Why bother? by Micael Pollan

[SpiralHawk]

From this Sunday's NYT:

By MICHAEL POLLAN
Published: April 20, 2008

"Why bother? That really is the big question facing us as individuals hoping to do something about climate change, and it’s not an easy one to answer. I don’t know about you, but for me the most upsetting moment in “An Inconvenient Truth” came long after Al Gore scared the hell out of me, constructing an utterly convincing case that the very survival of life on earth as we know it is threatened by climate change. No, the really dark moment came during the closing credits, when we are asked to . . . change our light bulbs. That’s when it got really depressing. The immense disproportion between the magnitude of the problem Gore had described and the puniness of what he was asking us to do about it was enough to sink your heart..."

(snip)

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/magazine/20wwln-lede-t.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

[SpiralHawk]

1. Thirty years ago...

A snippet from Pollan's NYT Magazine article:

"Thirty years ago, Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer and writer, put forward a blunt analysis of precisely this mentality. He argued that the environmental crisis of the 1970s — an era innocent of climate change; what we would give to have back that environmental crisis! — was at its heart a crisis of character and would have to be addressed first at that level: at home, as it were..."

[Bandit]

2. This guy sounds like a Bush* voter to me

Why bother living? I am sure he could find a gun somewhere in America and just end it all.

[jane_pippin]

5. I doubt it...He wrote The Omivore's Dilemma, In Defense of Food

and is an advocate for eating locally grown, non-processed food, sustainablity, etc. etc.

His website:
http://michaelpollan.com/

Though, I suppose anything's possible. Maybe he is. But as I said, I don't think it's likely.

[SpiralHawk]

6. Pollan is not shrugging his shoulders, simply using the rhetorical device of posing a question

And then striving through the essay to answer it.

I think he did thought-provoking job of it - and that's any writer's job.

[gem4obama]

3. He sees the proverbial glass half empty...

I truly believe that God (or whomever your Life Force is) knew what He was doing when He created the balance that is called life. There is a right and wrong. A yin and yang. A black and white. A day and night. The optimist and the pessimist. There will always be those who see things from the polar opposite perspective, and it appears the writer of the article is one such person.

[SpiralHawk]

4. Visible Hands

From Pollan's NYT article...

"The “cheap-energy mind,” as Wendell Berry called it, is the mind that asks, “Why bother?” because it is helpless to imagine — much less attempt — a different sort of life, one less divided, less reliant. Since the cheap-energy mind translates everything into money, its proxy, it prefers to put its faith in market-based solutions — carbon taxes and pollution-trading schemes. If we could just get the incentives right, it believes, the economy will properly value everything that matters and nudge our self-interest down the proper channels. The best we can hope for is a greener version of the old invisible hand. Visible hands it has no use for..."

[SpiralHawk]

7. I'm bothered enough to give this thread another kick..

eom