Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h/t Pat – Guardian Climate Agoniser Madeleine Somerville, who has a BA Sociology, with a concentration in Criminology, Deviance and Social Control, has provided what might be the most hilarious excuse ever, for not personally practicing the green philosophy which she preaches.
… This hypocrisy is a delicate balancing act. It speaks to the seemingly inescapable reality of this North American machine we’ve built and which now runs our life.
In order to avoid it, one needs to escape to the woods, go off the grid. You’ll subtract most of your environmental impact by doing so. I think everyone fantasises about it from time to time (I certainly do), but you’ll also lose priceless human connection and culture, alongside the ability to educate or inspire change in others.
The fear of navigating this cognitive dissonance, as well as the fear of armchair critics declaring that you’ve failed is, I believe, at the heart of many people’s reluctance to adopt more green practices.
…
By doing so, you open yourself to harsh criticism; you’re asked to justify your decision to change anything when you’re not committing to change everything. It can be intimidating: suddenly you’re expected to have all the answers. “Why bother recycling when you still drive?” “How can you wear leather when you don’t eat meat?” “Aren’t those annual flights erasing the impact of anything else you do?”
My reluctant decision to continue owning a car came about as a result of a handful of carefully considered factors: the limited public transportation options in my city, six months of Canadian winter, car shares which can’t accommodate a car seat for my daughter, and a custody agreement which requires me to drive her to see her dad three hours away, twice a month. To be honest, it makes me feel bad, but I’ve also realized that choosing to try means also accepting that you’ll fail, at least some of the time.
You can either accept the status quo, or you can work towards something better. Doing so often looks less like an off-grid hut in the woods and more like finding a way to exist in an uncomfortably unsustainable society while also trying to change it. …
Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/apr/05/environmentally-friendly-green-living-ideas
You see, it is not reluctance to give up modern life, and live in a mud hut in the wilderness, which stops greens from practicing what they preach; It is the fear of being mocked by armchair critics, when they dial out for a pizza delivery.
So Madeleine works for a future in which we all live in mud huts, and nobody has access to pizza delivery – except perhaps for a handful of special people like her, who may still need access to planet destroying fossil fuel powered badness, to travel the world, to inspire the rest of us stay on message, to be certain that ordinary people don’t slide back into embracing the evil conveniences of modern life.
Keep writing Madeleine. Now that we are aware of your heroic efforts, to navigate that fine green balance between recycling urban kitchen waste, car ownership, and racking up air miles, I’m sure we are all looking forward to you sharing more pearls of green wisdom, to add to your growing list of titles, which includes How to make your own toothpaste and lotion – and help the Earth in the process, and How to green your home: make your own cleaning spray for every task.
Now I don’t have to worry about what to eat for lunch.
Madeline should consider starting up a consultancy business. Offering excuses for people. Correction, offering lame excuses. Really lame excuses.
Don’t you get it Tim?, maddy’s forcing herself to burn carbon for your good. Pity the agonies this heroic woman put herself through by not going off-grid. She did it all to educate deniers to the sanctity of the one true way!
Yep, it’s pretty though getting that fine line between being green and being hypocritical just right. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which is which.
It’s similar to Schneider’s moral dilemma of whether to be honest or effective.
Heck it must be really hard trying to save the world from a non-existent existential threat. You have to feel sorry for them.
So what is it with the hive, that all these columnists at the Guardian have taken to calling themselves “hippies”? First there was that Dave Bry weirdo–Remember him? You know, the guy who is all royally p. o.’d at Valentine’s Day ‘cuz it once messed-up a milk-the-cow-for-free good-deal of his, and everything (Google: “Dave Bry Guardian Valentine’s day expectations”). Thought that would jog your memory, dear reader. I mean, like, that Bry-guy is such a doofus creep-out, isn’t he?!!–who was goin’ around calling himself an “old hippie” (Google: “Dave Bry Guardian Campbell’s GMO labeling”), when the little phony-baloney, hive-bozo poseur was, as best I can estimate, not even born before the late seventies, at best.
But now we also have Madeleine Somerville improbably claimin’ to be a “hippie”, too, at her blog “Sweet Madeline” (Google: “Sweet Madeleine easy-peasy $160 living room makeover”)–the only problem with her claim bein’ that Madeleine includes pictures of her living room in the very same post in which she declares her hippie-hood! And I mean, like, check those pictures out! See what I mean?
