Earth Day came and went, making all the difference to the melting glaciers that Live Aid made to Africa. That is, none.
People trotted out the empty platitudes about how every day should be Earth Day, tried to hawk sustainable, organic wares in the market of spectacle and beg money for charities that have accomplished nothing and will never accomplish anything. Appeal to my morality, ask for my cash.
And just where is this environment that people keep talking about? Is it on Young Street, perhaps lurking in a strip club wash-room? Or is tied up with real-estate restrictions in some park; a green-zone that exists at our mercy to serve our voyeurism? Maybe it’s the sky.
There is no such thing as the environment. The environment is just something you watch on television. If you’re lucky, you take a two week trip to it, snap some pictures and return home. Post the evidence on YouTube and Fickr.
It’s bigfoot.
We do not live in it, we amble through it as tourists. Our real environment is the boulevard, the bar and the electric box. It’s not the trees we’re trying to save, it’s the ability to remain alienated from them. Having raped the Earth, we’ve decided that it’s now polite to ask it on a date. “Was it good for you, honey?”
Environmentalism is just a method we use to trick ourselves into thinking we’re good people. It’s a marketing stratgey used by us, on us and for us. We don’t care about the planet. We never have. We care about the planet’s ability to impact our shopping habits.
Should we think about the planet, we might realize why our ancestors ran from it in such screaming horror. It’s a monster. Like Bigfoot.
And it’s dead.
3 comments
laurenarcher
April 26, 2009 at 9:21 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Let us retreat to our Caves of Steel, then…
We can’t save the planet, anyway. The planet will save itself after we’re gone and be better off for it.
Mego
May 22, 2009 at 8:58 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
What is the environment?
“1. The circumstances or conditions that surround one; surroundings.”
The environment isn’t a thing per say- it’s a place. A place can’t be dead.
It’s not bigfoot. It’s not something someone made up. Are you alive? Are you breathing and eating and shitting? Then you are in an environment. You are in your environment.
The fucking hippies made it some sort of mythical creature. It’s not.
And people do care. People have cared. Speak for yourself. You don’t care. Say it. Don’t be a coward.
But by not caring- you are one.
Ryan Oakley
May 22, 2009 at 9:30 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
The environment is not a place, it is a concept. It’s like a home vs a house.
Curiously enough, shortly after I wrote this, an environmental marketing firm advised environmentalists to stop using the term “environment.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/02/us/politics/02enviro.html
“In fact, the group’s surveys and focus groups found, it is time to drop the term “the environment” and talk about “the air we breathe, the water our children drink.””
At any rate, I was trying to speak to our alienation from the natural world; that even the defenders of it have lost touch with it; that it is, in this day and age, impossible, to really be a part of it. We’re not trying to save nature, we’re trying to save what we think about it. We’re tourists. All of us.
If that was lost on you, I’m sorry.