Saturday, 9 June 2007

Green Man's Burden

"People here have no jobs," Mark Fenn (coordinator of the World Wildlife Fund's campaign against a proposed mining project near Fort Dauphin, Madagascar) admitted, after taking documentary producers on a tour of his $35,000 catamaran and the site of his new coastal home. "But if you could count how many times they smile in a day, if you could measure stress" and compare that with "well-off people" in London or New York, "then tell me, who is rich and who is poor?"

Why is it that eco-crusaders so often sound like a slanderous caricature of the sort of old-style imperialist that they spend so much time condemning?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

But I thought that nobody's racist so long as they have "good intentions"?

Anonymous said...

Caring about the welfare of other human beings is terribly speciesist. The true modern progressive pays more attention to the rights of plants, animals, and, ideally, inanimate matter.