Huckleberries Online

O’Neal: ‘Green’ Is Getting Tedious

Posted by DFO

March 9, 2009 8:15 a.m. • 5 comments

I’m thinking that, to do something for the environment, I’m gonna buy me a Hummer. Let me explain. Indisputably, we should be all good stewards of the Earth. No one wants rivers and lakes to be toilets or the air to be fouled with pollutants. Environmental zealots, though, narcissistically wrapped up in their own sense of preciousness, take a perfectionist approach to environmental issues, which is inevitably doomed to failure. With 6-plus billion people inhabiting this planet, resources are going to be used, stuff is going to be burned, and we’re going to make messes. Rather than turning environmentalism into a religion of pointless gestures, like cloth grocery bags, sane people take a different approach. They focus on what works at a cost that’s reasonable/Michael J. O’Neal, Moscow-Pullman Daily News. More here.

Question: How do you rate yourself in terms of environmentalism?

Five comments on this post so far. Add yours!

moscow_minidoka on March 09 at 9:55 a.m.
O’Neal won’t need to worry about the environment at all once Dick Harwood is running the Sovereign Nation of Idaho…

I understand the point O’Neal is trying (and failing to make). Yes, some environmentalists are zealots, but that’s the case with ANY group - think free enterprise zealots, fundamentalist Christian zealots, etc.

I don’t quite understand why he thinks using a cloth shopping bag is an “empty gesture,” though. Lots of little people doing lots of little things does aggregate after a while, after all. Think about roadway trash… if I just throw one beer can out my window, that’s just one beer can. Is that a meaningless and harmless violation? Well, not when the next 4000 people to drive down that road do the same thing… it adds up.
tjh on March 09 at 1:48 p.m.
I made it through O’Neal’s full piece and it’s well written. Except for all the facts he gets wrong! (All of them cited without any authority, not surprisingly.)

If O’Neal really wants to argue that a Hummer has less impact on the environment than a Prius, well, there’s some other kind of zealotry going on…
LukeB on March 10 at 7:38 a.m.
He makes good points without getting to the real point - that the cost of an item does not reflect it’s total, real cost when externalities are taken into consideration. This is the main problem with capitalism - it is an economic system totally unable to take future envirornmental costs into present prices, which is why we need the government to tax consumption at all levels.

Or, we need to find an economic system not predicated on the assumptions of infinite resources and infinite growth.

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D.F. Oliveria is a columnist and blogger for The Spokesman-Review. Huckleberries Online was judged the best 2008 Idaho newspaper blog by the Idaho Press Club. And the best 2007 news blog in the Pacific Northwest by the Society for Professional Journalist. Print Huckleberries is a past winner of the Herb Caen Memorial Column contest by the National Association of Newspaper Columnists. The Readership Institute of Northwestern University cited this blog as a good example of online community journalism.