So I ask you, dear reader, rhetorically that is, does Madeleine’s living room look even remotely like a hippie-freak, mellow-yellow, bio-hazard, mega-untidy, flower-power crash-pad? Huh? Oh you say you’re a little too young to have had a personal experience of such things and so you’d rather not offer a judgement in the matter. Well, O. K., then let me clue you in: NO!!!–Madeleine’s living room is most definitely not up to counter-culture, feelin’-groovy, scuzz-pit standards, big-time! Rather, Madeleine’s living room is obviously the lair of a very nice lady (and I say “nice”, with full knowledge of her regrettable, brazen-hypocrite, carbon-piggie tendencies, which entirely derive from a youthful, dumb-kid brainwashing, which she has yet to shake and which has, as we all know, no basis in reality), with a “room-ambience’ that would register in the half-fried mind of a real-deal hippie as lookin’, like, man, this room “thing” of yours is just a bit too much of an up-tight and bourgeois and control-freakish trip, for moi, and everything, but if it’s your “bag”, then different strokes for different folks, Peace, Sister. .
I mean, like, in the sixties, when there were real-life “hippies” to be had, any appeareance of Bry and Somerville, at a commune, worthy of its name, would have instantly sparked panic-attack cries of “NARCS!!!”, immediately followed by a mad-cap hippie-dither, the end result of which (in the face of some ugly, passive-agressive push-back by certain of the not-thinkin’-straight, burnt-out, mega-stoner communards present, let me note) bein’ a precautionary flush of the communal “stash” down the commode.
I know this sort of thing is not supposed to be done, but I do need to make a correction to my comment, immediately above, or a portion of the same will not “make sense” (assuming boldly, of course, that any of my comment makes sense, that is).
In particular, the parenthetical remarks in the third para should read “(and i say “nice, with full knowledge of her regrettable, brazen-hypocrite, carbon-piggie, guilt-trippin’ tendences, which derive…”
mark4asp — Yup, that’s the same reason why Al Gore roars around on private jets. — Eugene WR Gallun
Mike, I think you’ve outdone yourself.
That was epic. I don’t think I inhaled the entire time I was reading that paragraph.
I was going to write a long tract to Madeline explaining that I’ve managed to maintain a modern existence while living “off the grid” in the middle of a huge coastal redwood forest for the past 35 years. It’s doable. It isn’t cheap and it’s not easy, but someone with such intense feelings to “do the right thing” should be able to accomplish it. I did, and I’m not even a hippy, I just don’t like having neighbors and I prefer managing my own power, water, sewer, road and telecommunications. It’s just “my bag”. I never meant to save the world, but I can’t order pizza by phone either. Oh well.
Too much TV? I don’t know. Whatever it is that motivates Madeline, my bet is she’s not all that easy to live with. It would take an awful lot for me to divorce a woman I shared a three year old child with. My guess is she’s odd.
I just read today that the environmentalists in California have found that all the regulations they have helped put in place, have made it too hard and expensive to put in bike lanes. Rather than realize that business has also found it too hard and expensive and left the state because of these regulations and that maybe the regulations have gone too far. They instead want to be exempted from the regulations.
If someone says they are going to run head first into a brick wall, and I criticize that idea, that makes me an armchair critic for not having tried running head first into a brick wall myself.
Welcome to the nu age.
More importantly, it makes you a brick wall deeeenier.
She could sell climate indulgances
Robert of Ottawa — Carbon trading creates climate indulgences. Eugene WR Gallun
Well I feel her pain; poor baby can’t give up her fire breathing air polluting earth disturbing fossilized car.
It is really difficult to face the reality that your living conditions are better (by your own admission) by virtue of the fact that living in a round mud hut with no car or electricity seems to conflict with the life style to which you have become accustomed.
So much for your dedication to the positions that you espouse for other to adopt.
G
By the way, I am very green. I do most of everything in my daily regimen in the most resource conserving and energy efficient manner that I have found by experience fits into my life style.
The soap that goes on my hands when I wash my hands first thing in the morning, is then transferred to my face where the grime there also gets removed. And then I use a 50 cent two blade shaver to scrape that soap off my face along with whatever that fur growing on my face is. All of this part of the ablutions consumes at least a quart of cold water.
No it has never occurred to me to buy shaving cream, or shampoo either for that matter. The cheap bar soap seems to do everything I need. I do have to replace the two blade 50 cent shaver now and then this year, my new years razor, got replaced on April fool’s day. I think that’s the best longevity I have seen so far. And the outgoing discard was still working fine the day before I tossed it out.
I never buy toothpaste. The tiny airline size my dentist gives me now and then seems to last even longer than my shaver does. I have enough supply and an order of magnitude more than enough toothbrushes to last for the rest of my life.
