Fragilecologies Archives
3 January 2002
When I was a kid, decades ago, I used to travel the world over. But I had to do it vicariously, by reading the travel sections of the local Sunday newspaper and by collecting stamps.
The desire, if not the need, for travel probably started innocently enough, with that stamp collection. I remember that some of the most beautiful stamps were from countries with names like Nyasaland, the Cayman Islands, Rwanda-Burundi of Tana Tuva. Some of these were colonies but are now independent countries.
American stamps were also quite fascinating. In my imagination they took me to such faraway places as the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone National Park, Yosemite, Bryce Canyon of Arcadia. I also got lots of history lessons about wars, treaties, presidents and so on through the stamps that I collected, either by accident of by purchase at a local stamp shop.
The business of stamps
Stamps often carry lasting messages to the people who buy them as well as to the people who receive them. People collect stamps in a neatly organized album, or piled up in the top drawer of a desk.
Stamps have become big business for postal services around the globe. You can find, for example, U.S. presidents on stamps of countries that seem to have only one thing to export – stamps of U.S. presidents, movie stars or Walt Disney characters.
Stamps that deal with the natural environment present only the prettiest side of nature: national parks, butterflies, birds, fish, even different types of coral reefs. However, many countries that produce beautiful stamps of nature that pay homage to flora and fauna have laws in place that allow the wanton exploitation of the very environments that they so beautifully and proudly display on their postage stamps.
There are very few examples of exceptions, but a few do exist. During a trip to Moscow I came across two stamps that focused on environmental problems. One was a Chernobyl stamp printed in the late 1980s. Another was an ecology stamp that portrayed the drying up of the Aral Sea in (at that time) Soviet Central Asia. I was surprised to find that a government had actually immortalized some of its major environmental disasters on its postage stamps. What a novel idea.
Stamps as a message
Perhaps the UN could consider this design as a possible postage stamp in order to focus attention on El Niño
Isn’t it time for all governments to “stamp their environmental problems?” So, here’s my suggestion for the “Idea Bank.”
For example, the U.S. Postal Service produces stamps of the environmental problems that our society faces: Love Canal, the 42 environmental “hot spots” in the Great Lakes, the clear cutting of forests in the Pacific Northwest, oil spills, the effects of the destruction of wetlands, Three Mile Island, nuclear waste disposal, landfills, global warming, the ozone hole, the horrific consequences of landmine proliferation and so forth. Other countries could stamp their disasters.
To put these issues in front of the public on a daily basis, in a medium that many of us collect (especially young people), could help to educate the American public and policy-makers on the fragility of earth.