empathy via psychedelics: "My most recent mushroom trip (also the largest dose I've ever taken) I became fixated on a news story I had heard that week. About an 8 year old girl from a tribe in the Amazon, who was tied to a tree and burned alive in order to scare her people off their land so it could be logged. I realized that at the moment he did it, whoever lit that gasoline actually felt/thought more or less okay about what he was doing. And my mind was illuminated with dozens of the parallels between that man's malformed, horrific perceptual/behavioral state, and mine. I saw the same mistakes in value attribution, the same willful ignorance of the consequences of my acts and words. And there was nothing I could do to deny the similarity."
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y agoEnvironmentalism and endangered species protection is the new colonialism. Rich white people impose their values on poor brown people and try to prevent them from doing the same things that they did to develop, and rather try to keep them as the “noble savages” living in a “pristine wilderness.”
- sho 7y agoThe "brown" owners of these palm oil plantations, sitting in their luxury condos and villas in Jakarta and KL, are much richer than you, believe me.