“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Monday, March 4, 2013

"Green Fatigue"

As ecological awareness settles more deeply in, another wave of denial has begun to wash back. This might be a way to see the forgetting, abandonment or otherwise of green sections such as the Dot Earth section of the NYT. 

This might be a way to understand the sentences: 

"Environmental journalists often feel married to the tragic narrative. Pollution, extinction, invasion: The stories are endless, and endlessly the same. Our editors see the pattern and bury us in the back pages; our readers see it and abandon us on the subway or in the dentist’s office.

"Might this endless (and often simplistic) tragic narrative be wearing out the public and wearing thin in newsrooms?" 

Ecological reality is incredibly boring, in some sense. Who wants to know that they are stuck in repetition? With a 100 000 year amortization rate? 

HT Bill Rose (@billrosethorn)

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