"Toxic Sludge is Good for You"

My PSA ideas:
Group: Ben, Pete, Paul

My concept idea is to make a PSA to remind people how plugged in they are and to occasionally separate themselves from it all or cut down on their screen time. My goal is to portray this in a humorous way and end with some strong facts regarding the amounts of time that people are plugged in. I envision a bunch of people gradually coming over sitting on a bench and being totally plugged in and isolated, on Facebook, ipods, websurfing, texting, etc. This would be alternating with scenes of people interacting and having fun or perhaps the people on the bench leaving to live in the real world. From what I saw in the past PSA’s, I think a focus on timing and a good background song will also be important.

Chapter 8

I raced yesterday at Tufts U., where the river is highly polluted due to raw sewage entering it...

1. The work of the PR groups in communities really bothers me. They are so sly that they think they can just infiltrate into neighborhoods and manipulate people’s opinions, and even attempt to “buy out” a community with a few donations.
2. I think the entanglement of the businesses/interest groups and the government agencies was very clear in this article, such as with the reclassification of the sludge from hazardous to Class A fertilizer.
3. I was reminded of how this misleading PR really impacts people when the article described the “casualties” of this pro-sludge policy. It’s not fun to think about, but it’s important to remember that in these political battles that the quality of many human lives are often at stake.
4. I think the thoroughness of the evidence against the use of toxic sludge was made very clear throughout the chapter. Despite the clear evidence of toxins and pathogens, the PR people continue to push their product.
5. Lastly, I was very disturbed that all this PR work has started to convince large scale food buyers that sludge-grown is safe. For me, this just represented how much PR can erode the facts if left unchecked.

My question is…if we can’t even trust the EPA to be putting out reliable information, who can we trust?

Chapter 9
1.It was very creepy to hear that “best PR goes by unnoticed”. I think there is a definite problem in that we no longer know what is news and what is propaganda, and that unfortunately it’s often the latter.
2.I was intrigued by the good cop, bad cop approach of corporations towards environmental organizations. This made their relationship much more clear to me, and how they always seem to have links to environmental organizations, but still be fighting to protect themselves from penalty for their many methods of destroying the environment. The corporations get to cloak themselves in green, while still polluting, and it works!
3.I liked the AMP formula for action. It reminded me that change can not be made by one group of people, but rather it needs many groups to play roles in activism, media, and politics to achieve a common goal.
4.I was given a new perspective by the line about companies trying to say the opposite of what is perceived of them (we think “they don’t care = they say “we care”). This served as a good reminder to analyze the PR efforts of any corporation more thoroughly.
5.I had heard of the Keep America Beautiful campaign and I was disturbed to realize it was just a bunch of corporations trying to make us focus on ourselves as the source of environmental damage, rather than the polluting corporations.

My question is… how do we get these big “corporate” environmental organizations back on track with supporting activism?