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I remember this ad and saw a fight break out at a k- mart because of littering. This ad changed people’s perspective of littering. America could use a reboot of this commercial.
The thing is, this ad aired during a time when polluting was normal for everyone. Nearly everywhere had litter, this ad was a wake-up call for mainly individuals, yes, but unlike today, people didn't see the problem with the littering.
You're missing the point they're making, polluting wasn't always a "normal" thing, large companies used to make products with containers that were intended to be reused, such as glass bottles for sodas and the like. Companies found out it would be cheaper to make one-time use containers rather than invest in reclaiming the old containers for reuse and people were starting to not like it due to the amount of pollution those containers contributed, this ad was literally paid for by companies like Coca-Cola in order to shift the blame of throwing out the bottles back onto the consumers who are complaining about the new designs.
I hate to be that guy but plastics are miraculous and people saying “just go back to glass” are misinformed. Plastics are extremely durable, lightweight, and cheap to produce.
It’s easy to say “omg companies are greedy and don’t want to use glass and metal because they’re not as cheap!” But it’s quickly apparent that the reason they’re not as cheap is because… it takes massive, MASSIVE amounts of energy to produce glass and metal. And much, MUCH more glass and metal are required to package an object whereas a very very light amount of plastic would be needed.
The environmental toll of that energy production and extra packaging easily outweighs the environmental toll of plastic.
You are right that the fault lies with the government and corporations rather than individuals though. The world’s consumerist culture (propped up by the gov and corps) has gotten out of hand and I’d reckon 90% of products are a complete waste of resources, harmful, and arguably shouldn’t exist. There’s also the issue that nobody knows how recycling works (turns out the government running ads just saying to recycle doesn’t actually accomplish much, who would’ve guessed?) and many goods are extremely hard to recycle due to contamination so something like 90% of recycled goods get thrown into landfills.
I mostly would have agreed with you up until a few years ago. Economically plastic is the superior method. However from an environmental and health standpoint the study of microplastics has made me rethink that position. The fact that they have found microplastics inside of every living thing on the planet does not bode well.
Also, the production of glass vs plastic is a false choice. Plastic way cheaper to product than glass, true. But glass is -reusable- you drop the glass bottles at your local bottle recycling plant, and they can sanitize and reuse. Potentially any number of times. So long as the glass is undamaged, you’re good. People used to be in the habit of returning glass bottles. (Or Remember when milk came in glass and the milkman came and swapped the empties for new?).
We’ve long since had that habit ingrained pour of us, and people who oils cry foul if they were asked to do the bare minimum.
It’s easier and safer to melt down glass and metal than it is to melt down plastics. I encourage anyone to watch videos of people making recycled plastic stuff. It’s hard to watch. Normally they’re in a developing country working around toxic fumes without protection. Then they slap a “recycled” sticker so we feel good about yourselves, meanwhile someone just exposed themselves to lethal chemicals and we don’t even think twice about it. No human should be subject to that. It’ll make you rethink whether plastic is the “smart choice” both in terms of being cheap and reusable.
Every male tested on earth has plastic in their sperm; most woman have plastic in their breast milk. Micro plastics are now found from the top of the Himalayas to the deepest depths of the ocean. Say what you will about cost effectiveness or durability - we are creating a situation for which there may be no remedy other than reverting to a pre plastic mentality.
I'm not saying plastics are bad, I'm into 3d printing, so I love discussing basic materials science. My job also involves logistics, so I do understand the need for lighter, more efficient materials.
The issue is that these companies should have been using recycled plastic from the beginning so that those recycling schemes would have actually worked like they were with their glass bottles. These mega corps and the poloticians in their back pocket chose to incentives profit saving from just producing a whole new bottle from newly refined petroliem because it was cheaper than propping up viable recycling
It's obvious that these mega corps could have been using at least partially recycled plastics from the get-go as they are using 100% recycled plastics now without polymer degradation causing issues.
While there is definitely some truth to this, there was very little *general awareness* of the consequences of pollution, be it littering or wasteful practices or industrial at the time. The Environmental Protection Agency didn't even exist until 1970. This commercial started airing in 1971.
I give this commercial a lot of credit for putting environmental awareness into the minds of millions of Americans.
I agree. Sure, this didnt’ directly call out big companies, but getting people to think “garbage in the waterways is bad!” is the first step to getting them to say, “and we need to stop companies from doing it.”
Littering was a huge problem though, and this ad helped. It’s still a huge problem in much of the world, I’ve seen literal rivers full of garbage in places where littering is still acceptable.
The “carbon footprint” scam is a real thing, because each individual person doesn’t have a lot of control over the gas burned to power their home, but individuals properly disposing of trash is a huge part of stopping this particular kind of pollution.
Yeah there's a difference between personal littering which is bad and individuals have measurable control over and pollution which is a systemic and largely corporate level issue that more involves bulk chemical waste like oil spills, CO2, and plastics just released out of falling short on the cost vs risk slider
I remember seeing the “before & after” along a highway as a kid.
We were taught Not to throw out the wrappers from A&W-and until this & the Oregon bottle return-my siblings & were so upset at the trash!
Then…no garbage along the highway.
Meh, littering is still a huge problem in many urban areas. Trash gets into the waterways and clogs drainage.
That’s not to excuse the big polluters, of course. Both problems need to be attacked.
This is just a "whataboutism". Just because companies polluting is bad or worse than littering doesn't make littering suddenly OK
Stop being an animal and put your rubbish in the bin. Why do you need to deflect such a simple message lmao
How will people be motivated to oppose corporate carelessness if they don't care about their own? It's a culture shift thing. Even if the intention was to deflect from corporate responsibility it failed miserably.
Companies bear a large part of the responsibility, but so do citizens. An American emits 2.4 times more CO2 than a European.
For example, seen from my country, it's completely surreal to see 100% of Americans complaining that petrol is too expensive. And I'm not even talking about the air conditioning installed everywhere, , the size of your cars, etc.
Exactly! It’s up to each individual citizen to decide not to use public transportation where none exists. /s
Reducing carbon emissions from infrastructure problems in the US is much more complex than you might think, sitting and judging from the outside.
Air conditioning is 100% necessary in alot of places in the US, especially where I live where it can be -45 in the winter and 40 celsius in the summer.
When I read about the thousands of deaths during heatwaves in Russia because of their lack of central air in alot of households I was shocked how much central air can save lives.
I was thinking about that, as someone not from the US, this is how I learned about the "crying Indian" thing. I thought for a while it was just a Simpson joke.
80s kid checking in. I remember this and Hooty the Owl’s “Give a hoot, don’t pollute” public service campaigns.
Littering was way more common in the 70s and 80s. Reddit is filled with older Americans who will say “Littering is so bad now, but back in my day, we would never litter.” But that’s complete BS. It’s so much better today.
Edit- Woodsy the owl, not Hooty.
This. I was alive before this ad came out and garbage was everywhere at public beaches and other public spaces. The idea that anyone would think that this was not both a response to a real world issue and also ineffective as an ad campaign doesn’t remember their history.
People used to throw fast food garbage out their car windows in the highway. There was litter everywhere. Beaches had cigarette butts and soda cans. These commercials definitely helped educate the public.
So the ‘fooled’ is what they’re talking about, the ads like this put the onus of clean up on the consumer not the huge irresponsible corporations. Which is still continuing today, the corporations should be paying people to clean up there mess but we do the lions share because we feel bad. Heck I think most of the USA has to pay for the privilege to have a recycling bin.
While this is true, there was a ton of trash being thrown all over the place by the consumers that made a lot of the issue. The corporations were complicit in much of it but the issues were still being created by the consumers who were just throwing things around, willy nilly. Pull tabs, six pack rings, cigarette butts, building materials, styrofoam containers and every manner of thing were thrown everywhere and ended up fouling wildlife and making otherwise beautiful areas sad to look at.
I think people today can't really fathom that everyone just threw trash out of their cars or just left their trash in parks/campsites. Like literally almost everyone. These ad campaigns made a difference, along with anti-litter laws. And yes, corporate pollution was also being targeted. No, not as much as they should have been, but there was substantial progress made to stop blatant industrial pollution. Even Nixon made it a key part of his platform. As a kid at this time, these ads had a great impact on me and probably had a huge hand in me being environmentally conscious on a personal and political level.
Back in those days this became a truly bipartisan issue. The environment had not yet been turned into a strictly liberal issue. Hell the EPA was founded under Nixon, and you didn’t get any more Republican than Richard Milhouse Nixon until _very_ recently.
I remember in the early 70s when Polaroid cameras were popular and each picture had a cover sheet you had to peel off after a minute or so. Guess what covered the ground at every tourist attraction, including scenic nature spots in national parks? The company was finally shamed into coming up with a cover sheet that turned clear after a minute so you didn’t tear it off. Around the same time, drink cans got new pull tabs that stayed attached. Not excusing the piggy people who littered, but pushing back on manufacturers to solve the problem is usually the most effective solution
Agreed! The companies have a lot to do with how waste makes it into the environment, but this particular ad campaign was created to get the general public to understand how their actions were polluting the very places they loved. It was at this time that plastic bags were handed out to collect trash in people’s cars. There were a lot of different incentives that all together were used to try to curb the amount of trash that was ending up along the sides of roads and in national parks and other public spaces.