A person that I live with uses up the largest family size of toothpaste in about three weeks. Most of it never makes it into the mouth, but falls off the brush into the sink.
Efficiency is about finding a workable but simple way of doing what seems like a complex thing and sticking with what works. I find that about a quarter of a mm scraped on the top of the bristles , makes all of the foam that you can contain in your mouth while you scrub your teeth with the brush. The toothpaste does nothing but get the kid to put the tooth brush in his mouth.
Honey works just as well.
I actually have great pity for Ms. Madeline. She seems incapable of prioritizing things in any order that makes sense.
I do have a concrete practical solution to one of Madeline’s dilemmas.
Donate the car Madeline, preferably to the Salvation Army, and then tell ‘dad’ to come and pick up his kid himself; then YOU won’t have a lame excuse for having a fossil burning CO2 polluting machine.
G
She could make a million bucks writing excuses for students!
I think you are overly harsh towards Madeleine. I think her comments hit spot on the difficulty we have with wanting to be green and actually being as green as we want. An entirely reasonable quandary. At least if we are all leaning to a lower energy consuming, lower polluting way of life then we are making the right efforts while sill enjoying the bulk of the fruits of our labors.
No, the philosophy of being green is what you want the peasant slime to do, not what you are to do yourself. The green blob is elitist, and the holy elect do not have to do what they urge others to do.
All greens are equal, but some are more equal than others.
+1000!
And while we are at it, why do the Greens who have such an aversion to a warming planet hold all their conferences in tropical locations such as Bali?
JJ I agree. It’s the thought that counts. Rationalize, forget and carry on. All my green friends (the only kind I have) do it so it must be right.
Now let’s see If I can get a business upgrade on my next flight to Oz.
Nothing is impossible for someone who isn’t going to do it herself.
I think it’s a reasonable desire to be a conscientious steward of the environment, and as such, to desire to live a lifestyle that’s “cleaner”. “Green” is a loaded term, and carries all the freight of blatant manipulation by power hungry messiahs, so let’s agree not to use it. We’d be mistaken, though, to think that all those millions of “normal” people out there who want to be more environmentally friendly, are doing so out of some hypocritical motivation. No, in my humble experience, most people who care about environmental concerns don’t spend their time reading in-depth articles about the absurdities of the Environmental Leaders, and so while their motives may be reasonable and good, they find themselves in untenable and absurd situations.
The end result is an unshakeable guilt for the concessions they have to make to live a modern life. It’s sad. And I pity them their unnecessary angst. Which is part of the reason why I consider it a joy to educate people on, what I believe to be, the realities of this climate nonsense. This is good news people. And yes, it’s sickening what’s being done with our money, but there can be a great sense of relief that you don’t have to “effing” feel guilty for driving your “effing” car down the road!!!
rip
“guilt for the concessions they have to make to live a modern life.”
That really is the point. The new, green life they are trying to push onto the unwashed masses is completely incompatible with a modern life. If we followed their strictures against every modern agricultural practice ever, then only 10% of the current population would survive.
“…we are making the right efforts…”
How much is enough? How much is too much? What level of guilt feelings is sufficient to Save The Planet? Who decides these matters and what is the punishment for not complying?
And why should be a punishment for not complying with other people’s beliefs? I don’t think CO2 is a pollutant, quite the contrary, it is plant’s main anabolic substrate. I don’t feel the moral obligation to reduce my carbon footprint.
“At least if we are all leaning to a lower energy consuming, lower polluting way of life then we are making the right efforts while sill enjoying the bulk of the fruits of our labors.”
How far do I have to lean? If I don’t lean as far as someone that has more power than me, is it O.K. for them to push me over a little farther?
And as for “…the bulk of the fruits of our labors.” What does that mean? 50%? 70%? How much of fruit do you think it is OK to take away (directly or indirectly) in order to solve climate change?
To know the difference between wanting… and actually having, is to know and accept reality. It is not difficult.
It’s called rationalization.
Something that anyone with exposure to even mediocre Sociology should know.
Maddy Somerville only gave herself excuses so that her life is less complicated, (in her mind) and that she feels self absolved.
Has Madeline exchanged her lighting for self made candles? Always!
Built her own cold cellar? Actively stores fruits, vegetables and preserves?
Considered fishing for her dinner? With a hand held self made thread, of course.
Initiated her own yeast growth and carefully tends it?
How does her garden grow?
Does she raise enough vegetables to last her through winter?
Makes her own beer/mead/wine for safe drinking fluids?
Uses corn husks for toilet needs?
Stopped flushing plant and food parts through a sink disposal?
Has she gone to court to force her ex to live next door? Or
considered moving next to her ex three hours away?
