ENVS 202 Fourth Homework Assignment

Date Due: Tuesday March 16

For this assignment its not practical to use email as there will be graphing involved. So waste some trees and use paper.

For you creative types, you are encouraged to prepare a Web page in response to this question:

Saving the World Through Advertising

This assignment has two parts. The first part is to identify what biases and perceptions about the nature of man you need to target and correct through subversive advertising. The second part is to consider how you would do this.

Part 1

Preface:

"As the century turned, Africa began to emerge from a Dark Age stretching as far back as life on earth, into all the years that lay ahead - years of Renaissance, Enlightenment, Industry, and, if you will, Anxiety. It is fitting that Grogan made his symbolic trek (across Africa - 1891-92) as a survey for a railroad, the means through which foreign capital, the paraphernalia of technology, and foreigners themselves would enter. But because an incision is also a wound, the railroad was also the means through which the old life suppurated and poured out of Africa. This, then, is the tragic paradox of the white man's encroachment. The deeper he went into Africa, the faster the life flowed out of it, off the plains and out of the bush and into the cities, vanishing in acres of trophies and hides and carcasses. The coming of the white man, who imposed his steel tracks, his brains and his will, on the great continent was attended by glory and courage, ennobled by sacrifice, enriched by science and medicine and law. But it marked the beginning of the end in a land where nature herself had always been sovereign: at once sickness and cure, crime and punishment, beginning and end. Not the least of the signs of decay and dying was the gradual, remorseless end of the wild Game." --excerpted from The End of the Game by Peter Beard

Please ask the following 14 questions to at least 30 randomly selected people.

Man is innately (innate means culturally invariant):

1. Territorial Yes or No
2. Competitive Yes or No
3. Greedy Yes or No
4. Arrogant Yes or No
5. Benevolent Yes or No
6. Prejudiced Yes or No
7. Selfish Yes or No
8. Moral/Ethical Yes or No
9. Promiscuous Yes or No
10. Lazy Yes or No

11. Man is the most intelligent species on the Earth Yes or No
12. Technology will solve all of our environmental problems Yes or No
13. Which of the following will cause the greatest injury/loss of life in our species over the next 50 years? Select only 1
    • Nuclear War
    • AIDS
    • Starvation
    • Environmentally Induced Cancer
    • Toxic Waste Poisoning

14. What does the term "Wilderness" mean to You?
    Part Duex

    Okay, now your advertising team has collected the data (e.g. done market research). Using this data you can now think about what kind of advertising campaign you want to run in order to Save the World ...

    Let us now assume that you have arrived at a position of power on Madison Avenue and are in control of a particular segment of the media (e.g. TV Network, Magazine, Newspaper, Internet ...). Your assignment is to alter the attitude of the individual citizen toward the environment in this country; something that can only be done through subversive means! Having remembered ENVS 202 from those bygone college days, you realize that the source of the problem lies in our decision making processes. That is, the global population makes decisions which are either selfish or economically based, when morality-based decision making is the only clear solution to this problem (however, you can argue otherwise if you want in this assignment). In this case, your task is to use the media (since you reach millions of people in an instant) to re-educate people to make morality based decisions.

    Your assignment is then to outline and write down the kind of advertising campaign that you would use to subvert the populace into believing that morality based decision making is a good thing and that failure to engage in such a process makes one a poor citizen of the planet. You can construct a set of Web pages on this theme or just present your group ideas in writing. In a nutshell, how would you get people to think and act globally instead of locally? Remember, you are not trying to change people's intellectual view of the situation, but rather their emotional view. You are trying to make people feel bad whenever they act selfish.

    Here is an example of web pages constructed for a similar assignment

    Course Page