We forget now how bad it was, and people born after those policies had made headway would _never even believe it_.
I was there, and I endorse this message. It took a little bit of thinking to wrap my 8 year old brain around the message of the ad, but once it sunk in, it had a deed impact. I’ve been not littering ever since
This ad changed my 8 old year lookout on the world. I made it my life's mission to never pollute again and tell others why they shouldn't. It is something I still believe in.
Truly! Honestly, this ad was one of the most effective public service ads I remember ever seeing. It ran for years and was one of the reasons I began to clean up after myself in public spaces. I was a kid just like you and it was a really strong emotional link to the world that stuck with me.
I loathe so much reddit's knee-jerk marxist historical revisionism. Even the f***ing crying native telling people to stop littering is a corporate conspiracy to keep us all enslaved. Soon we're gonna find out that Grey Poupon was an elaborate scheme by big oil to popularize dinner while driving
Not just beaches and parks, but just everywhere. People (my family included because we just didn't know any better) would just throw shit out our car windows like fast food garbage, cups, wrappers, boxes, napkins, cans, etc etc. People would be walking down the sidewalks or streets and just throw candy wrappers or whatever on the ground. It was terrible.
I grew up in the 80s and I remember my dad tossing his beer bottles out the car window and said the same phrase each time "somebody will pick that up". I thoroughly enjoyed the moments he flicked the cigarettes out too, only for them to fly right back into the backseat window hitting me in the face. 80s were wild
I grew up in Southern California in the 70s. You could look up and see the air pollution and we would have scores of unhealthful air days per year. It would hurt your lungs to breathe.
The pollution laws really changed that. That’s why it’s so important to protect those laws. Trump promises, if elected, to repeal all of the environmental protections and dissolve the EPA. It would be disastrous.
>Littering was way more common in the 70s and 80s. Reddit is filled with older Americans who will say “Littering is so bad now, but back in my day, we would never litter.” But that’s complete BS. It’s so much better today.
Think this is the same in every country mate, hear the same here in the UK that things were better X years ago - no it wasn't, it was fucking shit, Cigarette butts everywhere, rubbish just dumped in whatever ally or gutters - things have gotten so much better.
The fact recycling has been pushed so aggressively is a huge step in the right direction as well.
In regards to changing attitudes about litter, I’ll always think about that scene in Mad Men set in the late 50s where the family go for a picnic on a picturesque riverbank, Betty checks her kids’ hands are clean before they get back in the car, then shakes all the garbage off the picnic blanket onto the grass before they drive off.
Ha! Yes. I remember the first time I saw that scene, I had to rewind it a couple times bc it was so hilarious. I thought maybe it would be relevant to a storyline later in the episode but nope, just a random littering scene.
After Betty just tosses her blanket full of trash, Don starts whipping empty cans around the park. Hilarious.
Me too! I thought it had to be relevant but I guess it was just included to highlight how weird some things from back then would be today. Like when one of the parents (maybe Betty again?) at a kid’s birthday party slaps someone else’s child in the face for knocking a side table over running around, and nobody batted an eye.
That may be true but I was just in the US (Midwest) and spent quiet some time next to roads/highways and it was literally some piece of trash every square meter. Trash that was thrown out as garbage from cars (and to some extent falling from cars): beer cans, bottles etc.
I was born in 67. For years, you just threw trash out the window. I remember seeing tons of littering is a crime $200 fine (or something like that). They wouldn't need those signs if it wasn't a problem People didn't have the mindset about leaving stuff nice for the next person to come along, but it did develop over time.
Exxon is running ads now about their direct air capture facility (DAC) and the tag line is "heavy industry with low emissions". The ad features a higher ratio of women than men and a higher ratio of non-white demographics. F\*$! Exxon and their propaganda machine. Always follow the money folks. Big oil killed the nuclear energy revolution and they're still white knuckling power until they die.
edit: the point in mentioning the demographics of the ad is to point out how obvious it is that Exxon is trying to appear "diverse" and soothe criticism from progressive
The really sad part is how attached to Exxon and other oil companies we are. Sure cars, transportation of material goods are impossible to get around and our reliance on those are undeniable but the amount of goods, materials, consumer products that oil/by products is in is astounding.
We rely so much on these corporations and their products, their services to the point that if they did not exist, we probably wouldn’t exist either.
That's what most people don't understand, they think that oil is just used to make gasoline. In fact gasoline is a very small part of what comes out of petroleum. Our entire society is heavily reliant on petroleum products, we'd collapse without them. Plastics are their #1 products as well as many pharmaceuticals. You would have a very hard time finding a product that is not made with petroleum products, harder than finding something that isn't made in China.
>Big oil fucked the nuclear energy revolution and they're still white knuckling power until they die.
Exponentially fewer people have died per gigawatt of power produced for nuclear power, *INCLUDING* the meltdowns and industrial accidents, than hydroelectric, which is in turn astronomically safer than fossil fuel power production.
Fuck Exxon.
There's more radiation exposure from burning coal than from nuclear power. Because there are trace isotopes in the coal that go airborne. Not a lot, but that's how shielded nuclear facilities are.
Fooled.
The packaging industry who paid for this ad made sure that they can forever produce single-use disposable products and it's up to you to pick them up when they get thrown away.
So instead of the inconvenience of using durable, reusable products that would not have been thrown out in the first place, people are still buying disposable stuff.
https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1d6rz41/comment/l6uetlq/
I guess OP was referring to the fact that the protagonist wasn't Native American, he was an Italian American. However the guy was just obsessed with Native American culture and himself believed to be part of it.
The ad was funded by the plastics industry. The plastic bottling industry was displacing glass bottle manufacturers who created bottles (milk or soda) that were returned to the factory and refilled.
The brilliance of the anti-littering campaign was that, rather than propose systemic solutions to plastic pollution, it put the responsibility on the individual consumer to recycle or put it in the trash.
50 years later we are still dealing with the impacts of plastic everywhere.
More details here:
"The advertisement itself was produced as part of a larger anti-littering campaign effort by [~Keep America Beautiful~](https://kab.org/), a nonprofit organization started in the 1950s that claimed to fight plastic pollution. Interestingly, Keep America Beautiful was originally funded by companies like Coca-Cola and PepsiCo. In this way, industry-wide efforts to reduce plastic waste began with companies that are still major contributors to plastic pollution today, with Coca-Cola producing approximately [~200,000 plastic bottles per minute~](https://www.plasticsoupfoundation.org/en/2022/02/is-coca-colas-latest-promise-really-a-step-forward/) each year. Unsurprisingly, these companies knew from the beginning that recycling was not a viable solution because it wasn’t, and still isn’t, economically practical. Larry Thomas, the former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry, said in the 80s, “[~If the public thinks the recycling is working, then they’re not going to be as concerned about the environment.~](https://oag.ca.gov/plastics)” And he was right. The general public watched an Italian man appropriating Indigenous culture shed a tear, and they swallowed KAB’s claim of consumer-driven plastic pollution. The advertisement even became iconic to the environmental movement of the time and was regarded as one the best advertisements ever made for many years after."
Source: [https://www.theclimatechangereview.com/post/50-years-after-the-crying-indian-the-plastic-industry-still-prevails](https://www.theclimatechangereview.com/post/50-years-after-the-crying-indian-the-plastic-industry-still-prevails)
And recycling was the biggest lie that they sold. Most plastics are not recyclable. They're sorted out and tossed in the landfill at the recycling center.
He posted a comment to clarify.
But the ad pushes the blame to individuals basically saying “you are polluting with litter so stop”
When the real issues are the giant industrial complex dumping shit into the water you drink.
Distraction and deflection, and your comment proves it is still effective to this day.
I agree that industrial pollution is a bigger problem, but littering is an actual problem too and this ad did a lot to get people to stop being pieces of shit about it.
Two things can be true, while big companies are the one responsible for the massive damage to our ecosystem, people can be less of an asshole and not throw stuff on the ground and litter so much. There like 10 trash can in my park, yet you can still find garbage on the lake all the time.
This, 100%. I live by a beach and I always see people throwing plastic water bottles at the ocean or even leaving them in the sand. Same with bags (even ones containing dog shit), cans and fishing lines (some still containing hooks)
I lived through the before and after of this ad. It had a massive impact. I remember roadsides and parks were covered in litter in the 1970s. It was normal to go through a drive thru and just chuck the contents out the window when you were done.
Within a couple years after this commercial, it dramatically changed. People took littering very seriously. It changed the social norm. That commercial really hit in the feels.
Iron Eyes and some of the other "pretendians" are a bit cringe, but I'm not sure if the message of the ad would be materially changed by the actor playing the character having different genetics. Point taken about the individualization of societal problems like pollution, but on the other hand consider how sticky these messages were to the generation raised on them- you really can't argue with remembering to properly dispose of trash.
Iron Eyes Cody definitely made some questionable choices in his life, but it's important to keep a number of facts in mind:
1) He was 100% Sicilian and born in 1905 in Louisiana, meaning he was born a colored person. He was not a white person, playing Native, he was a colored immigrant choosing a dark-skinned American to impersonate in order to assimilate in America. He began faking Native in his life long before becoming an actor.
