ON THE WATER
NEELS BLOM: Some are saving the world; then there are the rest of us
Environmentalists come in two types. Type One will heave its faux off-roader onto the sidewalk of a street café where an appropriate bumper sticker will advertise shades of green to competing greenies, there hierarchically seated in proximity to the bottled-water dispensing bar and declare: "I am here to save the world." For all the binary implications thus implied, Type One is the only one that matters. Type Two is nothing but a function of the first; it would not exist other than as antithesis; on its own it is a zero in the process of dialectical reasoning. Were it not for those who would save the world, the world would have nothing from which it needed saving, but since it had invented itself, the defining characteristic for the rest of humanity became that of those who would ruin the world, just because Type One chose to save it. It is exasperating. Take the WWF’s shameless deployment of its panda bumper sticker, which forces Type Two to associate panda bears with the WWF’s adm...
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