Comments Randy Olson has made

Greenpeace = tha chronic = money, etc.

This is a really good essay and I can relate.  I run a project called Shifting Baselines (trying to communicate ocean conservation more effectively) and two years ago I organized a Stand-Up Comedy Contest in which contestants were invited to give their best 2 minutes of material on the subject of "lowered standards" which is what "shifting baselines" essentially means.

Wanting to add a little diversity, I asked a young African-American filmmaker friend, Ifeanyi Njoku, to recruit a few black comics.  He called a week later and said none of them were interested -- they felt the whole subject of conservation (particularly ocean conservation) was too much of a white people's issue.

So I asked him to show this a little more clearly by going down to Crenshaw in L.A. and doing some person-on-the-street interviews, which he did with comic actor Alex Thomas.  His 4 minute film ended up being one of the 7 winners (of 42 contestants) and serves as just sort of a comic representation of how distant these issues that some of us assume are universal can be to other folks who, as Ms. Brown noted, "have to hustle all day long."  To many of them the word "greenpeace" means literally only money or something to smoke which just illustrates that we don't all live in the same world of communications and priorities.  And by the way, I staged the same film the next year in Kansas with white people at a country western music festival and got even more unenlightened replies.

You can view Ifeanyi's film at:  http://www.shiftingbaselines.org/comedy2.html

- Randy Olson, Director
Shifting Baselines (www.shiftingbaselines.org)On Dramatizing the "death" of environmentalism doesn't help urban people of color, or anyone else posted 4 years, 8 months ago 21 Responses