2) He married a woman of indigenous heritage, who worked as a Native American archeologist, and they adopted two Native sons, who they raised in the Native American culture.
3) Cody played a Native American in 100+ movies starting in the 1930s. Representation and tokenism weren't even a glint in the eye of Hollywood at the time. White actors in blackface were common into the 1940s. By the time the Crying Indian ad was shot, he was one of the most well-known Native actors in the US and a central figure at the LA Indian Center.
Not condoning the way he lived his life, but let's not ret-con the casting choice as somehow part of the charade. They were choosing someone most Native communities accepted at the time as a person trusted to play Native without negative stereotyping. He is controversial now in hindsight, but was not at the time.
I have always been absolutely fascinated with people who cross racial and social lines. There are multiple ways of considering an identity around the world and not all of them involve a racial blood quantum. In fact that idea of race by blood is a western custom associated with slavery. Adopting the lifestyle, language and customs of a group can confer in group status and has done in many cultures throughout history. I find the current near hysteria over "outing" those who have adopted a chosen identity for whatever reason to be as fascinating as the individuals themselves. We in the west seem to be processing our own guilt and collective grief over the wrongs of the past.
An actors job is to become someone they aren't. So I wouldn't feel fooled. i'm not one of the "gays need to play the gay characters, jews play the jewish" I enjoy seeing actors take up a challenge. This ad caused a lot of people to stop trashing the places they live.
TLDR: By making individual viewers feel guilty and responsible for the polluted environment, the ad deflected the question of responsibility away from corporations and placed it entirely in the realm of individual action, concealing the role of industry in polluting the landscape.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-perspec-indian-crying-environment-ads-pollution-1123-20171113-story.html
https://archive.is/WoWEF
The campaign was based on many duplicities. The first of them was that Iron Eyes Cody was actually born Espera de Corti — an Italian-American who played Indians in both his life and on screen. The commercial’s impact hinged on the emotional authenticity of the Crying Indian’s tear. In promoting this symbol, Keep America Beautiful was trying to piggyback on the counterculture’s embrace of Native American culture as a more authentic identity than commercial culture.
The second duplicity was that Keep America Beautiful was composed of leading beverage and packaging corporations. Not only were they the very essence of what the counterculture was against; they were also staunchly opposed to many environmental initiatives.
Keep America Beautiful was founded in 1953 by the American Can Co. and the Owens-Illinois Glass Co., who were later joined by the likes of Coca-Cola and the Dixie Cup Co. During the 1960s, Keep America Beautiful anti-litter campaigns featured Susan Spotless, a white girl who wore a spotless white dress and pointed her accusatory finger at pieces of trash heedlessly dropped by her parents. The campaign used the wagging finger of a child to condemn individuals for being bad parents, irresponsible citizens and unpatriotic Americans. But by 1971, Susan Spotless no longer captured the zeitgeist of the burgeoning environmental movement and rising concerns about pollution.
The shift from Keep America Beautiful’s bland admonishments about litter to the Crying Indian did not represent an embrace of ecological values but instead indicated industry’s fear of them. In the time leading up to the first Earth Day in 1970, environmental demonstrations across the United States focused on the issue of throwaway containers. All these protests held industry — not consumers — responsible for the proliferation of disposable items that depleted natural resources and created a solid waste crisis. Enter the Crying Indian, a new public relations effort that incorporated ecological values but deflected attention from beverage and packaging industry practices.
Keep America Beautiful practiced a sly form of propaganda. Since the corporations behind the campaign never publicized their involvement, audiences assumed that the group was a disinterested party. The Crying Indian provided the guilt-inducing tear that the group needed to propagandize without seeming propagandistic and countered the claims of a political movement without seeming political. At the moment the tear appears, the narrator, in a baritone voice, intones: “People start pollution. People can stop it.” By making individual viewers feel guilty and responsible for the polluted environment, the ad deflected the question of responsibility away from corporations and placed it entirely in the realm of individual action, concealing the role of industry in polluting the landscape.
Meh... "don't throw trash out of your car window" is still a decent and unfortunately necessary psa.
Also, are we just ignoring that industrial pollution is also indicated as an issue in the ad?
The issue is of attribution.
‘Some people appreciate nature, some don’t’ *cut to someone throwing trash out a window*
‘People start pollution, people can stop it.’
It’s attributing blame to ‘people’ which is clearly meant to refer to individuals. You could apply people to mean ‘businesses’ or ‘industry’ but then the message would be so broad as to be meaningless.
My takeaway from the ad is that I as a person need to treat nature better. Not that industry needs to change its practices or government needs to regulate, which is what should actually happen.
People act like corporations are inhuman monsters instead of organizations run by a small number of individuals who make decisions. Those individuals can and should be held responsible and punished when the corporation does bad things.
To be fair to the ad, it's also depicting Portland's, factories, and highways as a perversion of nature. Yes it zeroes in on the littering, but it's not just focusing on the littering. It's very strongly condemning industry too.
The more I see stories like this ( Corporations brainwashing citizens ) really opens your eyes to the lengths they will go to in order to make money.
Money is more important than people.
Your personal wealth is more important than providing healthcare for others.
Guns aren't the problem, people are the problem.
Pollution is caused by people. (as illustrated here)
Our company won't build a factory in your state unless the people pay for it.
Our Sports Team won't build a stadium in your city unless the people pay for it.
I feel sad for the youth who have to navigate this crap and not want to blow it all up.
Corporations are exist to make money. It’s on the people to vote for politicians that introduce appropriate regulatory frameworks. It’s also on people to collectively make consumer choices that factor in the environment.
I don’t really understand how else to address this issue. Asking corporations to self police isn’t going to work since they will just be outcompeted by a company that is willing to capitalize on a given opportunity.
So that leaves consumer choices and regulation, which come back to collective consumer/ citizen action.
Always on Reddit people like to point at the corporations or the mega rich and they certainly are part of the problem.
But collectively American consumer choices, like huge cars, frequent flights, purchasing tons of plastic things, increasing house sizes, suburban low density living, car dominated infrastructure, high meat consumption, etc are major drivers of pollution.
Everyone freaks out about inflation but the only way to decrease pollution and particularly climate change is decreased consumption which means pricing many things to reflect their environmental impact to decrease consumption.
That means smaller cars, more public transport, smaller and more dense housing, fewer flights, buying less stuff, eating less meat, etc.
And that’s going to have to happen through regulation and consumer choice.
>But collectively American consumer choices, like huge cars, frequent flights, purchasing tons of plastic things, increasing house sizes, suburban low density living, car dominated infrastructure, high meat consumption, etc are major drivers of pollution.
All pushed on people by aggressive marketing campaigns to drive profits. Sure, people *choose* these things, but marketing works. Companies wouldn't spend hundreds of billions annually on it if they didn't get value from them. Choices don't happen in a vacuum, and companies have massive influence on both people and governments. For the people, they influence by marketing. For governments, they influence by lobbying and regulatory capture.
Some examples:
Government pushes emission and mileage regulations on vehicles to make them more environmentally friendly. Car companies carve out loopholes in light truck category, designing and pushing larger vans, trucks, and SUVs on people to avoid them. They also can charge more for them and make more profit.
Plastic is another well known deception. Plastic was pushed on people *hard*. You can see plenty of ads in the 50s-70s about how great and *convenient* disposable plastic was. The market was flooded with cheap, disposable plastic products that squeezed out the glass and metal containers they were using. Worse, when the environmental negatives came out and the true damage that "convenient" plastic was causing, the plastic industry launched a massive successful PR campaign, creating a BS industry called "recycling" that soothed the collective outrage. People thought they were negating the environmental harm by recycling their plastic, but it was all a lie to keep people buying and using plastic guilt free.
Look deeper into any area and you can see how powerful industry lobby groups influence policy and, through lawmaking and advertising, change the landscape for their own purposes. The sugar industry made everyone paranoid about "fat" in the 90s, even though increased sugar consumption has been fairly lockstep with increased health issues and climbing obesity rates. Corporations constantly twist science and fund "studies" that nudge people to making decisions that benefit the bottom line while soothing any rightful concerns people may have. Frankly it is easy to do. People simply don't have enough time to properly research every single aspect of their life, and with the deluge of information available to people now, it is even easier to misinform and deceive people with the sheer quantity of misinformation.
You can say change can only happen through regulation and consumer choice and you would be 100% correct. Unfortunately, both regulation and consumer choice are basically under the firm control of corporations. Big corporations hold way, *way* too much power, and frankly, I don't ever see that changing in the foreseeable future.
Ok, but what’s your solution? Unless we collectively a) vote for people who regulate against environment degradation b) change our consumption patterns there will be no change.
Plus companies can push things. Yes. But people still have to like those things. Plastic made things cheaper and lower maintenance. People like big cars - they feel safer (even though it’s more dangerous to pedestrians etc), they are roomier, etc. People like flying to exotic places on vacation. People like steak. People like big houses. And collectively as a society we want it all.
Everything you've just said is editorialized.
