Anti-consumerism by default

[cybermule]

I saw a car sticker today exhorting me to boycott Canada (mainly to save seals, so it seems). Now I actually quite like Canada. And America, too, excepting a few nutcase politicians and their seemingly sizeable swathe of followers.

So if I boycott Canada for seals, Brazil for deforestation, Columbia for drugs, the USA for being generally wonky... that's pretty much a whole continent, right?

Now exclude all the dodgy political regimes. Plus the known sweatshops. Plus anywhere across the ocean because of air miles. That's actually a lot of places, if you live in England...

So I can buy things from Britain.

Except we shafted the Celts out of economic existence hundreds of years ago. And butt-munched our own manufacturing base out of existence during the glorious reign of Mommy Mags.

I'm pretty much confined to buying the earth in my own garden. Which is fine - I don't really like buying many things anyway. I just want to be clear that it's because I'm stingy, I think, rather than being politically correct :P

Comments

[aras-55555.livejournal.com]

Hmm, isn't boycotting Canada just going to cause us to kill *more* seals, in order to make up for what we're losing? ;)

[cybermule.livejournal.com]

Probably. Although I personally didn't notice anyone killing any seals while I was there. So what the eye doesn't see, the wallet doesn't boycott ;)

What do you do, anyway? Swap 'em with Japan for whales and games consoles?

[aras-55555.livejournal.com]

Hehe. I don't know, it's not like you can just buy some seal pelts at the corner store. Probably just use em for road infill :P

[framlingem.livejournal.com]

Where I live, we eat them. We also wear their pelts. They are _shot_ (Not clubbed over the head) upon reaching adulthood (those fluffy baby white seals they show you pictures of? Dead useless as far as their fur is concerned. It's not waterproof, which is the main draw of a sealskin coat. Besides, what fashion designer in their right mind would use whitecoat pelts? It's be career suicide.) Added to which, the law they've been campaigning for happened twenty years ago - it's been illegal to kill the whitecoats since the eighties.

Believe it or not, there are approximately double the number of harp seals than there were twenty years ago. The practice is sustainable and a whole lot more humane than most chicken farms. (Can you say 'about as free-range as it gets'?)

Unless the guy with the bumper sticker is a vegetarian who is also exhorting people to boycott every met-eating country, he's being a tad hypocritical. I know people who couldn't be going to college without the revenue from the sealing industry.

Sorry, I get annoyed when people make judgements about the seal hunt based on what the animal-rights groups show in their commercials. (I'm all for animal rights - but I recognise than humans are a species too.) The cod are in much worse shape, but for some reason fluffy baby seals get more donations than pop-eyed fish, so that's what people have fixated on.

[cybermule.livejournal.com]

You're entitled to get annoyed. I did, and I don't know anything about seal hunting.

[ninneviane.livejournal.com]

Never has this issue being so elloquently summed in not so many words :D