There is a part of me that has always cared about the environment so I was interested in attending the Rose Scholars event on February 24. Professor Aaron Sachs gave a unique talk about the environment. I say unique because the talk focused on the one thing that media does not portray about environmentalists, humor. Prof. Sachs talked about how media in general has portrayed environmentalists as very serious people who sometimes don’t understand why certain things could be more important than the environment to other people. It has diminished the importance of taking care of the environment. Prof.Sachs proposed introducing comedy when talking about the environment as a solution to making more people understand the importance of the environment.

At first thought, it seems almost paradoxical to think that people would take you more seriously if you made fun of yourself, but I could see the merit of Prof. Sachs’ idea. In our current situation, environmentalists are often seen as too far away from society to really understand how radically different our lives would be if we cared more about the environment. We saw a great video about a group of environmentalists proposing an idea for a wolf highway across the Canadian border. They were proposing the idea to a government official. In the environmentalists mind, the main idea was to build a safe path for wolves in order to increase the population. On the other hand, the government official’s main objective is to understand how this idea might affect the people in the region. The government official brings up a great point about how the farmers in the region see the wolves as a threat and would not be welcoming of this idea. The environmentalists in the video don’t seem to consider the situation of other people when they proposed the idea. The video just emphasizes the point that environmentalists are seen as people who don’t understand other people’s situation. In order to remedy this situation, environmentalists can use humor to make them more relatable which would strengthen people’s support of their cause. Humor allows us to come together and if used wisely, it could be used to strengthen support for taking care of our environment.