Of Monkeys and Banks

In my third Feelgood Friday post I said I wanted “to go right up into the horrors of the world today and find beauty in them” but last week I really enjoyed the bunnies. Is there another recent news story that involves serious issues for the human race and cuddly animals?

Why yes, yes there is.

Deforestation! Now there’s a dire issue. Expanses of essential forest are disappearing, worsening climate change, robbing all of us of the advantageous (medical) secrets undiscovered in the verdant depths, depriving us of our natural heritage, and threatening extinction of an unknowable number of species with just as much right to exist on the planet as we do. 

You didn't know they get along?

Including...baby chimpanzees! Cute, cuddly, big-eyed and fuzzy-headed baby chimpanzees. And tigers, for crying out loud! As if we have enough of those to spare.

Videos like this one are pretty damn shocking. And it’s all for 1%er corporate profit from producing disposable packaging. Paper and pulp. Since we need more junk mail, redundant print-outs, and packaging.

But what can we really do against corporate titans? Sign a petition? Scoff! Go for it Greenpeace, but we all know banks are impervious to morality. (Unless they happen to be in Iceland, the one country with the ethical cajones to actually hold its bankers accountable.)

And yet, after less than three weeks, Santander bank decided not to continue funding the deforestation. It turns out that even a massive bank pays attention nowadays when 167,513 people sign a petition, 14,788 send emails to the CEO, hundred pick up the phone, people visit branches to speak their consciences, and the video gets shared 100,000 times. Or perhaps they’re just an abnormally human company. That’s theoretically possible.

One bank pulling their funding may not be enough to persuade a company like April to find a better way, but it sends a powerful message that perhaps rapacious business-as-usual isn’t going to be so as-usual for long.