>The first thing
>that comes to mind is that, unlike other leftish concerns,
>environmentalism is cool with upper- and middle-class people,
>so the bourgeois practice of constantly lying about everything
>may have come into play.
Though I wouldn't go all the way with him, I think James Heartfield (and his former comrades in LM) have a point when they argue that environmentalism appeals to an upper class contempt for the workers, and fits nicely with financiers' taste for austerity. And then there's the continously frustrated leftist taste for apocalypse; if we can't have a value-crisis, when the FROP finally reaches zero, we can have the eco-crisis, when the thermometer goes to 120 and beyond.
Like I say, I wouldn't go all the way with this; there's a real risk in climate change and toxic landfills and the rest. And there are real social/political and aesthetic reasons not to want to drill in Alaska or cover the landscape with suburbs and strip malls. But greens slip too easily into the eschatological mode, I think.
Doug