Has she taught her child to walk to/from school in all weather? Or
Actively walked her child to/from school?
…
The list goes on with all of the individual measures a self respecting environmentalist advocate can do.
Ms. Somerville’s list of offset decisions are solely for her personal benefit, all other be dam_ed.
Ms. Somerville does not respect herself nor does she respect any true salt of the land that actively engages with nature for their foods, heat, water, sanitary facilities and cooling. Those despicable ‘salt of the earth’ people just don’t get the message she is preaching; but the nylon, polyester and leather clad eco-greenies do… Especially when they make the news or are on telly.
“Has she gone to court to force her ex to live next door? Or
considered moving next to her ex three hours away?”
It’s my suspicion that she herself made the decision to move three hours away from where they previously lived. And that this is the reason he custody arrangement puts the burden of the transportation on her. So it may be “moving *back* next to her ex.”
“I think her comments hit spot on the difficulty we have with wanting to be green …” etc. (JJ, too).
============================
JJ,too, too many ‘we’s’ and not enough ‘me’s’.
… and when the JJ,toos of this world say “we” they me you.
… and when the JJ,toos of this world say “we” they mean you.
Actually, she needs to be pilloried relentlessly, as do all pseudo intellectual greenies. Don’t take them seriously, simply laugh at them. It’s great therapy.
JJ, too-
“The fear of navigating this cognitive dissonance, as well as the fear of armchair critics declaring that you’ve failed is, I believe, at the heart of many people’s reluctance to adopt more green practices.”
I have ZERO cognitive dissonance….as in none….in this area. I am as green as I want to be. I do not wish to live in a mud hut in the forest, nor do I accept that my doing so would “subtract most of my environmental impact by doing so”. In fact, if I left my current home and life behind, someone would move into it AND I’d be making ANOTHER impact on the environment creating a “new life” in the woods. Cutting down trees to build a house or hut, hauling water from somewhere, clearing land to grow food that wasn’t there before, eating fish and mammals and bugs that are currently NOT being eaten by me, making clothes, burning SOMETHING for warmth, cooking etc. It’s possible that I would DOUBLE my environmental impact at least!
I read some of Madeleine’s blog and the woman just figured out “a few years ago” that Vegan Leather is….plastic. She claims she cannot “wear” leather because she doesn’t eat meat, but has two giant leather chairs in her living room, and ordered a new handbag that someone made out of an old Gap leather coat. Apparently her aversion has subsided to just “first generation leather”…as long as someone else kills and creates the leather first…it’s ok.
There is a photo of herself with family at Christmas and the caption says-
“Three separate arrivals spaced several hours apart, each necessitating its own trip to the airport. Why? Because this is the way of my people, that’s why.”
This girls “quandaries” are insipid, contradictory and probably do make her feel like a hypocrite…because she IS one. Her quandaries (and yours) are not mine.
Mate she wants you in a mud hut, and not her. It’s that simple.
Her piece is designed to balm her own (and green cohorts’) cognitive dissonance and hypocrisy.
I often say to a green, as do many, well if you are so hell bent on being right why are you driving a car, why have you got an iPhone that contributed to China’s pollution. Oh I see you have a nice new TV, only a year old, oh you travel lots do you, hmmm you seem to be using a lot of coffee cuts with plastic lids, erm I have looked at your home and everything you use has fossil fuels in it and used to get it to you.
The response is nearly always “denier”.
Mark…She likely wants all men in a mud hut three hours away by car and wishes that her ex would just do everyone a favor and just drop d….
Green is just another over used term, aka sustainable, free energy, etc. Nice and heuristic but not particularly practical in my world. Give me cost effective, efficient solutions with minimal environmental impact and I’ll be happy. Take the spots off my apples and destroy the bugs with DDT, please.
cost effective, efficient, solutions – all heretical words to a green. Inefficient, highly subsidized, imposed – these are proper green words.
Silly as this article is, this is how a totalitarian justifies having what they deny others. Their work is more important than yours so they can have what they want you to sacrifice. If the greenbies win and kill fossil fuels for us, I promise you they will find a way to keep them for themselves.
Agre Lib, this kind of thinking does seem to led to totalitarian thinking.
I have long said that more of this needs to be highlighted, green hypocrisy, it is everywhere in many forms, and is always funny the way they rationalize it.
A “Kermit” – (It isn’t easy being green….)
