Thrawn Rickle 2
It’s Not Easy Being Green
© 1990 Williscroft
“It’s not easy being green,” crooned Kermit to an entire generation of tykes. Columnist Alston Chase quotes a German Green politician: “Grass-roots democracy sounded wonderful before we were elected to Parliament. But now we are in power, centralized solutions seem far more effective.”
“Green” is an idea whose time has come. It is impossible today to find a politician who will disavow “the environment.” The typical attitude is to decry radical actions by fringe greens while giving lip service to their so-called underlying principles. Is “Green” as Time Magazine says, merely that “…our stand on the planet is that we support its survival…”? Or is there something behind the rhetoric of survival, beyond the National Wildlife calendars, beneath movie-star environmental protests?
In Reason, Virginia Postrel quotes David Brower, whom she considers to be the “Archdruid” of the American environmental movement: “I founded Friends of the Earth to make the Sierra Club look reasonable. Then I founded Earth Island Institute to make Friends of the Earth look reasonable. Earth First! now makes us look reasonable. We’re still waiting for someone to come along and make Earth First! look reasonable.”
Earth First! is the group responsible for spiking trees, sabotaging logging equipment, and undertaking other terrorist activities in the name of the environment.
Wendell Berry, an eloquent agrarian admired by greens writes: “In living in the world by his own will and skill, the stupidest peasant or tribesman is more competent than the most intelligent workers or technicians or intellectuals in a society of specialists.” Stephanie Mills, the green journalist puts it this way: “[Recreation activities of young moderns] may not cultivate the endurance necessary for the kind of labor required to dismantle industrial society and restore the Earth’s productivity.” (…dismantle industrial society and restore the Earth’s productivity?) Elsewhere she writes, “The ecofascist in me finds it hard to trust even the outcome of a democratic process.” (ecofascist?) She goes on to imply that the only way to save the Earth is for an elite group of biology-smart ecologists to rule the rest of us with benevolent firmness. She concludes that a major element in bringing this about is that private ownership of land must be totally abolished.
Is this beginning to sound familiar? Stay tuned for further details.
