In a week in which the New Seven Wonders of the Natural World were announced (our very own mighty East Coast Park was just pipped to the post by Brazil’s Iguaza Falls) it seems prudent to take stock of how we’re handling issues of eco-preservation. Forget all the talk of park connectors, sky gardens and silly “Supertrees,” here’s three rather more interesting initiatives we’re happy to get behind.Preserving the Lesser-Shamed Corporate Sponsor. If you haven’t yet noticed, we’ve just been invaded by some 162 baby elephants. These life-size replicas have been installed all over town, and one of them, painted like a durian, already vandalised. But our memories aren’t as pachydermously prodigious as we’d like and so we forget why this open-air art exhibit is here. Is it to highlight the urgent need for conservation of these majestic mammoths, or just good PR for the financial bigwigs who’ve coughed up an elephantine amount of money? Hopefully the latter. The beleaguered banker (identifiable by his harsh squawk “Bonus! Bonus!”) needs all the help he can get in these troubled times.Accurate Seafood Labelling. Gone are the days when it was sufficient to merely tell people which fish they were about to fry. Now they expect to know how it was caught, if it came from sustainable stock and whether it preferred The Wire to The Sopranos. What’d really help, though, is the sort of information that’s actually going to make a difference to people’s spending patterns here. You know, whether the fish has ever been name-checked by a celebrity chef, if it goes well with hyper-inflated white wine, and how difficult it is to cook it when your maid’s bunked off work for some quiet time with the security guard.Resurrecting the Dinosaurs. Just as the ferocious velociraptor ultimately evolved into the modern-day budgie, so macroshopping mallicus has become a lighter and less threatening but ultimately ineffectual beast. Now sporting such curiously redundant appendages as indoor climbing walls and canals, it’s a species crying out for a bit of genetic throwback. So we cheer any attempt to bring back to life the old-school mall. You know the type: Cramped, poorly-lit spaces, filled with people who look like they’d jump from the nearest balcony if only they weren’t already shopping underground.
