Advertising and Wildlife

This is an interesting view on a major influence on our efforts to conserve wild life. Please read the full article in the Guardian to see George's argument in full. The title below should link to the article. Our problems in wildlife conservation are all linked to the demands put on our environment by our human demands for endless development, growth and prosperity. Advertising must make it harder to find a sensible balance. George Monbiot gets to the heart of a big issue as usual. Posted: 24 Oct 2011 12:25 PM PDT Extracts. Advertising trashes our happiness and trashes the planet. And my income depends on it. By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 24th October 2011 We think we know who the enemies are: banks, big business, lobbyists, the politicians who exist to appease them. But somehow the sector which stitches this system of hypercapitalism together gets overlooked. I am talking about the industry whose output frames this column and pays for it: advertising. For obvious reasons, it is seldom confronted by either the newspapers or the broadcasters. Advertising claims to enhance our choice, but it offers us little choice about whether we see and hear it, and ever less choice about whether we respond to it. Since Edward Bernays began to apply the findings of his uncle Sigmund Freud, advertisers have been developing sophisticated means of overcoming our defences(3). In public they insist that if we become informed consumers and school our children in media literacy we have nothing to fear from their attempts at persuasion. In private they employ neurobiologists to find ever more ingenious methods of bypassing the conscious mind.