Investor's Business Daily, March 2nd, 2007
Environment: Whatever happened to the rain forest? The virtuous cause seems to have become an endangered species with the totemic rise of global warming. Maybe that's the lesson.
Not too long ago, the news was atwitter with stories of rain forest bio-jewelry, rain forest vegetable leather, rain forest acai juice, rain forest wisdom and Rainforest Cafes with Chicken Monsoon or Amazon mushroom burger repasts amid a lot of parrot noise. Don't forget Ben & Jerry's Rainforest Crunch ice cream.
One could take a class trip to the Amazon, book a rain forest vacation eco-tour, go to a rain forest art exhibit, watch Dora explore the rain forest on TV, give to a rain forest charity, stroll through the rain forest stalls on Earth Day, or see a kids' rain forest ballet -- all for the ennobling idea of "getting involved" to "save the rain forest, save yourself."
Some news stories drove the issue with panicky meters ticking away with how many square miles of rain forest were destroyed by human development each year, and warning that time is running out.
Those things are still around, and if a LexisNexis search is any indication, the media still mention the rain forest as much as they always did, maybe more.
But there's no mistake that the rain forest isn't making the news the way it once did. Today, the top environmental issue is global warming, and as it similarly becomes the issue du jour, there's reason to think that it may follow the path pioneered by the rain forest's time in the sun.
Nexis files show that in the early 1970s, most rain forest stories ran in scholarly journals and focused on science. Public interest percolated along for a few years but exploded only in 1989, when rock star Sting embraced his first painted Kayapo Amazon tribesman as his "friend" and then founded his Rainforest Foundation.
Not seen since Rousseau scintillated Paris salonnieres with his noble savage theories has the public imagination been so captivated by nature. Sting's act single-handedly tripled the rain forest coverage, and it has risen ever since. But with this, the soft, cuddly consumer stories began.
As for the other rain forest stories in recent years, the real kind, they're mostly news reports one might expect to find about a jungle, as Amazon rain forest used to be known. They reflect the savage realities of rainforest life, like news of shooters, squatters, farmers, ranchers, explorers, freebooters and activists in lawsuits against corporations -- Home Depot, McDonald's and Chevron among them.
Rain forest stories lost more gas in 2002 when Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was elected president of Brazil. Lula is a pragmatic leftist under whom large swaths of rain forest have been cut down to grow sugar for ethanol. He has little use for rain forest romantics, particularly from rich countries, and often blasts them as frauds.
Sting is not a bad man, and to his credit, his $1 million Rainforest Foundation, even if probably rather socialistic, focuses on the well-being of people, instead of eliminating man's "footprint," as today's eco-activists do now.
But there's no mistaking that the global warming theory, bolstered by stories about time running out and how you can help, has caught the public's eye. Broad symbolic gestures such as Sting's are being repeated. In one, Al Gore actually wins an Oscar.
Believing in global warming is all good fun for the pop culture, and there will be plenty of people and businesses who know how to make money off it as they have off the save-the-rain-forest campaign.
But like the rain forest hype, global warming has little to do with true science, and the danger is that the reality will be obscured by the jejune. The fact that the rain forest has come and gone in the imagination as a fad ought to make some take pause and consider that the same fate is likely to await the global warming absolutists.
Copyright 2007 Investor's Business Daily, Inc.