We own a ‘Kermit’. We affectionately call our 2007 (full!) Hybrid Ford Escape AWD small SUV ‘Kermey’ after the Ford 2007 ads for same actually featuring Kermit the Frog as spokesperson. You cite the ad slogan. Ads in the identical light green color we bought. Even in SciAm, whichnis neither scientific nor American any more. >70,000 miles, still going strong. Honest 32 city, ~27.5 highway at 75mph. 1500# Class 1 tow package has been used several times towing motorcycles on trailors. No signs of battery deterioration yet. We can still go several km under 20mph just on battery alone, even up inclines on Chatahoochee Narional Forest gravel roads. (We sneak up on Toccoa River trout holes.) Kermey freaks people out on our Florida condo garage. We sneak up emode silent on the neighbors BMWs, Mercedes, and especially the noisy Ferraris.
Kermey paid for itself with the available 2007 hybrid fed tax rebate ($3500 on a cost premium over equivalent trim (high end) V6 AWD Escape of $3400) before we put in the first tank of regular. Like Warren Buffet on wind, gotta love stupid government subsidies when being handed out gratis. Kermey has also paid for itself several times over since in fuel savings.
While reading this delicate klimate warriors musings, I kept wondering if I was reading something out of the Onion and this was just a late April Fools joke? Whenever evaluating those who live in the fully synthetic and nonsensical Reality as proffered by the libcult, such musings as her carefully crafted paean to herself and her “heroic” and tortured guilt and opprobrium, struggling to adhere to her cults doctrine while living the evil pampered life of a westerner, sounds like the hyperbolic hysteria of child grown old but never grown up. I’m sure we all weep for her heroic, courageous struggle to justify living the comfortable life of the evil westerner while “knowing better” which is, for the oh-so modern smart-set, just another smug, arrogant exercise in self-delusional narcissism.
Reminds me of St. Augustine’s prayer: “Oh Lord, make me chaste, but not yet!”
Oh, cut her some slack. You’re right in your assessment, but she sounds just like the countless other urban hipster dufus chicks that one encounters with monotonous regularity.
The fault isn’t entirely hers. Her condition could be viewed as being by design, with implementation by the education system and the very culture in which she was raised.
Like one of my buddies said, “they can’t think for themselves, but that has certain advantages”.
Why do these people think that if they can’t live the life the espouse, no amount of encouragement from them will help others achieve more. I suspect the reason they’re so angry with sceptics is because they think that we should be solving their problems for them.
For sure, we’ve failed to deliver that magical energy breakthrough 🙂
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/04/05/john-kerry-urges-private-enterprise-to-produce-a-renewables-breakthrough/
Very unreasonable of us 🙂 I think that they took the Disney film Flubber to be a documentary and that we’re hiding a way of making energy from tap water and used tea bags.
Eric
The results of the 1 year E-cat test are in. They show the 1 megawatt plant producing for 350 days with energy produced over 50 times the consumed energy. This on several grams of nickle and lithium with no emissions or radiation. Madeleine sounds like someone who will be happy to here this as a real solution to her perceived problems. My worry is those warmists I read about that will try to derail this technology because it will free people all over the world.
I doubt very much that e-cat works – the no radiation claim from a nuclear reaction is just BS IMHO.
DMA — Earth to DMA! The test was a total failure. No energy was produced at all. — Eugene WR Gallun
So what’s the deal here ?
DMA says it works and effectively 98% of all the energy involved came out for useful purposes, and only 2% consumed presumable as waste heat inside. Impressive.
Then Eugene says NADA. made as much energy available as my pet rock.
Both of thse events cannot have happened at the same time and place.
So what’s the deal.
G
@ur momisugly george e. smith, 5:40 pm, re, “what’s the deal” there is another article on the home page about that subject.
sorry, I forgot to close the quote.
“In order to avoid it, one needs to escape to the woods, go off the grid. You’ll subtract most of your environmental impact by doing so.”
Indeed. How right she is. She’d last all of a handful of days in the Canadian wilderness. Not a shred of ‘sustain – ability’ to be seen.
Realist,
Couldn’t have said it better myself, so I won’t. 🙂
She’s just a green hypocrite who feels guilty because she doesn’t practice what she preaches so she’s just trying to rationalize and justify it to herself.
” I think everyone fantasises about it from time to time (I certainly do),” No she doesn’t. She hasn’t yet met:
The Bugs
The Snakes
The Grubs
The Spiders
The Predators
The Pit Toilet
The Jug to Carry Her Water In
etc.
As soon as she does, really does, meet them she will no longer fantasize.
Larry, that’s not fair at all. Yes there are bugs and snakes, lizards and rats. Deer that eat everything you plant and rabbits to eat the rest, but it really isn’t that difficult.