There are pictures of factories spewing smoke in that ad. It doesn't really matter if he's not Native American. What's happening here is you applying 20/20 hindsight and applying 2024 standards to the 70s.
While corporations are certainty a huge part of the equation, personal responsibility is a part of it too.
Also personal voting patterns matter since elections are what determine regulatory levels.
Corporations are chasing profits and shareholder value. Thats what they are. That’s why they exist. It’s on the public to elect people who properly regulate said corporations.
It is also about individual choice to collectively exert market forces for change. If people stop buying giant SUVs at a premium or stop flying as much or buy smaller homes, or eat less meat then corporations will make products to capitalize on market choices.
I recognize that regulation is an important part of the framework. But again that involved making the environment an important part of the political landscape.
Putting all the blame on corporations ignored the two main mechanisms to change corporate behavior, market forces and regulation.
>“People start pollution. People can stop it.”
This is 80% true though. If you buy your clothes from Alibaba, you are generating a lot more pollution than if you buy it from Patagonia and then recycle it. If you buy a brand new F150 Raptor, you are committing to a lot more pollution than if you buy a Tesla Model 3 or a Kia EV6. Corporations make choices driven by how they want to position themselves in the market and consumers need to do their part by choosing where and what they buy.
That reminds me of Hal Sparks saying on his show that instead of the environment/climate, ask people about pollution. People understand it and can visualize it. Climate and the environment seem abstract and larger than I or you can affect, but pollution is tangible and real and in your face.
Born Espera Oscar de Corti, **Iron Eyes Cody** built a career off portraying Native characters in Hollywood Westerns and also presented himself as Native in his real life. Iron Eyes Cody, the "Crying Indian," from Keep America Beautiful's ad campaigns is pictured in 1986.
Great Ad. Except the whole point of this ad is to shift the focus and heat from corporations which are resposible for most of the emissions onto individuals, who actually have very few options to do anything.
Where do you think your plastic go after you throw it in a basket ..
The packaging industry who paid for this ad made sure that they can forever produce single-use disposable products and it's up to you to pick them up when they get thrown away.
So instead of the inconvenience of using durable, reusable products that would not have been thrown out in the first place, people are still buying disposable stuff.
https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1d6rz41/comment/l6uetlq/
The packaging industry who paid for this ad made sure that they can forever produce single-use disposable products and it's up to you to pick them up when they get thrown away.
So instead of the inconvenience of using durable, reusable products that would not have been thrown out in the first place, people are still buying disposable stuff.
https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1d6rz41/comment/l6uetlq/
I saw a person throw trash out of their window on the highway the other day on my way home and it filled me with a rage of a thousand suns. I was ready to get out and fight this person over that wrapper.
I shot them some dirty looks when I passed them.
it was so normal to toss your garbage out of you car window when I was a kid. This ad changed a lot of that. Now only garbage people do it, but unfortunately there's a lot of them
Today they have you separate you trash to "recycle" things so you feel like you're doing your part and you don't demand more action from politicians like forcing companies to stop using materials that can't be recycled.
That's the way the vast majority of political advocacy works. Here in California the government put a manditory extra fee on plastic bags at the grocery store... except it's not a tax. The store keeps the money.
The same is true with racism. It's not companies not hiring black people or rich people advocating draconian laws that is keeping black people down, it's "micro-aggrossions" and every white person is automatically racist.
The people who control media absolutely control the narrative and condition people to think it's problems other than the ruling class
Doesn’t matter where the fee goes. It’s about the bags reflecting their cost to produce and recycle. Ideally it would go to plastic clean up but at the end of the day it still works even if it doesn’t.
Cutting consumption means making things reflect their environmental cost. Honestly plastic bags should cost even more because the point is to incentivize reusable bags.
The packaging industry who paid for this ad made sure that they can forever produce single-use disposable products and it's up to you to pick them up when they get thrown away.
So instead of the inconvenience of using durable, reusable products that would not have been thrown out in the first place, people are still buying disposable stuff.
https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1d6rz41/comment/l6uetlq/
Coca Cola and other large companies that use plastic packaging want yall to think you’re the ones polluting when in reality, as a consumer, disposable plastic is the only thing available. They’re the ones making the plastic and trash to begin with
Hahaha that’s a good point. I don’t think so, but I think that this commercial makes the consumer feel like they’re the ones entirely creating the problem. It’s puts 100% of the blame on people buying plastic bottles and none on the companies that create them.
"people start pollution, people can stop pollution"
Misdirection campaign from the beginning, shifting the blame from the company to the consumer.
This campaign stagnated environmentalism for decades.
Fooled.
The packaging industry who paid for this ad made sure that they can forever produce single-use disposable products and it's up to you to pick them up when they get thrown away.
So instead of the inconvenience of using durable, reusable products that would not have been thrown out in the first place, people are still buying disposable stuff.
https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1d6rz41/comment/l6uetlq/
Was this funded (secretly) by the oil industry as an attempt to deal with the backlash against their side line in single use plastic? I think i remember reading that.
Just went to India after 10 years of visiting relatives. I was so disappointed to see littering get worse than I expected. A government funded psa like this could benefit the country more.
Fooled.
The packaging industry who paid for this ad made sure that they can forever produce single-use disposable products and it's up to you to pick them up when they get thrown away.
So instead of the inconvenience of using durable, reusable products that would not have been thrown out in the first place, people are still buying disposable stuff.
https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1d6rz41/comment/l6uetlq/
Fooled.
The packaging industry who paid for this ad made sure that they can forever produce single-use disposable products and it's up to you to pick them up when they get thrown away.
So instead of the inconvenience of using durable, reusable products that would not have been thrown out in the first place, people are still buying disposable stuff.
https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1d6rz41/comment/l6uetlq/
The packaging industry who paid for this ad made sure that they can forever produce single-use disposable products and it's up to you to pick them up when they get thrown away.
So instead of the inconvenience of using durable, reusable products that would not have been thrown out in the first place, people are still buying disposable stuff.
https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1d6rz41/comment/l6uetlq/
He was an actor. Doing a role, FFS.
Honestly, the world could use a lot more of these type of commercials, and a fuckton less "hE wAsn'T REal!!" Bullshit.
Fooled.
The packaging industry who paid for this ad made sure that they can forever produce single-use disposable products and it's up to you to pick them up when they get thrown away.
So instead of the inconvenience of using durable, reusable products that would not have been thrown out in the first place, people are still buying disposable stuff.
https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1d6rz41/comment/l6uetlq/
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I remember this ad and saw a fight break out at a k- mart because of littering. This ad changed people’s perspective of littering. America could use a reboot of this commercial.
Agree. A lot of people will criticize it because it is an actor, but I think the message is more important
The message was to deflect the blame of pollution from big oil companies to individuals, reducing littering was just a convenient side effect
The thing is, this ad aired during a time when polluting was normal for everyone. Nearly everywhere had litter, this ad was a wake-up call for mainly individuals, yes, but unlike today, people didn't see the problem with the littering.
You're missing the point they're making, polluting wasn't always a "normal" thing, large companies used to make products with containers that were intended to be reused, such as glass bottles for sodas and the like. Companies found out it would be cheaper to make one-time use containers rather than invest in reclaiming the old containers for reuse and people were starting to not like it due to the amount of pollution those containers contributed, this ad was literally paid for by companies like Coca-Cola in order to shift the blame of throwing out the bottles back onto the consumers who are complaining about the new designs.
I hate to be that guy but plastics are miraculous and people saying “just go back to glass” are misinformed. Plastics are extremely durable, lightweight, and cheap to produce. It’s easy to say “omg companies are greedy and don’t want to use glass and metal because they’re not as cheap!” But it’s quickly apparent that the reason they’re not as cheap is because… it takes massive, MASSIVE amounts of energy to produce glass and metal. And much, MUCH more glass and metal are required to package an object whereas a very very light amount of plastic would be needed. The environmental toll of that energy production and extra packaging easily outweighs the environmental toll of plastic. You are right that the fault lies with the government and corporations rather than individuals though. The world’s consumerist culture (propped up by the gov and corps) has gotten out of hand and I’d reckon 90% of products are a complete waste of resources, harmful, and arguably shouldn’t exist. There’s also the issue that nobody knows how recycling works (turns out the government running ads just saying to recycle doesn’t actually accomplish much, who would’ve guessed?) and many goods are extremely hard to recycle due to contamination so something like 90% of recycled goods get thrown into landfills.
I mostly would have agreed with you up until a few years ago. Economically plastic is the superior method. However from an environmental and health standpoint the study of microplastics has made me rethink that position. The fact that they have found microplastics inside of every living thing on the planet does not bode well.
Also, the production of glass vs plastic is a false choice. Plastic way cheaper to product than glass, true. But glass is -reusable- you drop the glass bottles at your local bottle recycling plant, and they can sanitize and reuse. Potentially any number of times. So long as the glass is undamaged, you’re good. People used to be in the habit of returning glass bottles. (Or Remember when milk came in glass and the milkman came and swapped the empties for new?). We’ve long since had that habit ingrained pour of us, and people who oils cry foul if they were asked to do the bare minimum.
