I used to think that wild flowers were a cute and unassuming gift and generally not a big deal until I had an occasion to participate in a confiscation operation at a train station. We chose to seize a load of snowdrops from Crimea on St. Valentine’s day and have the press make the event into propaganda of nature conservation. Even then I still hadn’t entirely abandoned the stereotypes I got from pop culture. What we were going to do was just another drop into the ocean, and not a necessary one at that.
But when the middleman whose plants we confiscated demanded that them destroyed before the cameras, so he’d know we didn’t resell them… I don’t know why the police agreed to it (standard policy is to donate them to hospitals), but we had to stomp 10.000 snowdrops into pulp. It gave us… actually, not that much bad PR as we expected, but it also drove the point home for me.
Never trust ‘harmony with nature’ you see in movies.
...that we can bring it to our homes in discrete little pieces, since we are part of it, and by doing so benefit nature, too. (Interestingly, I have heard people tell me that it was we who ‘murdered the flowers’.)
Oh, OK. (I don’t think I’ve ever before encountered the idea that we benefit nature by having cut flowers in our homes.)
I’d always just assumed that flowers one buys are grown especially for that purpose and wouldn’t have been grown otherwise. If that’s so, it doesn’t seem like having flowers around your house does much harm.
I used to think that wild flowers were a cute and unassuming gift and generally not a big deal until I had an occasion to participate in a confiscation operation at a train station. We chose to seize a load of snowdrops from Crimea on St. Valentine’s day and have the press make the event into propaganda of nature conservation. Even then I still hadn’t entirely abandoned the stereotypes I got from pop culture. What we were going to do was just another drop into the ocean, and not a necessary one at that.
But when the middleman whose plants we confiscated demanded that them destroyed before the cameras, so he’d know we didn’t resell them… I don’t know why the police agreed to it (standard policy is to donate them to hospitals), but we had to stomp 10.000 snowdrops into pulp. It gave us… actually, not that much bad PR as we expected, but it also drove the point home for me.
Never trust ‘harmony with nature’ you see in movies.
I’m feeling a bit dim. What point did it drive home? What specifically is wrong with movies’ portrayal of “harmony with nature”?
...that we can bring it to our homes in discrete little pieces, since we are part of it, and by doing so benefit nature, too. (Interestingly, I have heard people tell me that it was we who ‘murdered the flowers’.)
Oh, OK. (I don’t think I’ve ever before encountered the idea that we benefit nature by having cut flowers in our homes.)
I’d always just assumed that flowers one buys are grown especially for that purpose and wouldn’t have been grown otherwise. If that’s so, it doesn’t seem like having flowers around your house does much harm.
I have encountered it many times:) usually after I ask people why they do …, they often ramble to the point.