September 17, 2012

Ecoporn's Purpose

The general purpose of the term "Ecoporn", is to evade the possibility of  turning our worlds natural attributes into commodities. By definition a commodity is any economic fixture that can be produced to satisfy a need or want. What I have come to realize though is that our worlds natural aspects have always been a commodity. Even the early protestant values from the first European settlers in America speak to this when they claimed to seek a "city upon a hill". The only difference, is that today we have millions of people with access to the worlds natural resources and with the ability of destruction and abuse. Back then we were cutting down trees one by one just to build log cabins (no real impact).

But the purpose of this article is to prevent the the world from extorting the little serenity left on our planet. How do you go about doing this though, you cant stop somebody from taking  pictures of the sunset and pasting it to a calendar, nor does that pose an immediate threat to nature. And if we cant do this than what must we expect from the next generation of photographers? Strict limitations on what type of art we can sell? If you are depicting a serene landscape you can no longer sell it because you will be selling out on Earth? That doesn't quite make sense. What if somebody was selling nature scene pictures and then was giving the profits to the World Wildlife Foundation. Is that ok then? Where do you draw the line, because even in that case you are still exploiting nature.
Then there is an argument proposing that instead of selling the serene pictures of nature in a calendar we sell the images of  devastation caused by human impact. In my opinion that is a much more powerful message. And in this case you can argue that we are not making money off of our worlds nature"ecoporn", rather we are making money off of our own mistakes, and at the same time promoting a good message. Its a win, win. Sure nobody wants to hang up a calendar of plastic bottles floating around in high tide but it just may help.

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