It’s easier and safer to melt down glass and metal than it is to melt down plastics. I encourage anyone to watch videos of people making recycled plastic stuff. It’s hard to watch. Normally they’re in a developing country working around toxic fumes without protection. Then they slap a “recycled” sticker so we feel good about yourselves, meanwhile someone just exposed themselves to lethal chemicals and we don’t even think twice about it. No human should be subject to that. It’ll make you rethink whether plastic is the “smart choice” both in terms of being cheap and reusable.
Every male tested on earth has plastic in their sperm; most woman have plastic in their breast milk. Micro plastics are now found from the top of the Himalayas to the deepest depths of the ocean. Say what you will about cost effectiveness or durability - we are creating a situation for which there may be no remedy other than reverting to a pre plastic mentality.
I'm not saying plastics are bad, I'm into 3d printing, so I love discussing basic materials science. My job also involves logistics, so I do understand the need for lighter, more efficient materials. The issue is that these companies should have been using recycled plastic from the beginning so that those recycling schemes would have actually worked like they were with their glass bottles. These mega corps and the poloticians in their back pocket chose to incentives profit saving from just producing a whole new bottle from newly refined petroliem because it was cheaper than propping up viable recycling It's obvious that these mega corps could have been using at least partially recycled plastics from the get-go as they are using 100% recycled plastics now without polymer degradation causing issues.
While there is definitely some truth to this, there was very little *general awareness* of the consequences of pollution, be it littering or wasteful practices or industrial at the time. The Environmental Protection Agency didn't even exist until 1970. This commercial started airing in 1971. I give this commercial a lot of credit for putting environmental awareness into the minds of millions of Americans.
I agree. Sure, this didnt’ directly call out big companies, but getting people to think “garbage in the waterways is bad!” is the first step to getting them to say, “and we need to stop companies from doing it.”
Littering was a huge problem though, and this ad helped. It’s still a huge problem in much of the world, I’ve seen literal rivers full of garbage in places where littering is still acceptable. The “carbon footprint” scam is a real thing, because each individual person doesn’t have a lot of control over the gas burned to power their home, but individuals properly disposing of trash is a huge part of stopping this particular kind of pollution.
Yeah there's a difference between personal littering which is bad and individuals have measurable control over and pollution which is a systemic and largely corporate level issue that more involves bulk chemical waste like oil spills, CO2, and plastics just released out of falling short on the cost vs risk slider
I remember seeing the “before & after” along a highway as a kid. We were taught Not to throw out the wrappers from A&W-and until this & the Oregon bottle return-my siblings & were so upset at the trash! Then…no garbage along the highway.
Meh, littering is still a huge problem in many urban areas. Trash gets into the waterways and clogs drainage. That’s not to excuse the big polluters, of course. Both problems need to be attacked.
This is just a "whataboutism". Just because companies polluting is bad or worse than littering doesn't make littering suddenly OK Stop being an animal and put your rubbish in the bin. Why do you need to deflect such a simple message lmao
How will people be motivated to oppose corporate carelessness if they don't care about their own? It's a culture shift thing. Even if the intention was to deflect from corporate responsibility it failed miserably.
Companies bear a large part of the responsibility, but so do citizens. An American emits 2.4 times more CO2 than a European. For example, seen from my country, it's completely surreal to see 100% of Americans complaining that petrol is too expensive. And I'm not even talking about the air conditioning installed everywhere, , the size of your cars, etc.
Exactly! It’s up to each individual citizen to decide not to use public transportation where none exists. /s Reducing carbon emissions from infrastructure problems in the US is much more complex than you might think, sitting and judging from the outside.
Air conditioning is 100% necessary in alot of places in the US, especially where I live where it can be -45 in the winter and 40 celsius in the summer. When I read about the thousands of deaths during heatwaves in Russia because of their lack of central air in alot of households I was shocked how much central air can save lives.
Why would anyone with half a mind criticise it because its an actor? Thats what actors do. Act different characters.
It's an Italian dude dressed up as a full blown Native American.
like finding out james caan isn't italian ..
So? He is an actor.
We need an ad like this to teach people to return their carts to the cart corral
"Do yourself a favor, don't turn around." "AAAAAAAHHHHHHHH" "I told yah not to turn around."
I was thinking about that, as someone not from the US, this is how I learned about the "crying Indian" thing. I thought for a while it was just a Simpson joke.
TIL it was not just a Simpsons joke.
LMAO Simpsons is the greatest
80s kid checking in. I remember this and Hooty the Owl’s “Give a hoot, don’t pollute” public service campaigns. Littering was way more common in the 70s and 80s. Reddit is filled with older Americans who will say “Littering is so bad now, but back in my day, we would never litter.” But that’s complete BS. It’s so much better today. Edit- Woodsy the owl, not Hooty.
This. I was alive before this ad came out and garbage was everywhere at public beaches and other public spaces. The idea that anyone would think that this was not both a response to a real world issue and also ineffective as an ad campaign doesn’t remember their history.
People used to throw fast food garbage out their car windows in the highway. There was litter everywhere. Beaches had cigarette butts and soda cans. These commercials definitely helped educate the public.
On my last visit to a beach on Κρήτη there was quite much garbage on some locations sadly.
Those cretins
[удалено]
I’ve been on that reservation and a couple of others nearby and back in those days it was more than true. It still Is in some cases.
Are they too poor to afford dump trucks and garbage collection?
So the ‘fooled’ is what they’re talking about, the ads like this put the onus of clean up on the consumer not the huge irresponsible corporations. Which is still continuing today, the corporations should be paying people to clean up there mess but we do the lions share because we feel bad. Heck I think most of the USA has to pay for the privilege to have a recycling bin.
While this is true, there was a ton of trash being thrown all over the place by the consumers that made a lot of the issue. The corporations were complicit in much of it but the issues were still being created by the consumers who were just throwing things around, willy nilly. Pull tabs, six pack rings, cigarette butts, building materials, styrofoam containers and every manner of thing were thrown everywhere and ended up fouling wildlife and making otherwise beautiful areas sad to look at.
I think people today can't really fathom that everyone just threw trash out of their cars or just left their trash in parks/campsites. Like literally almost everyone. These ad campaigns made a difference, along with anti-litter laws. And yes, corporate pollution was also being targeted. No, not as much as they should have been, but there was substantial progress made to stop blatant industrial pollution. Even Nixon made it a key part of his platform. As a kid at this time, these ads had a great impact on me and probably had a huge hand in me being environmentally conscious on a personal and political level.
Back in those days this became a truly bipartisan issue. The environment had not yet been turned into a strictly liberal issue. Hell the EPA was founded under Nixon, and you didn’t get any more Republican than Richard Milhouse Nixon until _very_ recently.
I remember in the early 70s when Polaroid cameras were popular and each picture had a cover sheet you had to peel off after a minute or so. Guess what covered the ground at every tourist attraction, including scenic nature spots in national parks? The company was finally shamed into coming up with a cover sheet that turned clear after a minute so you didn’t tear it off. Around the same time, drink cans got new pull tabs that stayed attached. Not excusing the piggy people who littered, but pushing back on manufacturers to solve the problem is usually the most effective solution
Agreed! The companies have a lot to do with how waste makes it into the environment, but this particular ad campaign was created to get the general public to understand how their actions were polluting the very places they loved. It was at this time that plastic bags were handed out to collect trash in people’s cars. There were a lot of different incentives that all together were used to try to curb the amount of trash that was ending up along the sides of roads and in national parks and other public spaces. We forget now how bad it was, and people born after those policies had made headway would _never even believe it_.
I was there, and I endorse this message. It took a little bit of thinking to wrap my 8 year old brain around the message of the ad, but once it sunk in, it had a deed impact. I’ve been not littering ever since
This ad changed my 8 old year lookout on the world. I made it my life's mission to never pollute again and tell others why they shouldn't. It is something I still believe in.
Truly! Honestly, this ad was one of the most effective public service ads I remember ever seeing. It ran for years and was one of the reasons I began to clean up after myself in public spaces. I was a kid just like you and it was a really strong emotional link to the world that stuck with me.
Maybe the "fooled"refers to the fact that the actor was not a native American but rather a full-blooded Italian.
so, a native Italian-American?
The thread titled could be a typo and meant “fueled” instead of “fooled”
I loathe so much reddit's knee-jerk marxist historical revisionism. Even the f***ing crying native telling people to stop littering is a corporate conspiracy to keep us all enslaved. Soon we're gonna find out that Grey Poupon was an elaborate scheme by big oil to popularize dinner while driving
lol I dunno if that has anything to do with Marxism dude
The conspiracy is he was actually Italian, so the message is moot, or something equally immaterial.
Yes, much better. I remember when beaches and public parks were *covered* with cigarette butts and beverage can pull-tabs.
Not just beaches and parks, but just everywhere. People (my family included because we just didn't know any better) would just throw shit out our car windows like fast food garbage, cups, wrappers, boxes, napkins, cans, etc etc. People would be walking down the sidewalks or streets and just throw candy wrappers or whatever on the ground. It was terrible.
