Celebs Ignore Death, Poverty on MTV Enviro Series
 

http://www.cnsnews.com//ViewNation.a...20050422a.html

By Marc Morano
CNSNews.com Senior Staff Writer
April 22, 2005

(CNSNews.com) - A new MTV series features Hollywood celebrities praising the developing world's primitive lifestyles as earth-friendly -- despite those poor nations' high infant mortality rates and short life expectancies.

The eco-tourism show, called "Trippin'," premiered on March 28 and was heavily promoted in the runup to Earth Day. The show encourages environmental awareness and lauds traditional tribal lifestyles, which lack running water, electricity and other basic infrastructure.

The MTV series features actress Cameron Diaz and a rotating crew of "her close, personal friends [who] think globally and act globally." They tour developing nations, incuding Nepal, Bhutan, Tanzania, Honduras and visit remote villages in Chile.

Actress Drew Barrymore, who reportedly earns $15 million a film, told MTV viewers in one episode that after spending time in a primitive, electricity-free Chilean village, "I aspire to be like them more."

Barrymore, apparently enthralled by the lack of a modern sanitary facilities, gleefully bragged, "I took a poo in the woods hunched over like an animal. It was awesome."

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'Perverse and immoral'

A critic of the environmental movement condemned the new MTV series.

"There's something perverse and immoral when multi-millionaire Hollywood celebrities head off on junkets in the jungle - and then preach to us lesser mortals about the joys of the simple life, and how we should protect the Earth, conserve energy, prevent global warming, and help the poorest people on our planet continue "enjoying" their poverty, malnutrition and premature death," said Paul Dreissen, author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power/Black Death told Cybercast News Service.

"Life in these developing countries is still nasty, brutish and short. And that there is a reason our parents and grandparents worked so hard to create modern homes and hospitals and technologies, so they could leave behind the unsafe water, dung fires, pollution, rotted teeth, infant mortality and life expectancies half or ours," said Driessen.

"This entire MTV series totally glosses over the hardships and premature death that is right before their eyes. Even mentioning these facts would obviously get in the way of their ideological message, and their determination to turn [MTV viewers] into little ventriloquist's dummies for the sustainable development movement," Driessen explained.

Bless their poor little hearts.

Stewardship of the Earth is an excellent idea. If this show gets anyone to think about that notion just a little bit, I think it's fantastic.

Happy Earth Day everyone! Even you, TS, you troll.

Why is there never a pit viper around when you really need one?

Hey, hey, hey...

I'm no troll. Stewardship is a grand idea, just so long as it uses the newest technology and research to ensure renewability.

Fuck a bunch of shitting in the woods.

OK, I'll be steward......tickets please....or get off my Earth. :lol:

I wouldn't even allow my Australian Shepherd to poop in the woods in Chile. That's an excellent way to pick up brucellosis. Little Drew may have discovered by now that she brought home some nice bacterial infections too.

One can only hope.

Celebrities perpetuate a whole different breed of racism. Or maybe it's class-ism. The idea that the darling little brown people with their funny bead necklaces are CHOOSING poverty and disease because they're so in tune with "nature" is patronizing as hell, not to mention ignorant. Why don't you spend some of the money you made being filmed shitting in the woods to build a hospital or a way to make safe drinking water? Send the foot masseuse who travels with you home for a week or two, pick up a shovel and help these people that you are so enamored with.

The amount of money these people spend in one day on trucker hats and customized Blackberries could feed a village for a month. I think some of these celebrities and like minded assholes (trying not to get political) would prefer that the poor stay that way so they can continue to have photo ops and something to cry crocodile tears over.

[/rant]

Hey, hey, don't be blaming me for that shit.
Although it does bee-line for the reproductive organs. :blush:

Sorry about that, Bruce :blush:

These "picturesque" and "charming" villages like those I have been in must have been downwind of the places where these celebs were being filmed while rhapsodizing over the view and the values that these folks share. Usually the miasma rising from the livestock pens, pit latrines, and natives that have not been able to bathe for a year let alone wash their clothing is enough to stun a moose, so it would probably wilt the makup on Paris Hilton at 500 yards. Another thing which they are conveniently overlooking is the inevitable environmental degredation which usually surrounds these communities. Between scarce water supplies being thoroughly polluted by runoff from the animals and people doing their business nearby, often every stick of wood has been stripped for miles in every direction. Conservation is the luxury of the developed countries, these folks never heard of it.

So, did these celebs happen to mention that they are going to help out by giving away all their material possesions and move to a quaint little villiage in Rwanda?