Moving from gaseous wastes/pollution, to solid wastes, I covered in webpage 6.7 the television program ‘War on Waste’ and commended it for covering this important, but ‘unsexy’, topic in an interesting and engaging way for the general public; it was, also, surprisingly popular and effective. I reproduce the text and visuals of 6.7 here and recommend viewing the four programs of 50+ minutes each.
From Section 6.7: “An example of better mass-media environment stories is the ‘War on Waste’ series that I believe started in Britain with BBC’s ‘Hugh’s (Fearnley-Whittingstall’s) War on Waste’ in 2015, and was re-created in Australia by the ABC in 2021. It can be viewed here:
The ABC version had Craig Reucassel, a comedian in his other life, fronting it. They made a good attempt to address a topic no one wants to think about, and made it engaging and important. The host has a lively, friendly manner that gets people on-side, and he is good at converting hard-to-understand figures and volumes (the ‘scale’ problem alerted to elsewhere in T10), to meaningful quantities and examples (e.g. the Melbourne tram full of disposable coffee cups).
At times, the four programs are perhaps a bit too directed at individuals and what they can do, and not enough ‘up-scale’ and strategically to collective centres of power, such as the advertising industry, but this is defensible because he is trying to engage, as he says, “everyday Aussies”, and to make the topic understandable (T10 thinks the individual scale is a good starting – but not finishing – point for engaging with many environment issues). This said, he does, at times, deal with powerful, structural players, like supermarkets and politicians, but doesn’t go further to their need, and support of, constant growth, profit, and subsequent – waste.
The ABC and BBC should be congratulated on dealing with an obviously most ‘unsexy’ topic, and in an informative and engaging way, but critics will say that their engagement with ‘the environment’ is highly selective and limited (for instance, two thirds of T10’s ‘vital’ environment topics, such as #3 ‘Replace the Growth God’, or #9 ‘Economics and the Environment’, or #5 ‘Population’, or #7 ‘Habitat’, or ‘Media’, will never, or extremely rarely, appear) and thus this is Chomsky’s faux consultation, faux debate, that creates the impression of diversity and dealing with issues, while effectively excluding them and shutting them down. While I think this observation by Chomsky is perceptive and – sadly – often too true, application of this interpretation to ‘War on Waste’ would perhaps be ungenerous as the show was popular, effective with a surprisingly large audience, and you would never see anything like this on most networks, certainly not commercial outlets. As such, I think the glass is half full on this one, not half empty.”
