Adbusters UnCommercial - Talking Forest
Channel: Adbusters
Date: 2012-11-07

In 1988, the British Columbia Council of Forest Industries, the "voice" of the logging industry, was facing tremendous public pressure from a growing environmentalist movement. The logging industry fought back with a television ad campaign called "Forests Forever". It was an early example of "greenwashing": shots of happy children, workers and animals with a kindly, trustworthy sounding narrator who assured the public that the logging industry was protecting the forest.

Adbusters was outraged by the blatant use of the public airwaves to deliver deceptive anti-environmentalist propaganda. And they fought back by producing the "Talking Rainforest" anti-ad in which an old-growth tree explains to a sapling that "a tree farm is not a forest". But when the meme warriors went to buy airtime on the same stations that had aired the forest industry ad, they were refused. Adbusters was born in the startling realization that citizens do not have the same access to the information flows as corporations. One of our key campaigns continues to be the Media Carta, a "movement to enshrine The Right to Communicate in the constitutions of all free nations, and in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights".

Adbusters is a global network of artists, activists, writers, environmentalists, feminists, pranksters, students, educators and entrepreneurs who want to advance the new social activist movement of the information age. Culture Jamming since 1989. 

http://www.adbusters.org