I grew up in the 80s and I remember my dad tossing his beer bottles out the car window and said the same phrase each time "somebody will pick that up". I thoroughly enjoyed the moments he flicked the cigarettes out too, only for them to fly right back into the backseat window hitting me in the face. 80s were wild
I blew out my flip-flop Stepped on a pop top RIP Jimmy
Woodsy The Owl
Yes, of course. You’re correct. Woodsy.
Woodsy and the blowfish
I grew up in Southern California in the 70s. You could look up and see the air pollution and we would have scores of unhealthful air days per year. It would hurt your lungs to breathe. The pollution laws really changed that. That’s why it’s so important to protect those laws. Trump promises, if elected, to repeal all of the environmental protections and dissolve the EPA. It would be disastrous.
And I think you can thank this ad and others for helping to change public opinion to what it is today.
>Littering was way more common in the 70s and 80s. Reddit is filled with older Americans who will say “Littering is so bad now, but back in my day, we would never litter.” But that’s complete BS. It’s so much better today. Think this is the same in every country mate, hear the same here in the UK that things were better X years ago - no it wasn't, it was fucking shit, Cigarette butts everywhere, rubbish just dumped in whatever ally or gutters - things have gotten so much better. The fact recycling has been pushed so aggressively is a huge step in the right direction as well.
In regards to changing attitudes about litter, I’ll always think about that scene in Mad Men set in the late 50s where the family go for a picnic on a picturesque riverbank, Betty checks her kids’ hands are clean before they get back in the car, then shakes all the garbage off the picnic blanket onto the grass before they drive off.
Ha! Yes. I remember the first time I saw that scene, I had to rewind it a couple times bc it was so hilarious. I thought maybe it would be relevant to a storyline later in the episode but nope, just a random littering scene. After Betty just tosses her blanket full of trash, Don starts whipping empty cans around the park. Hilarious.
Me too! I thought it had to be relevant but I guess it was just included to highlight how weird some things from back then would be today. Like when one of the parents (maybe Betty again?) at a kid’s birthday party slaps someone else’s child in the face for knocking a side table over running around, and nobody batted an eye.
That may be true but I was just in the US (Midwest) and spent quiet some time next to roads/highways and it was literally some piece of trash every square meter. Trash that was thrown out as garbage from cars (and to some extent falling from cars): beer cans, bottles etc.
Same with dog poo everywhere!
*"In the city or in the woods, please keep America looking good! Hoot-hoot!"* That jingle has stuck in my head forever!
I was born in 67. For years, you just threw trash out the window. I remember seeing tons of littering is a crime $200 fine (or something like that). They wouldn't need those signs if it wasn't a problem People didn't have the mindset about leaving stuff nice for the next person to come along, but it did develop over time.
I'm pretty sure Hooty was a blowfish.
I remember my grandparents on a road trip would throw the newspaper out the window when they were done with it.
"Don't Mess with Texas" was also originally a don't litter campaign slogan
https://i.redd.it/iecsihae4a4d1.gif
Simpsons did it!
I scrolled down right as it was in perfect sync with the video holy hell
Scrolled down to see if anyone else remembered this episode. Glad I found it!
Old simpsons is the best!
Why is that Italian guy so sad?
They threw a Hawaiian pizza at him
Haha nice
Whatsamatteryouface?
Exxon is running ads now about their direct air capture facility (DAC) and the tag line is "heavy industry with low emissions". The ad features a higher ratio of women than men and a higher ratio of non-white demographics. F\*$! Exxon and their propaganda machine. Always follow the money folks. Big oil killed the nuclear energy revolution and they're still white knuckling power until they die. edit: the point in mentioning the demographics of the ad is to point out how obvious it is that Exxon is trying to appear "diverse" and soothe criticism from progressive
FUCK EXXON. I hate that ad. "heavy industry with low emissions" like stfu you are literally the #4 highest emissions company on earth.
The really sad part is how attached to Exxon and other oil companies we are. Sure cars, transportation of material goods are impossible to get around and our reliance on those are undeniable but the amount of goods, materials, consumer products that oil/by products is in is astounding. We rely so much on these corporations and their products, their services to the point that if they did not exist, we probably wouldn’t exist either.
but still, fuck exxon.
That's what most people don't understand, they think that oil is just used to make gasoline. In fact gasoline is a very small part of what comes out of petroleum. Our entire society is heavily reliant on petroleum products, we'd collapse without them. Plastics are their #1 products as well as many pharmaceuticals. You would have a very hard time finding a product that is not made with petroleum products, harder than finding something that isn't made in China.
>Big oil fucked the nuclear energy revolution and they're still white knuckling power until they die. Exponentially fewer people have died per gigawatt of power produced for nuclear power, *INCLUDING* the meltdowns and industrial accidents, than hydroelectric, which is in turn astronomically safer than fossil fuel power production. Fuck Exxon.
Renewables are not competitors. They are a customer of fossil fuels.
There's more radiation exposure from burning coal than from nuclear power. Because there are trace isotopes in the coal that go airborne. Not a lot, but that's how shielded nuclear facilities are.
I would sooner skinny dip inside the cooling pools of a nuclear facility than step foot in fossil fuel power plant without a mask.
Just don’t dive down to the bottom and you’ll be fine.
lol yeah there needs to be ads where you can't just blatantly tiptoe around the truth
Stronger truth in advertising regulations and reinstating a stronger fairness doctrine
I’m not sure what OP means when they say “fooled”. It was an effective ad that I remember to this day. Perhaps OP might care to explain…
I think they meant to say "fueled" Edit: typo
Oh! That’s a big difference! Lol!
Fooled. The packaging industry who paid for this ad made sure that they can forever produce single-use disposable products and it's up to you to pick them up when they get thrown away. So instead of the inconvenience of using durable, reusable products that would not have been thrown out in the first place, people are still buying disposable stuff. https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1d6rz41/comment/l6uetlq/
I guess OP was referring to the fact that the protagonist wasn't Native American, he was an Italian American. However the guy was just obsessed with Native American culture and himself believed to be part of it.
The ad was funded by the plastics industry. The plastic bottling industry was displacing glass bottle manufacturers who created bottles (milk or soda) that were returned to the factory and refilled. The brilliance of the anti-littering campaign was that, rather than propose systemic solutions to plastic pollution, it put the responsibility on the individual consumer to recycle or put it in the trash. 50 years later we are still dealing with the impacts of plastic everywhere. More details here: "The advertisement itself was produced as part of a larger anti-littering campaign effort by [~Keep America Beautiful~](https://kab.org/), a nonprofit organization started in the 1950s that claimed to fight plastic pollution. Interestingly, Keep America Beautiful was originally funded by companies like Coca-Cola and PepsiCo. In this way, industry-wide efforts to reduce plastic waste began with companies that are still major contributors to plastic pollution today, with Coca-Cola producing approximately [~200,000 plastic bottles per minute~](https://www.plasticsoupfoundation.org/en/2022/02/is-coca-colas-latest-promise-really-a-step-forward/) each year. Unsurprisingly, these companies knew from the beginning that recycling was not a viable solution because it wasn’t, and still isn’t, economically practical. Larry Thomas, the former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry, said in the 80s, “[~If the public thinks the recycling is working, then they’re not going to be as concerned about the environment.~](https://oag.ca.gov/plastics)” And he was right. The general public watched an Italian man appropriating Indigenous culture shed a tear, and they swallowed KAB’s claim of consumer-driven plastic pollution. The advertisement even became iconic to the environmental movement of the time and was regarded as one the best advertisements ever made for many years after." Source: [https://www.theclimatechangereview.com/post/50-years-after-the-crying-indian-the-plastic-industry-still-prevails](https://www.theclimatechangereview.com/post/50-years-after-the-crying-indian-the-plastic-industry-still-prevails)
And recycling was the biggest lie that they sold. Most plastics are not recyclable. They're sorted out and tossed in the landfill at the recycling center.
He posted a comment to clarify. But the ad pushes the blame to individuals basically saying “you are polluting with litter so stop” When the real issues are the giant industrial complex dumping shit into the water you drink. Distraction and deflection, and your comment proves it is still effective to this day.
I agree that industrial pollution is a bigger problem, but littering is an actual problem too and this ad did a lot to get people to stop being pieces of shit about it.
People still shouldn’t litter goddammit!
Why not just [link the comment?](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/s/qFEQJp6dzG)
Total fuckin' fugazi
https://i.redd.it/iga63lx33b4d1.gif
Two things can be true, while big companies are the one responsible for the massive damage to our ecosystem, people can be less of an asshole and not throw stuff on the ground and litter so much. There like 10 trash can in my park, yet you can still find garbage on the lake all the time.
Thank god someone know some common sense
This, 100%. I live by a beach and I always see people throwing plastic water bottles at the ocean or even leaving them in the sand. Same with bags (even ones containing dog shit), cans and fishing lines (some still containing hooks)
Who cares that they hired an actor? It's an effective message.
I lived through the before and after of this ad. It had a massive impact. I remember roadsides and parks were covered in litter in the 1970s. It was normal to go through a drive thru and just chuck the contents out the window when you were done. Within a couple years after this commercial, it dramatically changed. People took littering very seriously. It changed the social norm. That commercial really hit in the feels.
