A Cry for Common Sense Environmentalism

Here's Katherine Booth from the Yale Daily News:

Environmentalism is a great idea, up to a point. Let's run our buses on used cooking oil and recycle our red plastic cups, but let's also look to nuclear energy and expanded oil drilling in the United States to take care of our short-term energy crisis. Renewable energy may feel good initially, but a million wind turbines in Yellowstone or Yosemite would be ugly, expensive and incredibly inefficient. Look up the statistics - wind turbines and solar panels don't produce nearly the power you thought. And if you don't want wind turbines in Yosemite or the Branford courtyard, do you want them covering the state of Oklahoma? The self-righteousness of the environmentalist movement tries to make the conflict black and white, to sharply delineate between those who support the environment and those who gleefully turn it into a stinking cesspool. But even those who claim to be "environmentalists" are willing to take the fight only so far.

Of course Yale isn't going to put up windmills: not in Branford, not on Old Campus, not on top of Kline Biology Tower - but if they did, you'd have a right to be pissed off. So let's stop supporting equally ridiculous and impractical ideas elsewhere. If we dispense with the self-righteousness and base our opinions and decisions on a broader view of what is important - before the environmentalists decide that because humans are the cause of pollution, we ought to just get rid of them - we might find that most people, regardless of party affiliation, care about the Earth and are willing to move toward solutions that make sense.

A woman wise beyond her years.

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