Ken finds some hard truths about Barbie from Greenpeace on Vimeo.

(I’m a little behind with this one–it has been sitting in my draft pile for a month. Better late than never!)

Well,it’s about time Ken took a stand against Barbie’s deforesting ways. This, at least, is Greenpeace’s humorous approach to pressuring Mattel to stop their partnership with Asia Pulp and Paper. Not that we need another reason to be pissed at Barbie for being a shopaholic, but at least this time we can do something more than just whine about it.

Go here to participate

Blog Action Day’s Intro video

This years’s Blog Action Day theme is “climate change.” I’d like to focus on language.

So what’s in a word? Not much and a lot. Words don’t actually carry any meaning. Our belief in this comes from a fallacious cultural understanding of language based on the “conduit metaphor,” which views communicate as the transportation of things. For example, we say “I don’t get the idea,” or “Am I getting this across to you?” as if words contain information. But is this what really happens? Look at the word “message,” one of the core terms used in traditional information theory to denote a self-contained unit of meaning. Simple enough, yet if I say, “Did you read the message,” or “You don’t get the message, do you?” those are two different concepts. In either case “message” depended on context to convey its meaning.

Likewise “climate” and “change” also have different meanings in different communication environments. This was the stroke of brilliance behind Bush’s creation of the phrase, because it drains the situation of any real meaning or urgency, no matter how it’s communicated. Or take “global warming.” Both words actually make us feel really good, don’t they? But if we were to say planetary heat death? Or global ecological catastrophe? Or my fave, vampiric capitalist climate chaos? What kind of images do they invoke? As you can see, though words don’t “contain” meaning, they can frame our attitudes, especially when contextualized under certain conditions.

ecoAmerica, which has tested a lot of different phrases in focus groups and phone surveys recommends, “deteriorating atmosphere” (you can read the report here). To me it sounds rather weak and inept. Nonetheless, the report’s recommendation to use new language to frame environmental issues created a bit of a dustup between the New York Times’s John M. Broder and George Lakoff at the Huffington Post, which centered on whether or not framing language can impact social change.

In my view framing and language metaphors can influence the way we think about issues, but that they do not program how we think. I believe all communication is contextual and negotiated. The idea of mass media frames is not much different than Walter Lippman’s suggestion that democracy requires public manipulation and propaganda. A primary solution to climate ______ (fill in the blank) is local. We need to have discussion and dialogue amongst ourselves to come up with solutions, not media tested mind frames spewed by satellite beamed talking heads. I realize that mass media have a generalized impact on how we view the world, but a few linguistic “climate” experts cannot compete with the mythological language of advertising. Until we stop selling cars as the next great green fetish, I don’t think any amount of framing can compete with the context that commodities enrich our lives.

Finally, we need to acknowledge this isn’t just “climate change,” but it’s “lifestyle” and “human habitat” change as well.

My experience has been that mass media is best left to the corporate overlords who rule that realm, and to do an Aikido maneuver around them. Through pattern recognition (my alternative to critical thinking), we can step aside as these frames are hurled at us, and let them boomerang back to the source. Meanwhile we can have groovy film festivals and house screening of ecologically oriented documentaries served with local, bioregional fare as we reassert our community spaces away from the mass mind manipulators who claim to know what is best for the planet.

Sadly the poor Star Wars geeks at BoingBoing got duped by Derrick Jensen‘s unfortunate parody video, which slams all environmental strategies that don’t advocate violent resistance. Apparently he cannot differentiate the cartoon world of Star Wars with his own vision of the world, which seems to be a 19th Century caricature of far more complex reality than one in which it is possible to attack a center of power. To be sure, Jensen is a prolific writer and tireless advocate against the Empire, but having read many of his articles and books, I’ve grown weary of this kind of criticism that ultimately ends up leaving one feeling powerless. His latest missive in Orion Magazine made the false analogy that composting didn’t stop slavery. It’s a rhetorically witty retort to all us idiots who recycle, or even to those of us who advocate personal change.

I give Jensen credit for asking tough questions and for reminding us that what’s at stake is not just personal consciousness, but social justice. He’s right to criticize solutions that are only individualistic. Yet in identifying the enemy, he draws on Industrial-era assumptions of power and resistance:

If every act within an industrial economy is destructive, and if we want to stop this destruction, and if we are unwilling (or unable) to question (much less destroy) the intellectual, moral, economic, and physical infrastructures that cause every act within an industrial economy to be destructive, then we can easily come to believe that we will cause the least destruction possible if we are dead.

The good news is that there are other options. We can follow the examples of brave activists who lived through the difficult times I mentioned—Nazi Germany, Tsarist Russia, antebellum United States—who did far more than manifest a form of moral purity; they actively opposed the injustices that surrounded them. We can follow the example of those who remembered that the role of an activist is not to navigate systems of oppressive power with as much integrity as possible, but rather to confront and take down those systems.

I think this is a rather simplistic view of these particular confrontations and their outcomes. After all, it’s the Empire that took Hitler down, no? The fact is we have an opportunity to confront the system every time we make a lifestyle choice or eat a bite of food. To disparage these kinds of actions at the moment of actual contact we have with the system on a daily basis is asking people to surrender these opportunities to some abstract dream of bloody revolution. Me sense is that Jensen has not entered in on a Star War plot, but rather into a PK Dick novel, in which the sci-fi sage wrote, “To fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement. This is a paradox: whoever defeats a segment of the Empire becomes the Empire; it proliferates like a virus, imposing its form on its enemies. Thereby it becomes its enemies” (from Valis, p.134).