I’ve been on 10 acres surrounded by over 35,000 acres of wilderness for over 30 years and I live in what most would honestly call luxury. I produce my own power, I have my own well. I have a self contained septic system and toilets that flush. A gourmet kitchen, formal dining room, 360 degree views of mountains all the way to the Pacific. A barn, guest cottage, gym and home theater. 10Gbit fixed wireless internet service. I’m 10 miles from the nearest town and I have a private road. Living off the grid doesn’t mean living in a mud hut.
But I’m an engineer and I both designed and built most of the systems I depend on for survival. I grow food and raise livestock but I also buy supplies. I don’t live in isolation and I’m not self sufficient. I still trade with the natives 🙂
It’s not nearly as bad as you make out, but it is a lot of work. I’ve rarely been able to call someone to fix anything broken, if it breaks, I fix it or it doesn’t get fixed. UPS delivers here so Amazon is my friend. You might be amazed by what you can have delivered. I learned to repair Sub-Zero refrigerators a few years ago, and where to source parts.
But based on Madeline’s public fit, I doubt she’s be up to the task of really living “off the grid”.
I think that was Larry’s point – she would happily go “off grid”, provided it was 5-star.
Guns are useful in the wilderness where I live. Hunting works. Venison can be quite yummy.
Hi Bartleby! Were you on UK TV recently with Ben Fogle (TV ‘personality’), who made a series of progs on people who have gone off-grid/off planet?
Point -> “But based on Madeline’s public fit, I doubt she’s be up to the task of really living “off the grid”
I was a Scoutmaster for 20 years. I’ve seen all sorts of these folks fantasizing in the wilderness. It’s almost always humorous. They often quickly retreat to their paved, screened, air conditioned retreats as soon as possible.
Obviously you have made excellent decisions that fit your life. That’s good. Though I also suspect that you don’t live in a mud hut like the one pictured above. 🙂
And you do all of that with only ten acres ? That’s amazing.
I read somewhere that every living person on planet earth can live in just the State of Texas, with everybody having his own 150 square feet all to himself.
And you can do it all on just ten acres.
I know a guy who runs a farm up near Lake Tahoe; him and his wife and family. His diesel tractor uses no petroleum products. It all runs off used Donut shop fat that he gets from a local donut shop.
85% of all donut shops in the USA are owned by people from Cambodia. This chap is not Cambodian.
I wonder where I can find myself a donut shop to use their waste fat in my Subaru.
G
Thanks all for the comments, I’ve been away, catching up.
Hive: I didn’t think it was necessarily Larry’s point, but I wanted to point out that it’s possible to live in 5 star luxury while off the grid. I’m not the only one whose done it, Madeline may have some difficulties 🙂
EMS: Of course guns are useful, like tractors and hoes. One more tool in the bag. I used to raise turkeys for meat but gave that up a few years ago in favor of venison. They were eating my landscape anyway. It made no sense to pay for turkey feed and let the deer eat the garden for free. So a few times a year I put one in the freezer and I don’t bother with turkeys anymore. Truth is yesterday I had a turkey wander up my driveway. It was obviously one of mine that had escaped and been bred wild, it was a species not local to the area. I missed it.
Harry: No, that wasn’t me. If you ever see me on BBC I expect It’ll be on “Top Gear”. 🙂
Larry: No, my wife would have difficulties with a mud hut. Actually, I ran the place as a 5* resort for over 10 years. You can, with fair notice, get bouillabaisse here and we have a 60kWh solar array in case we’re “temporarily” disconnected.
George: I did mention we still trade with the natives didn’t I? I couldn’t subsistence farm this place, it’s on a ridge top. I have a small garden and paddocks for livestock. I import hay, run it through the animals and put it in the garden.
Good News for Maddy! With global warming on the horizon, those six months of Canadian winters will be a lot more tolerable and she can bicycle everywhere.
I like the bit about how ‘ride along’ cars don’t accommodate child car seats. I had a mental image of some African woman carrying her child in a sling as she walks the several miles to a clean water source. That African woman probably doesn’t appreciate how lucky she is. /sarc
She’s only a few hundred years late. Emerson already waxed poetic about this same problem. Well, kind of.
It is enough to make me put another shovel of coal on my luvverly open fire in the grate. There, done it. .Now, back to musing about how other people can save the planet for me.
Simpels: The word “hypocrisy” does not occur in the Green dictionary. Nor do the words “honesty” or “integrity”.
The first thing “Liberals” liberate is themselves from law, custom, standards, mores, and logic.
I applaud that writer for having the courage to state what is obviously felt by many on the left, and probably what defines the left, particularly the guilt and shame felt by many people (but not me) at merely existing.
