11 januari 2008
1 step forward 2 steps back OR is a slap in a face better then a kick in the stomach?
Ah yes – morning coffee! I get up after a good sleep, the muscles still tingling pleasantly from yesterdays gym visit. The light is just beginning to break, and after a pleasant morning huggle with my honey and a wake up tickle to the youngest kid I proceed to the kitchen to pour the water into the coffee maker (6 measures of organic fair trade coffee, and, sure, why not, Ill warm up the milk). Pick up the paper, glance at the from page and…
BAM!
The coffee gets stuck in my throat. 2 articles -- a left and a right – an editorial from Peter Wolodarski and an opinion piece from Jan Björklund both promoting the restart of nuclear construction in Sweden.
But…let me PLEASE not fall into a knee-jerk anti-nuclear reaction. Let me look at the arguments in the two articles and see what value there is in the arguments. I read through the articles again and calm down a bit. The authors are making a number of important points and observations. The question is – do these justify the conclusions that the headlines scream about, or was there a slight-of-hand rhetorical trick to get us there?
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7 mars 2007
Buy ecological! Yeah right…
Saw in the paper the other day that Ica will stop selling frozen Baltic cod (the fresh one is still ok apparently).
http://www.dn.se/DNet/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=147&a=624792
You should see our office, everyone is going around patting each other on the back going: ”great victory for the planet! The consumer pressure has taken its toll! The big bad company has bowed to the demand from the buyers to stop selling fish that comes from pirate fishermen that ruin our seas”.
Well everyone except me, I’m just crouching over my keyboard writing this and glowering cynically. Consumer power? Yeah right… The consumers don’t give a flying fish for the environment. Well I suppose a tiny, almost invisible proportion does. But who cares about them.
Anyway ICA knows this very well, that’s not why they stopped selling the filets. I mean it was not exactly a sudden inspired revelation that the Baltic is a giant sewer, that the fish in it is almost gone, and that the few that are still there are being pulled up by floating machines that scrape off the bottom of the sea, filter out the few pitiful bits of fish and spit out the rest over the side.
Certainly the tiny proportion of consumers who care about environment have known this for years. They are all veggies anyway and haven’t bought any fish since 1985, no matter if its from the Baltic, Caribbean or Black Sea.
And the rest of the consumers – well either they know about it (cause they happened to see a photo of a Greenpeace action on a Baltic trawler while flipping pages of Metro from the top story of Anna.Niclole Spear’s breast operations and shaved head to the sports section), but don’t care. Or they don’t know and don’t care.
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2 mars 2007
OMG can we BE any more self-centred?
DN is reporting that Merbau, a tropical wood species that is becoming popular as furniture and construction material in Sweden may cause allergic reactions.
http://www.dn.se/DNet/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=2715&a=623406
This is the same Merbau that is logged illegally in Papua New Guinea and Indonesia. Logged by companies that steal the forest from traditional users, do not hesitate to use slave labour, force local women into prostitution, bribe local governments, destroy the land, water and forests. So that we can have our wooden floors with its reach reddish brown glow (“looks wonderful with the new raw-stone wood stove, dotn you think so Marge? So noble, yet rustic at the same time…”).
Land theft, forest destruction, illegal logging – that’s no reason for us in Europe to be upset or involved. Oh no – free for all import, that’s what our government says.
http://riksdagen.se/webbnav/index.aspx?nid=63&dok_id=GU10148
But WHAT? It may cause little Kalle to sneeze if he breathes in dust from the newly sanded floor?! What is the government doing!? Don’t they care?
- Dima
