Taking on Big Green
As a follow-up to my last post, here's a link to a slightly more polemical articulation of the point I was trying to make yesterday. The author zeroes in on the Sierra Club committing just the sort of consumption-first compromising I was lamenting.
posted by Mark at 4:34 AM
2 Comments:
I see your point, but this guy's got his head so far up his ass he probably sees out of his mouth (if that convoluted metaphor makes any sense).
His statement, "For example, the US needs to reduce the number of cars on the road by at least 95% and make sure the few that are manufactured are hybrids." is a case in point.
Maybe that's the necessary end result, but you can't go from here to there in one step. Conservation (just like any other broadly-scoped sweeping cultural change) has to be an evolution over time.
We have to reduce the cars on the streets by 95%? Sure Einstein,you show me the straight line between A and B on that one and I'll be the first in line to pat you on the back. In the meantime, excoriating organizations for doing what they can, when they can is naive in the extreme.
Dunno why this thing fired me up so much, and I'm the first to admit I know very little about the necessary solutions to the huge problems we face. That said, capping on the Sierra Club because they don't want to become a laughingstock by embracing your "noble" paradigm shift is dumb.
4/30/2007 8:31 PM
Yeah, that sounds a little ludicrous. Perhaps I should have given the article more than a quick skim before linking to it, or at least taken a cue from NPR and added a disclaimer: "The views in this Perspective do not necessarily reflect ..."
One of the frustrations I have with the conservation community (and this goes for just about any movement) is the tension between the incrementalists like the Sierra Club and the demagogues like this guy. I think a lot of people are frustrated with the Sierra Club (myself included) because they've cozied up to big business and big politics. (Actually, I've been "off" the Sierra Club since they tried to come out against immigration, but that's a topic for another day.) But, I guess it's better the Sierra Club be cozy than someone else.
5/03/2007 10:47 PM
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