Ecotopia and their Facebook Forest
Ecotopia, not the fine people who cycle across Europe every year but the peddlers of “environmental and ethical shopping” (an oxymoron if ever i heard one), have created the “Facebook Forest”, a place on Facebook where, in return for our joining up and inviting our friends to join up, Ecotopia will plant one tree for every fifty of us who join up.
Ecotopia are one of a large number of companies selling eco-nonsense, blatant eco-cons and fraudulent eco-snakeoil products. While I am sure some of the products Ecotopia sell are great, they also sell EcoBalls, magnetic toilet descallers, magnetic fuel savers, Aqua Balls and Magno Balls; none of these products offer a any proof that they work, indeed i am quite certain that they don’t work, they are a cynical exercise in extracting money from well meaning people. More info on what I think of EcoBalls here and the magnetic products here.
Ecotopia were shortlisted for an award for Observer Ethical Awards as Ethical Business of the Year, but they seem to have been removed.
At face value the Facebook Forest seems a worthy enough cause, does it not, or at worst a fairly benign, albeit cynical, marketing exercise? However, they came in for a lot of hard questioning and criticism on the Facebook site (at least in part from me, but from many others too) which they chose to edit and delete rather than publicly respond to. Sure some of people were out-and-out nasty but others, such as myself, were not; we asked fair questions and Ecotopia deleted them. Funnily enough this annoyed people and they posted their outrage on the Facebook Forest site, resulting in further deletion until eventually Ecotopia withdrew the facility to post messages to their page entirely.
Now the FacebookForest page of Facebook is rather dull and lifeless because the “wall” and the “discussion” sections have been removed, making it a very one way experience; a very old school, read only internet rather than the bold, two way, “web 2.0″ Facebook experience.
It seem obvious to me, though clearly no to them, that it is a bad move to use social networking sites and viral marketing to jump on the environmental bandwagon to try to sell pseudo-eco ideas and products. This is presumably because they don’t see the irony of selling the idea of planing trees, with Ecotopia-branding on them, to somehow offset their/our guilt for having bought into the oxymoron of eco-consumerism and selling eco-shit, while trying to get us to attract our friends to their web site, presumably to sell them things they otherwise would not have bought and do not need and probably don’t work. They seem to be muddling the altruistic idea of planting trees with the not so altruistic idea of marketing crap, and they have chosen the wrong place to do it.
Problem for Ecotopia is that if they censor people on the internet in one place then the censored material will pop up elsewhere on the internet, where they can’t do anything about it. Anyone who would like to comment on this is welcome to, please fill in the form at the bottom of the post.
[ Facebook Forest on Facebook and Facbook Forest on Ecotopia's site. ]
