We spend a lot of time here on topics far from laughable. Time for a brief break from that – at least from the “far from laughable” part. A while back, George Meyer, a writer for The Simpsons TV show, produced the following piece for the BBC’s Green Room. It’s the only article I can remember reading which zeros in accurately on aspects of our global environmental plight and makes me laugh. It also calls for everyone, even crazy Michael Chricton, to become an environmentalist. Enjoy:
Welcoming Homer the tree-hugger
Are you a hypocrite? Because I certainly am.
I’m an animal lover who wears leather shoes; a vegetarian who can’t resist smoked salmon. I badger my friends to see the Al Gore movie, but I also fly on fuel-gulping jets.
Great clouds of hypocrisy swirl around me.
Read the rest …
_______
Growth is Madness! 
I love it! Thanks for the reminder that we all need to lighten up ever once in a while.
I would enjoy watching dazed stockbrokers and ad men clawing at the dirt for edible roots. I’d remind them that they’d been warned of their folly, right here on the BBC website.
And they’d all grunt ruefully, and make me their king.
Who among us hasn’t secretly harboured such a fantasy?
The ratio of wisecracks to total word count in that article is pretty damn high. Nice one. Got me smiling the whole way through.
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This particular article strikes me as especially valuable because we have to help one another maintain a healthy sense of humor.
The work at hand is formidable. Sometimes a good laugh provides more than anything else.
I will be on the lookout for other examples like this one.
Not only will we surely benefit from maintaining a good sense of humor, it seems to me we would be enlarged and our discussions made more meaningful and useful by input from the feminine gender.
Somehow I hope and believe that women can be encouraged to participate in these discussions.
Perhaps the conspiracy of silence regarding the human predicament will be broken by more active participation of females in public discourse.
When the mothers of children speak out as often, adamantly and unremittingly as the children of men do now, then the deafening silence that is perpetrated by the masters of the universe will give way to a necessary, community-based awareness of the global challenges soon to be posed to humanity by the skyrocketing growth of absolute global human population numbers and the unbridled, seemingly endless expansion of the human economy on the relatively small, finite, noticeably fragile planet God blesses us to inhabit.
Who knows, perhaps “the feminine” will play a pivotal role in saving life as we know it as well as preserving the limited resources and frangible ecosystem services of Earth.
Steve,
I very much agree. In fact, I’d like to see more women who are strong feminists challenge what I think is unfortunately a specific, misguided notion to have come from certain feminist groups — that concern over population is racist of anti-women. In fact, I think it is arguably the opposite of those things.
That’s why I loved seeing Katha Pollitt’s piece a while back:
https://growthmadness.org/2007/04/11/a-different-feminist-take-on-population/
There was a well known feminist challenging the illogic of others who have distorted the population issue for political reasons, thereby putting one more obstacle in the way of action which might save untold numbers of lives.
Thanks, John, for your perspective on this issue. There are moments, forgive me, when well-intentioned efforts to sensibly and reasonably communicate become so incredibly disjointed because so many people are expressing such a wide variety of views that I feel as if we are, indeed, in a time similar to the the one when the Tower of Babel was on the verge of fulminating; when the colossal wreckage seen only by Ozymandias was about to occur.
Who knows, perhaps the modern day masters of the universe among us, the ones, who rule the world now — by appealing relentlessly for more growth of the global economy, endless per capita consumption of scarce resources and unbridled increase of absolute global human population numbers — are leading the human community down another “primrose path” to a catastrophe, only the magnitude of which human beings have never before witnessed.
It saddens me to report that in the most recent issue of SCIENCE, 31 August 2007, we see its great editor comment on science fraud as well as the secrecy and concealment of good science; but nowhere can we find a top rank scientist to break the conspiracy of silence regarding the madness of growth associated with certain human production, consumption and propagation activities now overspreading the surface of the planetary home God blesses us to inhabit…… and not overwhelm, I suppose.
At least to me , it appears that a world-engulfing facsimile of the ancientTower of Babel has been constructed by the human community, one of such a gigantic scale and rapid rate of expansion that its unrestrained growth runs the risk of precipitating the mass extinction of biodiversity, the irreversible degradation of the environment, the reckless dissipation of Earth’s resources and the potential for the endangerment of the human species.
The need for “the feminine” to be widely introduced into public discourse is becoming crystal clear.
Hear now from Naomi Klein,
http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/2007/200709/20070904.html