I Am Not the Walrus Apocalypse: Treehugger Misses Mark on Mammal Meme

Bullshit WWF Story of Walrus Haulout Evidence of Immediate Sea Ice Crisis Caused by Anthro. Climate Change is Being Product Placed in All Venues

by Michael Major

Photo - Corey Accardo NOAA

The walrus story is yet another corporate PR led climate anxiety product placement but few are examining the story adequate to deconstruct the bullshit. We need to create a counter PR firm and worry about funding later!

Had treehugger reported on the phenomenon of large scale walrus haul-outs without trying to breathlessly adduce it as the latest scientific evidence of anthropogenic climate change, ['This is what it looks like when 35,000 walrus can’t find enough sea ice'] your readers would be better served.

Instead, you have taken a fascinating natural occurrence operating since time immemorial and converted it from a window on a complex ecology into an untruthful propaganda poster-child intended to cause uninformed climate reaction instead of ecological awareness and informed deliberation.

Wake-up! When you accept a PR initiative for publication no matter how well accompanied with beautiful photos, please consider that it may be positioned to undermine the values and ecological mindfulness with which treehugger has long sought identification.

Asleep at the gate, you have positioned treehugger with the types of corporate psyops reflecting for instance that climate changed ice-less polar bears are at terminal dead-ends therefore no longer a charismatic mega-fauna policy frustration for allocating pan arctic petroleum privileges.

Or a another example, the bandwagon on which ENGO activists were paid to jump, in which climate change rather than insane de/reforestation practices involving British Columbia's valley to valley clearcutting and dense monoculture in even aged replacement plantations caused mountain pine beetles to shift from endemic to epidemic mode and destroy $20 billion worth of plantations. As a result, as directed by corporate PR, Canadian society blamed endemic beetles and climate change rather than greed, perfidy and professional corruption. The guilty non beetles got away scot-free.

Treehugger is a valuable voice for environmental awareness and it needs to defend that voice from exploitative corporate hijacking.

The walrus haul-outs phenomena is astounding but it is not in terms of frequency or level or diversity of walrus participation evidence of climate change. There are numerous existential environmental threats to walrus survival originating from resource exploitation, pollution and accelerating industrial expansion. For walruses, climate change is not yet as immediate as the phalanx of other arctic ecosystem function terminating industrial threats.

Also, please note that the mitigation of atmospheric CO2 mediated climate change to occur at some future date is not intended to prevent the industrial extirpation of arctic or temperate mega fauna, human, walrus or otherwise.

The huge PR initiatives emphasizing climate change are not intended to cause a widespread political reaction to the rapid industrial expansion of threats to the environment or to the industrial modification of the inertial homeostasis and bounded variability of the late Holocene climate.

The PR initiatives are ultimately intended to generate public and political support for current and increasing levels of geo-engineering sufficient for creating and maintaining some bubble refugia and human sanctuary from noxious industrial byproducts such that sufficient critical public consensus will remain accessible for continuing the expansion of industrial resource and environmental exploitation despite terminal consequences for very many ecosystems.

In short, rather than reversing industrial exploitation in the interests of ecosystem and biodiversity survival, we are going to defend a subset of humanity from the consequences of industrial expansion while more fully reallocating the balance of the planet to rapidly increasing industrial expansion and the expansion of concomitant consequences.

The treehugger meme would reflect braking economic growth in order to reverse environmental threats and resource exploitation to a level such that long run ecosystem function, biodiversity and resilience is assured.

Now, how is that strategic goal going to be communicated alongside the PR feed that we should panic because only the sky is falling on the walrus?