The backlash on the green trend has finally arrived, and the question now is if the current wave of environmentalism has staying power.
The people at
Spiked see environmentalism fundamentally as an emotional spasm, a twitch of guilt and angst, which dresses itself in "frightfully dry statistics" to look grown up.
Greenormal argues that "the fact that it is fashionable at the moment gives us no indication as to its prospects, either way." But my favorite recent sentence for clarity and wisdom comes from the
New York Review of Books:
The genius of the tobacco companies has been to exploit not just the purchasing habits of the young and the addictive centers of their brains, but their dreams for a better life and their constant search through fantasy for meaning and identity.
That's a sentence which says more than it lets on -- not only because the climate change issue (especially the US auto market) is remarkably like where tobacco was in 1950 (which is a grim prospect), but also because it hints that what the people at Spike really want, as do the people giving green awards and organizing Live Earth, is meaning and identity.
Here is the full article from the current New York Review of Books, written by Helen Epstein, the daughter of Barbara Epstein, the NYRB editor who died of lung cancer last year. Barbara Epstein was also the editor of Anne Frank's Diary.
