Mother Nature Tells Off All Humans
October 06, 2014It feels more like brooding, otherworldly voices of eco-doom atop some slick nature footage. Why the ruffled feathers? If it's not obvious, she appears to be sick of this abusive, lopsided relationship where humans simply don't give a shit, meanwhile she does the heavy lifting for life as we know it.
At the heart of the refreshing pitch is the reality that people need nature to exist, not the contrary. After decades of relatively soft attempts to get society woke to impending crises like population growth, water shortage, environmental pollution and petroleum addiction, marketing guru Lee Clow and TBWA Media Arts Lab partnered with the conservation group to create stunning natural media with a message directly from the planet's most neglected and critical vantage points. Clow was the mind behind Apple's 1997 "Think Different" ad campaign.
"I just think if you want a lot of people to care about what you care about you need to hit an emotional chord that isn't based on fear or heavy-handed tactics," Clow told Fast Company. "So many of the groups speaking about conservation and climate change assume that man can fix the planet, as opposed to the idea that nature has been here for billions of years and we've been here for a nanosecond of that time span."
He went on about the message of the collection, saying, "Nature will be here long after us, so the idea that we can fix nature is I think kind of preposterous, but the idea that we desperately need nature and we better be the best stewards we can be because of that, might be more democratic and all-inclusive appeal. As opposed to right versus left, corporations versus ecologists, this is about the human race versus extinction."
Voicing the ocean, soil, Mother Nature, redwoods, water, the rainforest and the coral reef are some of Hollywood's finest: Harrison Ford, Edward Norton, Julia Roberts, Robert Redford, Penelope Cruz, Kevin Spacey, and Ian Somerhalder. Celebrities as public intellectuals can be a thorn sometimes, but this isn't crafted as a personal appeal from real people, but more so a collection of pissed off nature spirits warning people to open their eyes.
Clow's conclusion is one shared by a growing number: "Like so many things right now in our culture and politics, everything seems so polarized that the two extreme ends are the loudest and everyone else in the middle is getting tired and sick of nobody being able to solve anything."