WARNING: Falling Cigarette May Kill You

Talking about advertisements in class, it seems that everyone is trying to trick you into buying something, saying that it will make your life better in some way or another. I googled "advertisements" to look for an idea for my blog this week, and came across this:

This was at the Vancouver Art Gallery during National Non-Smoking Week. The red sign on the car reads as follow: Death from car accidents: 370, Death from smoking-related causes: 6,027, Quit now before it kills you. This reminds me a little bit of Everything's an Argument, but it made me realize the other side of advertising. This is set up not to get you to buy a pack of cigarettes or a car, but the opposite. Advertisements for the most part are to get the consumer to buy a product, but in this case, it was used for the benefit of the consumer. This shows the relationship of all-too-common deaths. A car related death is one that is many times hard to avoid; death by cigarette is easy to avoid. Here, the advertisement's plan was to get their message across, and it's a nice break to see a message that isn't about consumption. Listening to advertisements can sometimes seem almost like it has a subliminal message, and in this case, the message is at least a good one. Advertisements have a point, and getting that point across is what matters, and at least sometimes it is being used for some good.

Will There Ever be a Last Tree?

Reading Robert Pinsky's poem, Shirt, made me think about all the things in my life that I use without even thinking about how many other people are effected by them. I have a reusable water bottle that I have with me all the time, so I don't buy plastic water bottles. I try to recycle as much as possible, and I try to reduce instead of reusing. But I have overlooked something: when I bring a lunch to school, without thinking about it, I use paper bags. It seems obvious that a paper bag can be recycled, and yet, I never put that into perspective with a normal sheet of paper of a pop can that I would always recycle. Every year 4 billion trees are cut down for paper, that's 10 million a day, and currently the ratio of trees to person in the world is about 61:1. Now imagine how many paper products are used by just the US, just Chicago, just New Trier, just you. Without even knowing it we are killing off forests around the world. It's true that people need some paper products, but I don't see the ends justifying the means. People also believe that cures to diseases can be found in nature, but what if it is lost by the logging. Because of my use of paper bags, loggers are working for bad pay in all weather conditions, near falling trees and with dangerous equipment. Because of my use of paper bags, more trees are being cut down than necessary. Because of my use of paper bags, we may never know if that cure was out there. That one last tree could be the tree with a cure, it could be the tree that hurts a logger, it could be the tree that had the last of an endangered species. That one last tree will never be the last tree.

If you look closely at the cartoon above, you may notice that there is a crocodile piled up with the trees. Logging is done so routinely and so blindly that people don't even think about the consequences of it, and humans aren't the only ones affected.