The #PrayForAustralia Problem
"For most of the wild things on Earth, the future must depend on the conscience of mankind."
–Dr. Archie Carr
Superficial Sympathy
The Australian bushfires are the current popular craze online of caring about something, posting about it, and then forgetting all about it once the fire dies down (literally). It makes me think of the ice bucket challenge of so many years ago; do you even remember it? People filmed themselves dumping ice water on themselves and donated money to help find a cure for ALS. And what became of that? I certainly never heard anything. It was just a fad, and maybe it brought about some awareness to the disease, but the internet doesn't really care about solving problems. It just moves on.
Let's get one thing clear: posting something on social media in no way indicates how much you care about an issue. People post a picture of a burned koala or a dead baby kangaroo, write a caption about how terrible this is and how we need to do something, and then they move on with their lives. It makes them feel like they've actually done something when in fact they haven't; it doesn't matter how many hashtags you use because hashtags aren't going to solve this issue. And the people that have the most power to actually do something don't seem to care.
Now, that's not to say that we shouldn't talk about the fires or use social media to put pressure on the government, both in and outside of Australia, to confront climate change to prevent such disasters from happening in the future. We absolutely should take advantage of these terrible situations to put the anger, sadness, and fear we feel into action. But posting something online without taking action just feeds the frenzy of fear and ultimately does very little positively.
The #Problem
My main point of this semi-rant is that people only seem to care about these issues when something tragic happens. Where's the fervor for catastrophe prevention? Why is it that people are more willing to throw millions of dollars at an issue just to make to go away than to prevent it from happening in the future? We hope that by donating money, the people we give it to will know what to do and will handle it wisely. But that's just how we settle our own conscience, to reassure ourselves that we've done what we can and that the people in charge will then take care of it. But the people in charge don't really care; at least not about prevention. The Australian government on numerous occasions has made it clear that it considers climate and animal rights activists eco-terrorists. How are we ever going to see a future without these kinds of travesties if the people tasked with caring for that land and ecosystem won't take action without constant pressure on them to take climate change seriously?
I'd like to see people still discussing this after the fires die down. After the burned koalas are rehabilitated. After the orphaned joeys have families of their own. In the next months and years, I want to see the same storm online about this issue to prove that all the people posting about it now aren't just doing it because it's trendy to care about these kinds of issues. But I highly doubt that will be the case because the internet has a short attention span. Sooner or later, we'll move on and this will just be another minor tragedy soon forgotten. Just like the Amazon fires everyone was so incensed about only a few months ago. It's not wrong to care, and it's not wrong to post; but what good does it do if we don't follow through with our words and try to create change?
The Other Victims
What about all the farm animals in Australia? Everyone's worried about the humans and wildlife killed, but no one gives a hoot about the pigs, cows, or chickens. It's the farmers that are being impacted, losing their land and their property: farm animals are merely collateral damage, essentially worthless in the grand scheme of things. Just a hit to profits.
And where's the outrage over the Australian government sending out snipers to shoot camels from helicopters this month? Apparently, these wild animals release too much methane and drink too much water, causing environmental concerns. (But, no, no, no, the hundreds of millions of farm animals could never be the real problem there.) Ironically, their plan is to burn all the dead camels. Why aren't there trending hashtags about these burning bodies?[1]
Maybe I'm sounding hateful or apathetic; I don't want it to seem like I don't care about the fires because I actually do. However, the number of animals killed throughout all this, if you go on the high-end estimate of about one billion, is almost equivalent to the number of land animals killed for food production every single week across the globe. If you include marine life, there would need to be seven or eight bushfires every day to add up to that number (2.7 trillion). Overall, there are more pressing matters, matters that contribute significantly to climate change and wildfires and animal deaths, about which the general public should be much more concerned.
be conscious, be kind, be vegan
[1] "More Than 10,000 Camels to be Killed by Snipers in Australia for Drinking Too Much Water"