derangedhyena-delphinidae:I don’t mean to sound negative as shit, but EVEN HERE most people don’t…
I don’t mean to sound negative as shit, but EVEN HERE most people don’t understand that there are multiple types of orca. They don’t know about the issues, other than maybe in abstract. A distressing number of people think that ACTIVISTS have doomed the orcas because of Seaworld’s cessation of breeding. I’ve seen a number of discussions in which people have already written the SR’s off.
These aren’t pro-caps, they’re just casual observers. That’s bad.
While there’s a big group of cetacean enthusiasts here, and a huge number of conservation-focused orgs (they do great work!), it’s actually distressingly small in the big picture. And while I hate to bring this up for the thousandth time, this shit is a huge part of why I have so much vitriol for places like Seaworld and now VanAq because they aren’t really helping. They could do so much more. They should be. Lip service, from them, from politicians, from people who don’t change their habits, voice their opinions, DO something, is what gets us to this dreary point of despair in which it’s literally just a relative handful of people against the apathetic horror which is most of humanity.
If the numbers we were told at Superpod are correct, something like 97% of charity (and attention) goes to human issues. That leaves the minuscule rest for the environment and animals. That’s awful.
This is what we’re up against. How do we fix it? What do we do?
I’ve been wondering about this too (in general, rather than in orca-specific, terms). I think one solution is to have different modes in which you operate, different communities, with an understanding that you’ll be code-switching and adjusting your ideas of goals and victory based on context.
You can build a community of people who get it, and work with them to share ideas and plan and talk in-depth. And then you can engage with a larger community of people who are concerned but for whom it isn’t as central, and help to correct their worst misunderstandings and lay down a path for those who might move out into the first group. And then you have the big mass of mostly unaware folks you can try to influence and (hopefully) shift some of the percentages around in terms of support for legislation and countering the bullshit PR from the other side. But when you engage with that last group you’ll be aware that you’re not going to move the whole mass of it very much, but that will be okay because you’re sustained by the experience of working with the first two groups.
Is how I’m seeing it for myself, at least, these days.
Reposted from http://ift.tt/2iaze6q.
Tags: politics.
