Reply #48: You misplace the nature of my complaint. [View All]

[blindpig]

I applaud any and all environmental work on the community level. Any time the community comes together in an endeavour to improve their living conditions and maintain the environment, how can that be anything but good?

As you say, the poor are intrinsically better environmentalist from the git due to their lower consumption level. Well and good, unless that lower consumption rate is imposed by an unjust society as a function of class or race.

My beef is with the national movement, with the dictates and proposals coming out of offices in DC, ideas which might have had good purpose in origin but are so mangled and transmogrified as to be functionally useless and presented in a way as to be offensive to a good portion of the populace. What I'm talking about is the suburban, upper class bias which pervades the assumptions coming from those offices and affects the orgs downstream, particularly in the burbs. There is an underlying assumption coming from those places, "why can't you people be more like us." It is paternalistic, class arrogance. No, my complaint is with the educated who form an environmental policy replete with class prejudice, who blame everyone but themselves, who refuse to face the fact that it is our economic system, not the people, which is the greatest threat to the environment.