The Spirit Bear gets more action!
Credit: rissdemeanor
You may remember a post I recently wrote about the social media campaign that Darren, Julie and Monica are putting together to help Greenpeace, Forest Ethics and Sierra Club of Canada to influence the Provincial Government of British Columbia to help protect the Great Bear Forest.
[Brief editor's note - if you haven't followed the Spirit Bear on Twitter, submitted your photo to the Flickr contest or joined the Facebook Group or sent an email to the Premier of British Columbia, do it NOW. Ok, good. Continue]
I picked up the most recent ‘The Vancouver Courier‘ (an outlet I really like, even though I am going to have to admit my fondness for the 24 Hrs, The Georgia Straight and the Vancouver Sun, all of whom have been very kind to me and provided me with coverage), and guess which topic was the lead story? Simon Jackson and the Spirit Bear!
I talked to Simon earlier this year during EPIC 2008 (I even got a photo of myself with him, which I suppose I should email to him sometime!), and it was so nice to see that despite his fame, he is still very much down to earth.
It is very nice to see that mainstream media and social media can act synergistically to help such a worthy cause.
Related posts:
I got a very strange comment on my post about the Great Bear Rainforest… here’s an excerpt:
…. Do you or anyone else know about this theory?
@ Rebecca – that type of comment is extremely common, unfortunately. It’s the same type of comment that climate skeptics use to avoid working on emission reductions. It is true that those are charismatic, cute names for the forest to help attract attention, but that’s an issue of branding and not of lack of ethics and integrity.
For the reader in your post, I am more than happy to come over and drop this same response (or you can excerpt it from here). There is an article in the (peer reviewed) journal Cultural Geographies, in 2004, that explains the Greenpeace campaign and how the ENGO creates an image of a pristine forest. That’s not (in my view) unethical in the least. It’s just a method to connect with the general public.
The article’s reference:
Rossiter, David (2004) “The nature of protest: constructing the spaces of British Columbia’s rainforests” Cultural Geographies, Vol. 11, No. 2, 139-164
I’m more than happy to interact with your blog reader offline (via email) if he/she would like more information.
@Rebecca I’ve been meaning to comment on that, but what Raul says is true. There’s a great section on the power of renaming something for conservancy in “Made to Stick”, if I remember correctly.