| BULLSHIT ENVIRONMENTALISM | REAL ENVIRONMENTALISM |
| Protests the death of old growth forests, because for some reason the death of trees is sadder if they are old | Recognizes that wood is wood and arbitrary age limits on foresting make no sense |
| Talks angrily about the rape of Mother Earth or Gaia | Recognizes that while the Earth can be said to be alive, it is not a person and cannot be raped. More importantly, realizes that talking like that scares people away from the movement. |
| Has very PASSIONATE OPINIONS about IMPORTANT TOPICS that sometimes even require BOLD ALL CAPS to express. | Has a deep but pragmatic dedication to solving the important issues surrounding environmentalism before things get too out of hand |
| Thinks humanity is DESTROYING the PLANET! | Realizes that no matter what we do, the planet will be fine. Life on Earth will be fine. Even the human race will survive. What we’re fighting to save is civilization. |
| Like to talk about how awful civilization is, with its cars and pollution and carnivore tastes , and how the world would be better if everything was farms | Thinks the aesthetic displeasure of a select group of effect intellectuals is a very poor justification for destroying most of civilization. Also wonders if these people understand that if the world was farmers, they’d be farmers. |
| Like to talk about how awful civilization is, with its cars and pollution and carnivore tastes , and how the world would be better if everything was some hazy version of the Forest Primeval where everything looks like a Tolkien illustration. | Recognizes that here on Regular Earth, that situation would be less Tolkien and more the exact kind of brutal, unfair, unjust, social Darwinist nightmare that is a liberals worst nightmare . |
| Thinks that corporations are THE ENEMY because they are awful and icky and horrible and mean and must be DESTROYED because they are EVIL! | Thinks that corporations are AN OBSTACLE, and as such, need to be surmounted, but is willing to deal with them or even boost their profits to get the job done. |
| Spend all its time and energy at protests, rallies, and other “group actions” that accomplish little more than generate a good feeling of togetherness and smug superiority in the participants while demanding nothing more of them than they do things they already like to do anyhow | Spend their time and effort on things that might actually have an impact on the issue, like supporting research into carbon-busting technologies and working to get concrete and effective environmental legislature passed along with the enforcement powers to make it stick |
| Thinks that humans are THE ENEMY because they are awful and icky and horrible and mean and must be DESTROYED because they are EVIL! | Recognizes that to be both insane and hypocritical, seeing as everyone saying that is a human themselves. But mostly it’s the supervillain-level of crazy that bothers them. |
| Hates science and progress and loves things that are “natural” | Loves science and progress and wants to see more of it, and realizes that everything that exists is equally natural, whether it’s a beaver’s pond or Manhattan |
| Says “We can’t trust science to solve this problem… science is what got us into it!” | Cannot begin to grasp even the scope of the scale of the parameters you could use to describe how staggeringly stupid a statement that is. Science isn’t a substance. It’s knowledge. It also realizes that if science can’t solve it, what can? Prayer? Magic? Group hugs? |
| Wants to save all the endangered species of the world and return them to the wild where they can kill and eat one another | Agrees that biodiversity is important but only inasmuch as we don’t understand ecology well enough to know what species will turn out to be the load bearing brick on the pyramid of life. Mother Nature wipes out thousands of species before we came along and she will continue to do so long after we have gone to the stars and left this planet behind |
| Mourns the loss of the rain forests | Knows that at the current rate, it would take thousands of years of tropical deforestation to hage a noticeable effect on the world and that most of the Earth’s oxygen comes from algae anyhow |
| Reveres aboriginal peoples because they lived in harmony with the land, unlike the White Europeans | Know they lived in harmony with the land because they lacked the means and motive to do it much harm, just like White Europeans did before they had the means and motive to do it much harm. |
| Dedicate their efforts to “raising consciousness”, under the theory that there are people out there who haven’t heard of the environment yet | Know that the consciousness battle was won long ago and “consciousness raising” is just a bullshit excuse for not actually confronting the problem |
| Sends people with sleeve tattoos, tongue piercings, and dayglo haircuts around to your Grandma’s house to talks to her about, I dunno, like the environment or something? | Sends people dedicated enough to do what it takes to look trustworthy, learn everything about the exact topic at hand, and do what it takes to get people on your side |
| Get together with a group of like minded people to drink, smoke pot, and hang out together outdoors, and call that a protest, and feel like they really accomplished something | Get together with a group of like minded people to drink, smoke pot, and hang out together outdoors, and call that a barbeque, and know they accomplished absolutely nothing, even if they did it outside of some office building somewhere |
| Thinks what is important is passion and dedication | Knows what matter is focus and determination, and that dedication isn’t about who shouts the loudest or whose positions are most extreme, it’s about who is willing to do whatever that takes, even if it means significant personal sacrifice and loss of individuality, to actually solve the problem. |
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.