But take that natural guilt and magnify it; imagine a person acutely aware that her house displaced a gopher and 13 different species of bird. Every step she takes squishes precious insects that might be the very last one of its kind on Earth. It is the mirror neurons run amok. When Bill Clinton said “I feel your pain” he probably didn’t, but he tapped into the empathy of those that actually do this.
It is a type of projection of course; you imagine that you are being stepped on and how would you feel? It is the Golden Rule taken to an extreme.
In my opinion this emanates from a failure to connect with nature; I *am* part of nature, and if I inadvertently squish insects, well so do elephants and we don’t seem to worry very much about elephants squishing insects.
A comical but observant remark is “I didn’t climb all the way to the top of the food chain just to be a vegetarian!”
So it is possible and desirable to live and behave well; to dispose of garbage properly, to waste nothing. Eventually nations will collapse for any of a variety of reasons. If you are lucky to have a place to live, food to eat and entertainment to watch on YouTube, be thankful, not guilty.
Well spoken Michael 2.
Andrew
Neurosis and personality disorder are accommodated.
There is also infantile narcissism involved, the feeling that you are at the center of the universe with everything revolving around you and your actions, hence elevating your perceived importance to completely unjustified levels. My 3-year-old niece has the same feeling.
You have hit the nail on the head. It is also this narcissistic view of humans importance on this water covered orb that makes eco-activists “believe” we are causing the climate to change. The fact that there is NOTHING humans can do to impact ocean temperatures nullifies their world view.
How long can these reflection staring self indulgists continue to believe in the tooth fairy?
I’m not disagreeing with you, but I think that there’s another facet to this. My parents, having lived in Europe during WWII, knew what hunger and lack of basic needs (clothing, shelter) were, and as a result our family was very conscious of what we had and used. A fond memory of mine is, our house (in the US, where they migrated to) being popular for being toilet-papered by my high-school classmates, my Mom would get up early to collect the toilet paper, and then wrap it for re-use – the only downside was having to pick out leaves and pine needles. And even to this day I, who have never experienced lack of anything, will keep an eye on perishables such as bread, and if they get old, I do not throw it away but feed it to the birds.
My point being that they were very “aware” of what they had and how it was used – not from being narcissistic, but from knowing what it was like to “not have”.
I think that sums it up very well; you’ve brought it down to the basic problem at its fundamentals. Absolutely spot on.
A disproportionate number of “Greens” live in urban settings. The angst they feel leads them to campaign to “save the wolves” & etc. So I, who live in places they want to introduce wolves, get to pay for their exported guilt. They don’t put wolves in their backyards, they put them in mine, then get all testy and upset when I shoot them for killing my livestock. Somehow I’m the bad guy because they put wolves in my neighborhood. They don’t want wolves in their neighborhood, but mine’s just fine. Because I live off the grid where they think wolves should live and they don’t, but feel bad about that, so I get to pay for it? It’s just crazy.
Sorry. I know that was a rant. I’ve been putting up with this crap my entire life and I have some poorly hidden anger about it.
Bartleby — Your anger seems quite reasonable. — Eugene WR Gallun
Bartleby,
I agree completely and well said indeed.
Miss Somerville really ought to be on the long list awaiting the wooden stocks for eco-tards.
You can’t beat a nice piece of hickory.
Regards,
WL
I’ll add a story from my Navy days to illustrate how otherwise-practical and intelligent adults can really go off the deep end from time to time.
A sailor at Moffett Field was enamored of dolphins. They were absolutely the greatest thing that ever lived. I probably thought something similar until I saw killer whales; I was there in Seattle when Namu was captured and held in a pen at the wharf for a while. It looked like a submarine; shiny black and dangerous.
Anyway, he was of the opinion that dolphins were more intelligent than humans. Our job at the time included flying Navy P3 surveillance aircraft and operating the computers and so forth; things I’ve never seen dolphins doing nor much indication they would if only they had hands.
So while acknowledging that as animals go they are quite intelligent, why can they not escape fish nets by simply jumping over the top rather than trying to push through the net itself and drowning?
He explained that they were too noble for that, they wanted to sacrifice themselves to stop humans from fishing. Of course they could jump out of the net but they were choosing not to.
Well, I didn’t have much to say about that. Perhaps dolphins are gods and choose in all cases to hide their intelligence and nobility. Maybe there’s a huge spaceship that talks only to whales (Star Trek) with a very low information rate signaling technique that nevertheless supposedly conveys great purpose.
But probably not. They’re dolphins. I’m human. Welcome to life and the good and the bad that goes with it.