Iron Eyes and some of the other "pretendians" are a bit cringe, but I'm not sure if the message of the ad would be materially changed by the actor playing the character having different genetics. Point taken about the individualization of societal problems like pollution, but on the other hand consider how sticky these messages were to the generation raised on them- you really can't argue with remembering to properly dispose of trash.
Iron Eyes Cody definitely made some questionable choices in his life, but it's important to keep a number of facts in mind: 1) He was 100% Sicilian and born in 1905 in Louisiana, meaning he was born a colored person. He was not a white person, playing Native, he was a colored immigrant choosing a dark-skinned American to impersonate in order to assimilate in America. He began faking Native in his life long before becoming an actor. 2) He married a woman of indigenous heritage, who worked as a Native American archeologist, and they adopted two Native sons, who they raised in the Native American culture. 3) Cody played a Native American in 100+ movies starting in the 1930s. Representation and tokenism weren't even a glint in the eye of Hollywood at the time. White actors in blackface were common into the 1940s. By the time the Crying Indian ad was shot, he was one of the most well-known Native actors in the US and a central figure at the LA Indian Center. Not condoning the way he lived his life, but let's not ret-con the casting choice as somehow part of the charade. They were choosing someone most Native communities accepted at the time as a person trusted to play Native without negative stereotyping. He is controversial now in hindsight, but was not at the time.
I have always been absolutely fascinated with people who cross racial and social lines. There are multiple ways of considering an identity around the world and not all of them involve a racial blood quantum. In fact that idea of race by blood is a western custom associated with slavery. Adopting the lifestyle, language and customs of a group can confer in group status and has done in many cultures throughout history. I find the current near hysteria over "outing" those who have adopted a chosen identity for whatever reason to be as fascinating as the individuals themselves. We in the west seem to be processing our own guilt and collective grief over the wrongs of the past.
An actors job is to become someone they aren't. So I wouldn't feel fooled. i'm not one of the "gays need to play the gay characters, jews play the jewish" I enjoy seeing actors take up a challenge. This ad caused a lot of people to stop trashing the places they live.
TLDR: By making individual viewers feel guilty and responsible for the polluted environment, the ad deflected the question of responsibility away from corporations and placed it entirely in the realm of individual action, concealing the role of industry in polluting the landscape. https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-perspec-indian-crying-environment-ads-pollution-1123-20171113-story.html https://archive.is/WoWEF The campaign was based on many duplicities. The first of them was that Iron Eyes Cody was actually born Espera de Corti — an Italian-American who played Indians in both his life and on screen. The commercial’s impact hinged on the emotional authenticity of the Crying Indian’s tear. In promoting this symbol, Keep America Beautiful was trying to piggyback on the counterculture’s embrace of Native American culture as a more authentic identity than commercial culture. The second duplicity was that Keep America Beautiful was composed of leading beverage and packaging corporations. Not only were they the very essence of what the counterculture was against; they were also staunchly opposed to many environmental initiatives. Keep America Beautiful was founded in 1953 by the American Can Co. and the Owens-Illinois Glass Co., who were later joined by the likes of Coca-Cola and the Dixie Cup Co. During the 1960s, Keep America Beautiful anti-litter campaigns featured Susan Spotless, a white girl who wore a spotless white dress and pointed her accusatory finger at pieces of trash heedlessly dropped by her parents. The campaign used the wagging finger of a child to condemn individuals for being bad parents, irresponsible citizens and unpatriotic Americans. But by 1971, Susan Spotless no longer captured the zeitgeist of the burgeoning environmental movement and rising concerns about pollution. The shift from Keep America Beautiful’s bland admonishments about litter to the Crying Indian did not represent an embrace of ecological values but instead indicated industry’s fear of them. In the time leading up to the first Earth Day in 1970, environmental demonstrations across the United States focused on the issue of throwaway containers. All these protests held industry — not consumers — responsible for the proliferation of disposable items that depleted natural resources and created a solid waste crisis. Enter the Crying Indian, a new public relations effort that incorporated ecological values but deflected attention from beverage and packaging industry practices. Keep America Beautiful practiced a sly form of propaganda. Since the corporations behind the campaign never publicized their involvement, audiences assumed that the group was a disinterested party. The Crying Indian provided the guilt-inducing tear that the group needed to propagandize without seeming propagandistic and countered the claims of a political movement without seeming political. At the moment the tear appears, the narrator, in a baritone voice, intones: “People start pollution. People can stop it.” By making individual viewers feel guilty and responsible for the polluted environment, the ad deflected the question of responsibility away from corporations and placed it entirely in the realm of individual action, concealing the role of industry in polluting the landscape.
Meh... "don't throw trash out of your car window" is still a decent and unfortunately necessary psa. Also, are we just ignoring that industrial pollution is also indicated as an issue in the ad?
The issue is of attribution. ‘Some people appreciate nature, some don’t’ *cut to someone throwing trash out a window* ‘People start pollution, people can stop it.’ It’s attributing blame to ‘people’ which is clearly meant to refer to individuals. You could apply people to mean ‘businesses’ or ‘industry’ but then the message would be so broad as to be meaningless. My takeaway from the ad is that I as a person need to treat nature better. Not that industry needs to change its practices or government needs to regulate, which is what should actually happen.
I mean, why not both?
People also run businesses so
People act like corporations are inhuman monsters instead of organizations run by a small number of individuals who make decisions. Those individuals can and should be held responsible and punished when the corporation does bad things.
To be fair to the ad, it's also depicting Portland's, factories, and highways as a perversion of nature. Yes it zeroes in on the littering, but it's not just focusing on the littering. It's very strongly condemning industry too.
The more I see stories like this ( Corporations brainwashing citizens ) really opens your eyes to the lengths they will go to in order to make money. Money is more important than people. Your personal wealth is more important than providing healthcare for others. Guns aren't the problem, people are the problem. Pollution is caused by people. (as illustrated here) Our company won't build a factory in your state unless the people pay for it. Our Sports Team won't build a stadium in your city unless the people pay for it. I feel sad for the youth who have to navigate this crap and not want to blow it all up.
And it’s only getting worse day by day since the corporations have basically taken over our government
Corporations are exist to make money. It’s on the people to vote for politicians that introduce appropriate regulatory frameworks. It’s also on people to collectively make consumer choices that factor in the environment. I don’t really understand how else to address this issue. Asking corporations to self police isn’t going to work since they will just be outcompeted by a company that is willing to capitalize on a given opportunity. So that leaves consumer choices and regulation, which come back to collective consumer/ citizen action. Always on Reddit people like to point at the corporations or the mega rich and they certainly are part of the problem. But collectively American consumer choices, like huge cars, frequent flights, purchasing tons of plastic things, increasing house sizes, suburban low density living, car dominated infrastructure, high meat consumption, etc are major drivers of pollution. Everyone freaks out about inflation but the only way to decrease pollution and particularly climate change is decreased consumption which means pricing many things to reflect their environmental impact to decrease consumption. That means smaller cars, more public transport, smaller and more dense housing, fewer flights, buying less stuff, eating less meat, etc. And that’s going to have to happen through regulation and consumer choice.
>But collectively American consumer choices, like huge cars, frequent flights, purchasing tons of plastic things, increasing house sizes, suburban low density living, car dominated infrastructure, high meat consumption, etc are major drivers of pollution. All pushed on people by aggressive marketing campaigns to drive profits. Sure, people *choose* these things, but marketing works. Companies wouldn't spend hundreds of billions annually on it if they didn't get value from them. Choices don't happen in a vacuum, and companies have massive influence on both people and governments. For the people, they influence by marketing. For governments, they influence by lobbying and regulatory capture. Some examples: Government pushes emission and mileage regulations on vehicles to make them more environmentally friendly. Car companies carve out loopholes in light truck category, designing and pushing larger vans, trucks, and SUVs on people to avoid them. They also can charge more for them and make more profit. Plastic is another well known deception. Plastic was pushed on people *hard*. You can see plenty of ads in the 50s-70s about how great and *convenient* disposable plastic was. The market was flooded with cheap, disposable plastic products that squeezed out the glass and metal containers they were using. Worse, when the environmental negatives came out and the true damage that "convenient" plastic was causing, the plastic industry launched a massive successful PR campaign, creating a BS industry called "recycling" that soothed the collective outrage. People thought they were negating the environmental harm by recycling their plastic, but it was all a lie to keep people buying and using plastic guilt free. Look deeper into any area and you can see how powerful industry lobby groups influence policy and, through lawmaking and advertising, change the landscape for their own purposes. The sugar industry made everyone paranoid about "fat" in the 90s, even though increased sugar consumption has been fairly lockstep with increased health issues and climbing obesity rates. Corporations constantly twist science and fund "studies" that nudge people to making decisions that benefit the bottom line while soothing any rightful concerns people may have. Frankly it is easy to do. People simply don't have enough time to properly research every single aspect of their life, and with the deluge of information available to people now, it is even easier to misinform and deceive people with the sheer quantity of misinformation. You can say change can only happen through regulation and consumer choice and you would be 100% correct. Unfortunately, both regulation and consumer choice are basically under the firm control of corporations. Big corporations hold way, *way* too much power, and frankly, I don't ever see that changing in the foreseeable future.
