Blog Action Day

I was going to post on the awesomeness of the roller derby Event I attended this weekend (check out the Emerald City Roller Girls -- we got to see their inaugural bout!). Then I logged on and saw that it is Blog Action Day, so I feel the impulse to say something environmental, as that is the theme. Except what is there left to say? My Cynicism with a capital C has overwhelmed the once-wide-eyed 7th grader who read Fifty Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth and wept over the horrors of plastic six-pack rings and promptly became a vegetarian. My Marxism (such as it ever was) has overwhelmed the naive impulse to believe that because someone is an environmentalist/activist/baby seal lover/whatever, it means they give a damn about workers, poor people, or, in fact, that they aren't more than willing to participate in the oppression of others if it helps prop up their inflated sense of personal piety and purity. If this sounds like I'm all anti-environment, far from it. But the stuff that pained me most in An Inconvenient Truth wasn't so much about losing pretty postcard scenery -- though I am spoiled living here in that regard -- it was the impact of rising sea levels on millions of potential future refugees. So here are a few of my favorite things:

The scene in the episode of the Simpsons where Homer changes his name to Max Power and meets Ed Begley, Jr. EBJ drives away slowly in a wee car that he describes as "powered entirely by my own sense of self-satisfaction." I think many people's potentially positive environmental impulses have been coopted by corporations (shocking!) looking to provide momentary bursts of good feeling for the guilty consumer, often at the expense of those less fortunate. For example, carbon offset schemes.

Which brings me to my second favorite environmental thing: Vandana Shiva. She is just a rockstar. We heard her speak on campus last year, and one thing she discussed was the hidden detrimental impact of carbon offset schemes in industrialized countries on farmers in India losing their land, for example.

I'm not sure where that leaves me on the environment, except to say this: I am not going to attempt to justify my Western capitalist consumption lifestyle by saying I compost, or recycle, or whatever. Ultimately, I think it's just better to acknowledge that there is no way to justify it. There is no magic practice or product (100-mile diet! hybrid car!) that will absolve you or me or any of us of our impact. And that's when maybe we can tie the environmental impact of our society in with the human impact and the intellectual impact. And then, you know, the revolution will be right around the corner. Sigh. I'm exhausted today.

Final note: I just read an article from the Atlantic Monthly that says multitasking is making us stupider. Like, scientifically. I was annoyed with the author (anyone who drops that they now or at any time owned a Land Rover pretty much guarantees my loathing), but the message feels intuitively true, and depressing. And, unfortunately, since the expectation in most jobs now is that we will be rabid little multitaskers (and thus have an accordingly impossible weight of tasks), there's not much to be done about it.

Um, OK, I call today Blog Pessimist Day. Celebrate, all!