We respond to pictures very differently than we do to words. We grasp the meaning of words, but pictures grasp us.
There was something fundamentally wrong about the image of journalists being roped together to march in a Fourth of July parade in Gorham, New Hampshire (pop. 2,788). The occasion was a presidential candidate celebrating Independence Day in small town America, but the photo image mostly evoked ancient Rome, with captives being displayed to cheering crowds by a conquering general in a triumphant march through the city.
The purpose of the roping was to keep the media representatives away from Hillary Clinton during the parade. Certainly the merits of the roping can be debated. The news media can behave badly and monopolize the time and visibility of a candidate. The photograph of the journalists being roped in can be dissected, pixel by pixel, and its impact on the 2016 presidential election can be analyzed. But in the end it gets back to our initial, visceral response to the photograph. And what we saw was somehow very wrong.
Closer to home, there was something very wrong, too, about thousands of beautiful apples being spread out on the ground to rot. Over $90 million worth of apples that should have been shipped to customers overseas were instead transformed into a stinking mess by an intransigent Port of Seattle labor dispute.
The apple situation did not get a lot of attention, and most likely will soon be forgotten by all but the growers and others who lost the money and perhaps a few statisticians and economists.
What the apples didn’t have was a great picture. There was no visceral reaction. It is harder than you might think to take a great picture of rotting fruit. At a distance the decaying apples fade into the landscape. And while a close-up photo might be an appealing pin-up for a fruit fly, among humans it is more likely to create a response of “yecch” rather than “something is very wrong.”
What was missing in the rotting apple photo coverage was something that could prompt human emotion about the waste of resources. The apples needed a “Crying Indian.” In the 1970s the Keep America Beautiful non-profit organization ran a television ad that showed parts of our country that had been despoiled by pollution. The ad ended with a close up of a Native American with a tear running down his cheek. The advertisement was so successful that “The Crying Indian” became part of our language and symbolic of a new environmental consciousness.
A similar situation besets the unconscionable waste of halibut taken from the Bering Sea. An estimated 82 million pounds of halibut, dying or already dead, have been dumped back into the sea in the past decade by fishing trawlers which netted the fish but are forbidden by law to bring them to market. Only halibut caught by hook-and-line methods can legally be sold.
This is a sad, monstrous waste of a needed natural resource — but, like the spoiled apples, there are no great photos to reach out to us. What little is being done — a recent ruling by the Northern Pacific Fishing Council, for example, reduced by 25 percent the number of halibut that can be destroyed — is of interest to very few outside the industry.
It is difficult to believe that the halibut problem cannot be solved (the fish didn’t cause it, by the way) by the federal government agencies that regulate fishing in those waters. They just lack the prodding that public interest and concern can provide.
It is equally hard to believe that the state government in Olympia could watch the developing strike at the Port of Seattle and not figure out a way to transport the apples to food banks that would have put them to good use. Yet a government that declares an emergency so that a professional sports stadium can be publicly funded, a government that can shovel millions of dollars into misbegotten transportation projects, somehow could not come with a way to move some apples.
Economic issues like rotting apples and dead halibut are not the most photogenic subjects in this world. And neither the Congressional Record nor the Economic Report of the President publishes a swimsuit issue. We’re stuck with most economic issues being word-based, or worse, number-based. They lack the immediate visceral impact of great pictures.
We live in a time, though, when population strains, drought, and climate change are exerting pressure on our natural resources. We cannot afford the kind of uncaring waste that so characterized our past and still blights our present. And we cannot afford the kind of wasteful thinking that ignores issues simply because there are no pictures.
James McCusker is a Bothell economist, educator and consultant. He also writes a column for the monthly Herald Business Journal.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