Dolphins are a lot smarter than you give them credit for. They were smart enough to leave the earth before the it was destroyed by the Vogons!
Good Bye and Thanks for All the Fish. 🙂
That made me laugh. One of the standard geek certification questions around here is whether you know the Answer to the Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. It is remarkable how many people know the answer and its derivation (and even how long it took to calculate the answer).
It has always and will always be my belief that the road to a post-fossil fuels world someday is going to be paved (and always will be paved) with technological advances in areas like nuclear power rather than with green religion and ideology. We didn’t get rid of the horse and buggy as a personal transportation vehicle because of an ideological oppostion to horse dung, although some did worry about being overcome by the stuff back then. We did it because be invented something better.
Those like Ms. Somerville who attempt to rationalize their hypocrisy reflected in their continuing dependence on fossil fuels do not seem to be blessed with the intellect to understand this reality. This is not to say that their green religion will not provide the motivation for those technological advances someday. However, with their oppostion technologies like nuclear power, the green movement demonstrates that it can easily make itself as much a road block to those technological advances as it does the motivation for it. Their continuing support of wind and solar energy (in their present iteration anyway) as a stunningly inadequate alternative to fossil fuels demonstrates their ignorance of physics and engineering.
Whether Ms. Someville’s generation will see the end of the fossil fuel era someday is difficult to say IMHO. I tend to doubt it. If they do though, it won’t be so much because of Ms. Somerville’s green ideology as it will be because of Man’s infinite ability to inovate and always find something better.
Sorry, misspelled innovate.
I don’t know who said it first (doesn’t matter, it may have been Rush Limbaugh!), but we in the West have grown so affluent that we now have too many people with way too much time to imagine problems that don’t really exist.
Look at the mud hut in the photo – – Does anyone in the West seriously aspire to live that kind of meager subsistence lifestyle? Of course not. And yet Western “Green debutantes” like Madeline are perfectly happy condemning billions of Earth’s inhabitants to that wretched existence, if only to “reduce the carbon footprint”.
These people are totalitarians and arms-length murderers.
The world’s poor need only a few things. Clean water; abundant, reliable, inexpensive electricity (we’re talking only fossil fuels here); open capitalist markets; literacy; and freedom from kleptocrat governments
Cheap abundant energy is the first and greatest step
So maybe the Grauniad (inadvertently) transitioned slowly from deluded to bat-crazy and then (voluntarily) morphed slowly into the Onion and nobody noticed?
Like post-op TS journalism. Except more about the choice between description of reality or its exact opposite than gender.
Anthony, we need to consider presenting a “Convoluted Logic Award” on a yearly basis. I nominate Madeline Somerville to be its first recipient.
“we need to consider presenting a “Convoluted Logic Award” on a yearly basis”
We might need to make it a handicap competition, otherwise the graun might claim every award.
“My reluctant decision to continue owning a car came about as a result of a handful of carefully considered factors: the limited public transportation options in my city, six months of Canadian winter, ”
You gotta love the “six months of Canadian winter” excuse. Perhaps she should move to a warmer climate like I did. Oh wait, a warmer climate is supposed to be bad for us.
Also: she thinks public transportation is “clean”?
She had me at “Criminology, Deviance and Social Control”.
When I saw that comment, I immediately think someone would use those skills to devise criminal deviate social controls.
She’s got it ass backwards. Emitting CO2 makes the world more green. Restricting it makes the world less green.
“Hypocrisy” is it, Madeleine? Let’s see now–according to the Gaia-hustle’s flim-flam party-line, to which I take it you subscribe, C02 emissions kill babies and drive endanged species–like the Polar Bear–to extinction! Right? So what you call “hypocrisy”, Madeleine, is really just a euphemism for BABY KILLER!!! and POLAR BEAR KILLER!!! Right? And so, as you say, Madeleine, you’re dealin’ here with (trigger warning!–another eco-booger, Gruber-grade, agit-prop euphemism ahead) a “delicate balancing act”, all right.
HIde the children!
It’s Somerville
And Maddy’s “hot”
To score a kill
For Maddy on
A good-time roll–
It’s carbon-thrills
And screw the toll!
And what of all
That Gaia-cant
With which Maddy
Is wont to rant
Live carbon-free
Or we’re all toast!
Live carbon-free
Or the kids roast!
Well Maddy is
A hypocrite
And all her talk
So much bull-shit
Those life-style cuts
In C02?
They’re not for her
But proles like you
And fryin’ tots
Is A-O. K.
When spoil-sport brats
Get in her way
Mike — Nicely done — Eugene WR Gallun