Posted on 01/25/2007 7:02:31 PM PST by DieHard the Hunter
By JOE BENNETT
The young person was standing outside the supermarket in young person's clothes that I am reluctant to describe. Oh, all right. They were horrible.
Worse still, he carried a clipboard with Greenpeace stickers on it.
"Would you . . ." he began.
"No," I said, with magisterial self-control, and marched toward the aisles of consumption. But he was youth in bad trousers, and youth in bad trousers is as buoyant as a cork.
"But," he said, "don't you care about the planet?" He was smiling the smile of smugness because he knew he was pronouncing a contemporary article of faith. If there is one thing we can all agree on, it's that the planet's a mess, a balls- up, a basket case, an almost lost cause. And it's all our fault. We really ought to look after it, poor thing.
The only trouble with this argument is that it's wrong. The planet's just fine. Never been better. Or worse. It's just trundling along as it always has, altering superficially in places but essentially unchanged, and unless it happens to have an after-the-pubs- have-shut encounter with a seriously chunky asteroid, it will carry on trundling.
We should care about the planet to precisely the same extent that it cares about us: nil. Think diphtheria, Mount Pinatubo, genital warts, the tsetse fly, the Taklamakan desert, and the fate of Aussie's Croc Man.
The Greenpeace mugger and his friends at Friends of the Earth are guilty of fallacious thinking on two counts. First, you can't be friends with the planet because it's never been friends with us. Second, it's not the planet that's heading up Defecation Creek with a paddle deficiency. It's us.
Save the planet? It will be spinning merrily through the nothingness when the human race is just a minor addition to the fossil record.
The human race is clever. Our cleverness has got us as far as recognising that we're sitting on a planet and dependent on it. We also think we may be rendering it inhospitable. If we're right, then we know what we have to do. Unfortunately, the human race is you and I writ large. And whenever you and I are faced with what we know we ought to do, we don't do it till our arm is twisted so far up our back that it's coming into view again.
Take work. We know what we need to do to make things easy at work and to quell that back-of-the- neck stress that constricts the heart and the happiness. We need to think ahead, anticipate deadlines, not waste time tidying the desk when we should be doing stuff, do stuff rather than writing lists of stuff we've got to do, acknowledge that the boss may be a slab-faced dork but that he's still the boss and likely to remain so, and we should spend less time making, stirring, staring into and drinking coffee. But do we? No, we tidy the desk and draw extravagantly sexual cartoons of the boss. Then we make coffee.
A friend used to employ an old army trick. Every time he handled a piece of paper, he signed it. His purpose was to draw his own attention and sense of shame to the frequency with which he studied certain troubling bits of paper without actually doing anything about them. The result? Troubling bits of paper so covered in signatures that the original text became illegible, thereby making it impossible to know what they wanted of him. Mission, as he put it, accomplished.
So what should we be doing? Simple. We should all get together internationally and close down one oil well and one coal mine a day till they're all gone. We'll adapt readily enough, because we'll have to, and look at what we'll have got rid of on the way. Airport cafeterias, Sir Richard Branson, Arab sheiks who've done nothing more strenuous in their lives than operate a platinum cellphone because they were born into the family that owns the right bit of sand, the Dakar Rally, space travel, nylon, road movies, jet skis, tourism, ecotourism, garrulous taxi drivers, disaffected taxi drivers, American foreign policy, the Bush family wealth, boy racers, the Cheney family wealth, SUVs, the people who dubbed them SUVs as if they had something to do with sport and utility rather than an overwhelming urge to overwhelm, BP ads, ICBMs and the AA. All gone. At a stroke. Simple. Planet says, "aaah, so you've decided to stay, have you?" and we all live as happily as we can, which isn't particularly happily but it's better than not living, ever after. Or at least till the asteroid.
But will we? Oh really, do you honestly think so? So whose well is first?
*DieHard*
(grin!)
There is a *spectacular* comet in our Western sky here in NZ, visible even by daylite with the naked eye. It has a HUGE tail, just like in the picture you posted...
Comet McNaught should be visible thru the end of the month.
Visible from here in Melbourne as well. Very impressive.
The earth will shake us off like a case of bad fleas before we can ever do anything truly harmful to it.
So that gives me ... what ... a week to get there?
There's a good photo here:
http://www.stuff.co.nz/3941190a6015.html
Not bad. I presume that's a daytime, or at least dawn/dusk, photo?
Never before stated with such eloquence!
> Not bad. I presume that's a daytime, or at least dawn/dusk, photo?
I think so. But I'm looking at the comet right now (16h47 Auckland time) and it's broad daylite out now. If anything it looks like a stricken airplane, on fire at hi altitude, against the blue sky...
...hard to describe. But awe-inspiring!
Thanks for posting -- it's a great laugh, especially "But he was youth in bad trousers, and youth in bad trousers is as buoyant as a cork."
Well, NZ is pretty isolated. Since this guy proposes living without modern energy and technology it brings, let's test it there. No fossil fuels for NZ for, say 25 years, no shipping, no air freight, no transportation, no heavy industry, no "pollution" generating power, no nasty SUVs or any other vehicles. No fertilizers for crops, no synthetics for clothing, no mills to weave the wool or process lumber, no refrigeration to keep the meat, no petrochemical based pharmaceuticals, no smelted metal products, no plastics.
Then, after this 25 year moratorium, we'll see how much the people really want to live in that world, those who haven't died that is.
> Then, after this 25 year moratorium, we'll see how much the people really want to live in that world, those who haven't died that is.
I think that's exactly the point the writer is trying to make.
Well, they do have a Ship Creek National Park. And it's an incredibly beautiful place, whether or not you bring a paddle.
Australia banned dwarf tossing as sport some time ago, so here's an opportunity for NZ to become a world trend setter. IIRC you have some nice cliffs overlooking the ocean, too.
Greenpeace stinky hippie tossing - think of it as pollution control.
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