Sumatran Tigers? Fuggetaboutit. Activism is about cat videos.
I was a proud participant in the SOPA protest. This website, along with 25 Greenpeace websites and every website I could influence, went dark to demand the internet remain a haven of free speech, and the free and creative playground that it is now: a safe place to put popular culture in a blender and give it a whirl, a place where We the People determined the democratic discourse, not our corporate overlords.
I was also a proud participant in the Copenhagen Climate petition — the worldwide attempt to hold world government’s feet to the fire of public opinion and set them skedaddling to do something about — you remember it — that slow cook problem facing our froggy planet in its pot of warming water on the fossil– fueled range.
When I compared these two global mobilizations, it left a bad bad taste in my mouth. In a matter of not even weeks, the internet stood up to save itself from certain death in numbers that made the Copenhagen effort look like a nursing home petition to enlarge the bingo cards.
We — and when I say “we” I mean You, I mean Me — rightly accuse governments of having their priorities back-asswards when they can find trillions of dollars to bail out banks within months, but balk at the 10 million over three years they agreed to put down to save the worlds forests and buy us precious time to wean ourselves from our vodka and milk diet of fossil fuels. But what did We just do?
In 2009, a year-long effort by a huge swath of civil society raised 17 million signatures to demand climate action at Copenhagen.
Last month, in a matter of mere days We amassed more than 100 million signatures to save the internet.
According to Wikipedia:
On January 18 itself, more than 8 million people looked up their representative on Wikipedia, 3 million people emailed Congress to express opposition to the bills, more than 1 million messages were sent to Congress through the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a petition at Google recorded over 4.5 million signatures, Twitter recorded at least 2.4 million SOPA-related tweets,[3] and lawmakers collected “more than 14 million names — more than 10 million of them voters — who contacted them to protest” the bills.
The fate of the Siberian Tiger, the Orang-utan, and that most charismatic mega fauna, adorable baby homo sapiens of the future, continue their slide to oblivion unchecked. But it may be time that We simply stop talking about them, and focus on the threat that climate change poses to the wildlife that really seems to matter to all of us: LolCatz, Sneezing Pandas, and Dramatic Gophers.
