I was going to post about Harvard researchers stopping light and then restarting it in super-cooled sodium atoms. But then I ran across this site. They're doing a hatchet job on the environmental movement using the documentary stylings of Michael Moore and Al Gore. More MM, though, in that they have a keen eye on how to clip interviews and find the most unappealing spokespeople. Here's the big problem as they see it: Environmentalists. They (the greens) fucking hate, hate!, poor people. They're rich, bleeding hearts with no connection to the real world, much like the liberal swamp from which they spawned. What the poverty-stricken of the world need is more industrialization, especially in the form of extractive mines, because once the resources are all extracted, the company will still be around-- I'm letting my sarcasm get the better of me. But here's the big problem with the piece: Environmentalists. They seem to think--or cagily pitch--that Greenpeace equals Sierra Club equals Earth First! equals PETA equals. . . And so on. There are things you can say about "environmentalists." For example, they think about what the environment means to them. After that, though, pretty much all bets are off. How active are they? What are their intersts? Conservation? Toxic waste? Oceans? Environmental racism? Population? Give yourself a minute to expand this list in your own head. Another key bit of slipperiness: what is meant by growth versus development? How you define those terms will be real influential in the stands you take and the arguments you make (my god, I'm sounding like the Beatles. . . ), which, I realize, is right at the level of the first year of college. To sum up: It looks like a pretty awful piece, badly done. And I'd love to follow the money.
For a long and fine discussion of environmentalism, I'd suggest my booklist. Ahem. But to point to a particular title: Thiele's Environmentalism for a New Millennium. And you could drop by the Grist site for more fun.
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