Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Catch of the Day


As seen on Treehugger:
The Surfrider Foundation packages the bounty of our beaches into seafood containers, which are then sold locally at farmers' markets. So Californians in Newport Beach can enjoy this fillet of condoms (note the safe handling instructions: "Every day, 1.3 billion gallons of partially treated sewage and trash are dumped into the ocean"), and Texans can partake of the Aerosol Valu-Pak:



Butts and Bits from Venice Beach:

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

are those recycled styrofoam packages and stickers? i think we get the point that there is way too much trash out there, and not just on our beaches. shit like this is such a waste of time. not to mention they are going about it in quite the hypocritical manner. treehugger pretty much blows when it comes to content, but they do sometimes have better and more intriguing information and ideas than this.

C Neal said...

I can't vouch for the holiness of the materials, Anon, and I can sympathize with the ambivalence to Treehugger. I'm also no great fan of the Surfrider Foundation, with their constituency of well-off surfers and a mission (conserving nice beaches) that seems a bit petty in the grand scheme of things.

That said, I think that the message is more important than the medium here. I noted a few criticisms similar to yours in the TH comments, which indicates that even the campaign's critics are responding in a way that Surfrider would want them to.

For everyone else, it's an immediate and visceral way to present the problems of sewer overflows and watershed pollution. And presenting these things at local farmers markets is a brilliant bit of culture jamming.

Unknown said...

I don't want to start a bathroom wall brawl, but comments like anonymous' are why people think that environmentalists don't have any sense of humor.