Of course it's a lot of stereotyping; I was having a laugh, mainly; it's not like I've done a lot of intensive studying of the groups, or had a lot of contacts with them outside of festivals and the drug game, and those are all a bunch of wooked out fucks anyway; to be sure, nobody in these scenes are the best and brightest out of any culture that might wind up with its' kids getting involved with that, is it?
As far as environmentalism as an overarching political or metapolitical goal goes, "not destroying the planet" is probably something that really pretty much nobody is going to disagree with, right? "Think globally, act locally," and all that, recycling is obviously a good thing (except in those cases, where in net energy/resource expenditure, it turns out not to be.) Until we get down to the nitty gritty of how it's going to effect people's lifestyles, and livelihoods, and so on.
This, more than anything is why global warming persists as a controversy, and a political one besides a science in which the facts are not yet wholly agreed upon; I have chosen to refrain from caring or forming an opinion on the whole mess, first because I don't know the science (as, unlike a lot of fields of study, the reasonably intellectual amateur type
cannot, and as far as I understand it involves sophisticated computer models and stuff), and on the surface it seems the the anti-anthropogenic crowd are "denialists" (an interesting choice of phrase, and score one for effort at least in propagandizing your average latte-sipping
Times reader against their opponents using it) and are in the minority of the scientific community; on the other hand, the anthropogenic climate-change people traffic in apocalyptic rhetoric and points-of-no-return, and have returned quite a few predictions unfulfilled, which is common enough in science, but not so much in politics; the anti-anthropogenic people receive funding from people like the Kochs and the oil industry, but the anthropogenicists from Soros and various other bogeymen on the other side of the debate, neither of whom really has any sincere interest in science, at all, but is interested more in economics and social control (and science seldom exists in a vacuum, I'm reminded of Bertrand Russel[?]'s
Apologia for pure mathematics, saying it could never do any harm, with beautiful irony released only a few years before the atom bomb and the modern use of cryptography in war; but anyway, just like pharmaceuticals or anything else, there are powerful issues at play, on both sides of the equation, interested in furthering their own interests of profit and social control.)
Which is what it boils down to. Economics and social control. I highly doubt we're going to be around enough long enough to worry about the fact that most of the world's resources are finite and so forth, we've really proven ourselves adept at killing one another and producing totalitarian societies that'll keep that in check long enough. And,
by the simple fact of being "something we can all agree on," I find "not destroying the planet," as a political cause, to a be a pretty suspect one; if it is, in fact, something we can all agree on, then it's probably a set of false dichotomies created to distract us from other issues (like jobs, "green" or not, energy, petro-wars, whatever.) But my basic heuristic is to be suspect of anything that smells of such simplicity. As a lifestyle choice, people of course should do what they see fit; but as an overarching political position,
particularly when it becomes a "single issue"-type preoccupation, whenever something is self-evident ("saving the planet is good"), and a whole set of ideas and programs "necessarily follows" from that, then generally speaking, people are getting played. Sometimes we don't even know by whom, how, or to what end.
The conspiracy theories involving climate change ushering new forms of totalitarianism sound pretty far out, but, studying totalitarianism (and I don't just mean the proverbial 20th century Big Bads), is it, really? Life in this age is totalitarian all the way down, pretty much, so who cares? It definitely ushers in ample opportunity for people to make money off the greater fool (selling carbon coupons or green homes or promising the government to create over 9,000 green jobs in a juicy voting district or whatever; or OTOH, profiting off various things generally thought of by the anthropogenicists as being climate-harmful, by being long/short them economically based upon
political consideration), that's for sure, which ever side you're on.
we used to make shit in this country, now we just have our hands in the next guy's pocket.