Linkmeister

Earth Day 2007

From the National Resources Defense Council:

Mass-market magazines are now awash with green-themed cover stories and special features. While Newsweek announces the greening of the suburban American family, Vanity Fair puts the once-next-president on the cover, flanked by Julia Roberts (as a green fairy) and George Clooney (as an earth-tone peasant). A new magazine called Verdant , with a column on organic fine wines, features on luxury eco-spas in Bali, and ads for custom-built conservatories, takes the zeitgeist a step further. As editor Sharon King Hoge notes, the word "verdant" means lush as well as green.

[snip]

The thing about entering the mainstream, of course, is that you can’t simply will the river into a new direction. It flows where it flows. And today the river flows with the smooth and relentless current of conspicuous consumption. Which takes us back to those initial questions: If we’ve finally figured out how to wade in the cultural mainstream, maybe it’s worth keeping one eye open to the risk of drowning.

Yeah. Environmentalism is no longer counter-cultural, but there's a lot of fluff out there. The author mentions "green, nontoxic sex toys."

In the same issue, there are reviews of two books, one a reprint of Silent Spring and the other a collection of essays entitled Courage for the Earth: Writers, Scientists and Activists Celebrate the Life and Writing of Rachel Carson. Carson, of course, was the author of Silent Spring, a book often credited with jump-starting the environmental movement. Both are published by Mariner Books (Courage here, Spring here).

I read Silent Spring in 1979, seventeen years after it was first published. It was still relevant then, and it's still relevant now. If you've never read it, do so. It's a classic.

Posted by Linkmeister at April 22, 2007 12:51 PM | TrackBack