You don’t know me, I don’t know you. So before I write my article, I will first take a look at the online store NRC. Then I know again who I have in front of me.
The people who run this online store know the NRC reader best. It has to be, otherwise the store wouldn’t be profitable. The newspaper tells you what you think of the world, but in the store I see what you really want and buy: the shop window is the mirror of your soul.
You want a slow juicer for 469 euros or an ‘organic’ wine for 16 euros; you want designer stuff for the smarter educated and dirt-cheap boxer shorts; you want boutique hotels with luxurious packages, you want to fly away and wake up in a warm country.
I would like to do that myself.
Yet I just stumbled across a photo of a toucan with the offer: ‘Join me for fifteen days NRC on a nature trip to Costa Rica.’ (from 6,498 pp). The travel program read like a garden bird count, but in those ‘mysterious cloud forests’ of Costa Rica, ‘where as a nature lover you will never be bored for a second.’ Not for a second, no: ‘to save time we take a short domestic flight to San José. Because the plane flies quite low, we can get a good impression of how green Costa Rica really is!’
Why am I annoyed? Yes, flying to see birds, of course – but why? I haven’t flown for years myself, because I find it boring (my eyes are full of all the beauty here), but I don’t make any moral judgments about people who want to experience more than just some ring-necked parakeets, for example the quetzal. spot: a green-red, avocado-munching bird with a calligraphy tail a meter long and a call like a timid car alarm – and for that you have to go to Costa Rica.
Or do I have a moral judgment now? In any case, a moral problem. I get paid for this piece from the profits from such trips. I write with butter on my head, a tiny curl of butter, to be sure, but still.
Suppose I want to write in a moment that pleasure flying is wrong. Or just a disturbing piece about the state of nature, something against nitrogen farmers or against climate deniers in the threatening government… Then one could say: yes, hello, you are paid by a newspaper that encourages flying!
I wouldn’t get in the way of that. This newspaper indeed encourages travel to Iceland, Japan, New York, etc. It could be the webshop of a climate denier.
The CO2-footprint of the trip is compensated, it is now stated. For example, extra trees are planted, what carbon credits produces. But I can’t hide behind that. The trade in CO2credits is accompanied by ‘negative ecological consequences’, Wouter van Noort wrote in this newspaper. Compensation does not help, also wrote The New York Times.
And even if it worked, the logic would remain idiotic: ‘plant a tree so you can demolish one’. Give someone a cloth to stop the bleeding so that they can then hit them. Call it hypocrisy credits.
That ‘CO2compensation’ also fuels the belief that we, the relatively rich, can continue as before. Climate compensation is a shorter word for it quod licet Iovi non licet bovi. It is always the others who have to change their lives. Then you shouldn’t be surprised if they rebel.
Anyway. The online store therefore undermines my moral authority. Certainly, the shop and the newspaper are in theory strictly separated. But it says ‘Fly with NRC’; not with Corendon or Sunweb. And just as the quality of the newspaper reflects on the items in the shop window, the items and trips also reflect on this piece. They are under the same NRC logo.
Hypocrisy, no human can live without it, but it has a cost. You can’t point fingers at climate deniers and work for a fly shop yourself. It’s one of the two.
So I don’t think anything of the world for the time being. I refer you to the story The man who planted trees by the Frenchman Jean Giono from 1953. About someone who plants trees, not for the credits, but simply. Trees are beautiful and good.
And then I leave it to you to daydream about a newspaper that sells trees, not to fly, but just. I’m sure there are plenty of you who would happily pay for a forest, without necessarily wanting to make a trip.
Arjen van Veelen replaces Floor Rusman.