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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
March 11, 2007
Holier than thou
I noticed in one of those commendable articles on Canada.com, this week, which made Drudge, that the green people have discovered “environmentally-aware sex”. It was overdue. The Italian Communist Party took much less time to discover ideologically-aware sex, and by the 1960s had a manual instructing party members that, “Sex, without class-consciousness, cannot give satisfaction, even if repeated to infinity.”But once again, we find that the Communists were a little deeper than their “environmentalcase” successors. For the “green sex” that Greenpeace is currently selling rejects only stuff like, “sex toys containing phthalates, controversial chemical plasticizers believed by some to be hazardous to humans and the environment alike.” Make a note of that, gentle reader: no more phthalates in your sex toys. And a shopping hint: Babeland.com now offers vibrators, soy massage candles, natural lubricants, and condoms that not only do not contain phthalates, but have never been tested on animals. Also, Greenpeace recommends S&M paddles made from sustainably-harvested timber. Some of their other suggestions are more dubious, for instance, “shower together”. For what if it takes twice as much time? To say these people disgust me would be misleading. It would concede they might be from the same planet, whereas I think they’re from Mars. My father once met an early ecofreak in New England somewhere, who had hooked up his IBM Selectric to a power-generating windmill. The man was very proud of his little accomplishment, which allowed him to tap out his Whole Earth hippie blather without burning any fossil fuels. Papa’s confidential comment was, "Why doesn't he use a [deleted] manual typewriter?" The same sort of question comes to mind in reading the revelations about power use in Al Gore’s vast environmentally-friendly mansion in Tennessee. His household sucks up twenty times as much electricity as the U.S. average. But he gets to feel less guilty about it because, being filthy stinking rich, he can afford to buy “offsets” for all this conspicuous consumption from an eco company in which, by a happy coincidence, he owns shares. This company in turn attracts huge public subsidies for “alternative energy projects” that -- check me if I’m wrong -- can only generate yet more power. Mr Gore is beyond hypocrisy. By comparison, I think Canada’s Stéphane Dion may still be beneath it. Both persist in contributing to an environmental problem that the ecofreaks are unable to discuss. This is the proliferation of micro-managing bureaucratic agencies and regulatory layering that make life ever more ridiculously complicated for all the simple little souls like me, give the rich with lawyers a big leg-up on the poor who lack them, and contribute substantially to the global consumption of power and paper. One turns to Henry David Thoreau for relief. The man just hewed himself a log cabin by a pond, and got on with marking up paper. Of course, had he lived a century later, chopping those trees down without undergoing a thorough public review process would probably have got him arrested, but Thoreau was a pioneer of civil disobedience, too. Most of my life I’ve lived in quarters where the largest single electrical power draw was for light bulbs. There is no such thing as a manual laptop, so I will not charge myself with that sin. I have a modest stove, and a modest refrigerator, a small vintage CD player, and an electric fan that comes out on the hottest days in summer. I had a little vacuum cleaner, too, but the sound of it drove me crazy, so I went back to just a broom. No car. I’m an inner-city boy and I hate cars. Before recently having my left leg bungled in a hit-and-run by a woman in a big black SUV who looked angry enough to vote Green, I was walking about five miles a day, carrying e.g. groceries home in a large satchel. Hope to be doing so again, soon: in the meantime I’m over-encumbering the city transit system. On the other hand, the couple-thousand second-hand books I’ve accumulated trap more than my share of global carbon. I mention these things because I want my climate-changed readers to appreciate just how holy I am. And yet: I don’t feel holy. I do not hold myself up as a model to anybody. And while I might make the occasional moral decision, it is on my own behalf. My consumer choices are almost purely aesthetic. I actually prefer things I find in flea markets. Whereas everything these ecofreaks sell is false and ugly. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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