Great article and good to see a person that can adapt to the facts. I was lost to the hyper-green movement early on. When I was in college we were bombarded with propaganda on the plight of the Hudson River. We were told that it was stone cold dead and it would take hundreds of years to reclaim it, if ever. I believed it.

Lo and behold, ten years later the Hudson is just fine thank you. I have never forgotten that lesson in hysteria.



But do you think that the Hudson would've been cleaned up without the hypergreen hysteria?

I've supported groups like Greenpeace whose agenda I consider way too radical, not because I hope they'll win, but because I hope they'll influence things in the the right direction. Society has a huge amount of inertia, like a supertanker, and I think of these radical organizations as little tugbouts straining furiously to deflect the supertanker's course just a few degrees. We need to tend more in the direction of taking responsibility for the environment, and that means exerting a vector at 90 degrees to the present course and pushing for all we're worth.

The overkill's necessary, these days. It takes a lot of screaming "the sky is falling!" to get the average person to buy an umbrella or just come in out of the rain. You need a big club to make a dent in a society as complacent and self-satisfied as ours.

--Robert