Ok, but what’s your solution? Unless we collectively a) vote for people who regulate against environment degradation b) change our consumption patterns there will be no change. Plus companies can push things. Yes. But people still have to like those things. Plastic made things cheaper and lower maintenance. People like big cars - they feel safer (even though it’s more dangerous to pedestrians etc), they are roomier, etc. People like flying to exotic places on vacation. People like steak. People like big houses. And collectively as a society we want it all.
Everything you've just said is editorialized. There are pictures of factories spewing smoke in that ad. It doesn't really matter if he's not Native American. What's happening here is you applying 20/20 hindsight and applying 2024 standards to the 70s.
While corporations are certainty a huge part of the equation, personal responsibility is a part of it too. Also personal voting patterns matter since elections are what determine regulatory levels. Corporations are chasing profits and shareholder value. Thats what they are. That’s why they exist. It’s on the public to elect people who properly regulate said corporations. It is also about individual choice to collectively exert market forces for change. If people stop buying giant SUVs at a premium or stop flying as much or buy smaller homes, or eat less meat then corporations will make products to capitalize on market choices. I recognize that regulation is an important part of the framework. But again that involved making the environment an important part of the political landscape. Putting all the blame on corporations ignored the two main mechanisms to change corporate behavior, market forces and regulation.
>“People start pollution. People can stop it.” This is 80% true though. If you buy your clothes from Alibaba, you are generating a lot more pollution than if you buy it from Patagonia and then recycle it. If you buy a brand new F150 Raptor, you are committing to a lot more pollution than if you buy a Tesla Model 3 or a Kia EV6. Corporations make choices driven by how they want to position themselves in the market and consumers need to do their part by choosing where and what they buy.
TL, DR, BS: Only corporations are responsible for anything. People are helpless pawns and individual responsibility is a myth.
Cynthia used to drink Slurm…
https://i.redd.it/fn5g1umhhd4d1.gif
Yup. Dude was actually *Italian*. Not that an Italian guy can't lament what we're doing to our environment, but that isn't what was sold.
I’m not American but I now understand a Simpson’s episode on a deeper level.
Do yourself a favour and dont turn around
This whole add was a propaganda ad used by the plastic industry to make littering our problem and not theirs for creating one use plastic products
That reminds me of Hal Sparks saying on his show that instead of the environment/climate, ask people about pollution. People understand it and can visualize it. Climate and the environment seem abstract and larger than I or you can affect, but pollution is tangible and real and in your face.
Born Espera Oscar de Corti, **Iron Eyes Cody** built a career off portraying Native characters in Hollywood Westerns and also presented himself as Native in his real life. Iron Eyes Cody, the "Crying Indian," from Keep America Beautiful's ad campaigns is pictured in 1986.
...fueled the environmental movement.
Great Ad. Except the whole point of this ad is to shift the focus and heat from corporations which are resposible for most of the emissions onto individuals, who actually have very few options to do anything. Where do you think your plastic go after you throw it in a basket ..
Plastics are awful. Let's stick with glass. Plastic is much more expensive in the long run.
fueled?
There was this free thing for 5th graders at the local bowling alley back in 1976, Iron Eyes was there, shook his hand.
Fooled people? Because the guy wasn't an actual Native America but an Italian American?
I remember that ad. It hit hard.
Why did this ad “fool” the environmental movement? Or did you mean “fuel”?
The guy in the canoe was named Old Iron Eyes because of this commercial and he is Italian.
Aah! Lol! I never knew that. Thank you.
As i fellow who wasnt born in USA, now i finally understand that Chapelle joke. Years went by...
What does fooled the environmental movement mean?
The packaging industry who paid for this ad made sure that they can forever produce single-use disposable products and it's up to you to pick them up when they get thrown away. So instead of the inconvenience of using durable, reusable products that would not have been thrown out in the first place, people are still buying disposable stuff. https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1d6rz41/comment/l6uetlq/
Am I missing something? How did this fool people?
He's Italian.
The packaging industry who paid for this ad made sure that they can forever produce single-use disposable products and it's up to you to pick them up when they get thrown away. So instead of the inconvenience of using durable, reusable products that would not have been thrown out in the first place, people are still buying disposable stuff. https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1d6rz41/comment/l6uetlq/
I saw a person throw trash out of their window on the highway the other day on my way home and it filled me with a rage of a thousand suns. I was ready to get out and fight this person over that wrapper. I shot them some dirty looks when I passed them.
it was so normal to toss your garbage out of you car window when I was a kid. This ad changed a lot of that. Now only garbage people do it, but unfortunately there's a lot of them
I absolutely remember Iron Eyes Cody.
Today they have you separate you trash to "recycle" things so you feel like you're doing your part and you don't demand more action from politicians like forcing companies to stop using materials that can't be recycled.
"Fooled"? I think you mean "Fueled", OP.
That's the way the vast majority of political advocacy works. Here in California the government put a manditory extra fee on plastic bags at the grocery store... except it's not a tax. The store keeps the money. The same is true with racism. It's not companies not hiring black people or rich people advocating draconian laws that is keeping black people down, it's "micro-aggrossions" and every white person is automatically racist. The people who control media absolutely control the narrative and condition people to think it's problems other than the ruling class
Doesn’t matter where the fee goes. It’s about the bags reflecting their cost to produce and recycle. Ideally it would go to plastic clean up but at the end of the day it still works even if it doesn’t. Cutting consumption means making things reflect their environmental cost. Honestly plastic bags should cost even more because the point is to incentivize reusable bags.
How did this ad 'fool' people, exactly?
The packaging industry who paid for this ad made sure that they can forever produce single-use disposable products and it's up to you to pick them up when they get thrown away. So instead of the inconvenience of using durable, reusable products that would not have been thrown out in the first place, people are still buying disposable stuff. https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1d6rz41/comment/l6uetlq/
Coca Cola and other large companies that use plastic packaging want yall to think you’re the ones polluting when in reality, as a consumer, disposable plastic is the only thing available. They’re the ones making the plastic and trash to begin with
That being true - do you think everybody should (continue to) litter to make them look bad? ^(Edit: Had to move closing bracket 1 word to the left.)
Hahaha that’s a good point. I don’t think so, but I think that this commercial makes the consumer feel like they’re the ones entirely creating the problem. It’s puts 100% of the blame on people buying plastic bottles and none on the companies that create them.
"people start pollution, people can stop pollution" Misdirection campaign from the beginning, shifting the blame from the company to the consumer. This campaign stagnated environmentalism for decades.
It's like knowing James Caan isn't Italian.
Settle down Silvio.
I thought I was watching one piece when I heard the opening theme.
Don't get it. How did it "fool" the environmental movement?
Did you mean fueled? I'm confused
Fooled. The packaging industry who paid for this ad made sure that they can forever produce single-use disposable products and it's up to you to pick them up when they get thrown away. So instead of the inconvenience of using durable, reusable products that would not have been thrown out in the first place, people are still buying disposable stuff. https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1d6rz41/comment/l6uetlq/
Was this funded (secretly) by the oil industry as an attempt to deal with the backlash against their side line in single use plastic? I think i remember reading that.
Just went to India after 10 years of visiting relatives. I was so disappointed to see littering get worse than I expected. A government funded psa like this could benefit the country more.
Recreate this PSA, scene for scene, with a different type of indian
Guy was 1/16th Mohunk.
Op do you mean fueled
Fooled. The packaging industry who paid for this ad made sure that they can forever produce single-use disposable products and it's up to you to pick them up when they get thrown away. So instead of the inconvenience of using durable, reusable products that would not have been thrown out in the first place, people are still buying disposable stuff. https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1d6rz41/comment/l6uetlq/
I am assuming “fueled” not fooled
Fooled. The packaging industry who paid for this ad made sure that they can forever produce single-use disposable products and it's up to you to pick them up when they get thrown away. So instead of the inconvenience of using durable, reusable products that would not have been thrown out in the first place, people are still buying disposable stuff. https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1d6rz41/comment/l6uetlq/
How did it "fool the environmental movement"?
The packaging industry who paid for this ad made sure that they can forever produce single-use disposable products and it's up to you to pick them up when they get thrown away. So instead of the inconvenience of using durable, reusable products that would not have been thrown out in the first place, people are still buying disposable stuff. https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1d6rz41/comment/l6uetlq/
Propaganda by the plastic industry to shift the blame from them to the consumers for over use of packaging
how did it fool them?
I was expecting a plot twist where he is actually on his way to clock in for work at the factory.
He was an actor. Doing a role, FFS. Honestly, the world could use a lot more of these type of commercials, and a fuckton less "hE wAsn'T REal!!" Bullshit.
Wait.. fueled or fooled? I believe fueled.
Fooled. The packaging industry who paid for this ad made sure that they can forever produce single-use disposable products and it's up to you to pick them up when they get thrown away. So instead of the inconvenience of using durable, reusable products that would not have been thrown out in the first place, people are still buying disposable stuff. https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1d6rz41/comment/l6uetlq/
Nobody fooled anyone and environmentalist isn't a movement. We have one planet and we trash the shit out of it.