My Inner Stalin
The disgust roused in me by this morning's House & Home story, "The Year Without Toilet Paper," is as visceral as the most rabid homophobe's response to the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Act (a bill that I support). I have an overpowering desire to exterminate (why beat around the bush?) preening and precocious urban environmentalists like Michelle Conlin and Colin Beavan, who ought to be thrown out of their Lower Fifth Avenue building for keeping a composter in their apartment.
Someday, I'm sure, the post-consumer life that the Conlin-Beavans are trying to lead will be forced upon all of us, but I expect an industrial, not a Thoreauvian, solution. That is, we will finally apply our enormously sophisticated technology to the task of minimizing its own impact. What the Conlin-Beavans are doing is a retrograde, autarkic form of playing house.
Those who did not experience the folly of the Sixties seemed doomed to repeat them. "If I was a student," Ms Conlin tells Penelope Green, "I would march against myself." The more telling quote is Mr Beavans.
Like all writers, I'm a megalomaniac," Mr Beavan said cheerfully the other day. "I'm just trying to put that energy to good use."
The far more urgent task is ridding Manhattan, and perhaps the entire Metropolitan Area, of diesel trucks.
Comments
oh dear. Max and I kept a worm bin in our music room closet for several months last year. Does this mean we too are marked for extermination?
In case you don't know what a worm bin is, it's a big box with worms in it. You put your food scraps in with the worms, and they eat them. eventually you get a big pile of worm shit which is very good for your houseplants.
I doubt i'd like those people, but I think you are a bit harsh on "preening and precocious urban environmentalists". I have more thoughts on this, but it is way, way past my bedtime.
Posted by: amy | March 23, 2007 11:35 PM