"You might think I'm Plastic"

Can you identify the quote above?

I love articles like this because they illustrate three things.

1. People have very short memories as a rule.
2. Most people just want extremist to leave them alone and so will sometime go along with things to shut them up.
3. The environmental movement is full of cowardly people.

Rant One: It was the environmental moment back in the 1980's that pushed for the use plastic bags instead of paper bags. They claimed that the plastic bags were more ecologically friendly than paper ones. I doubt you could get any of them to admit this now but I heard them myself on Radio talk shows. The slogan at the time was "Don't destroy the rain forest just to carry you groceries home." This despite the fact that rain forest are generally cut down by people wanting to convert the land to agricultural purposes not make paper. The trees for paper are grow on big tree farms just like wheat or soybeans. However there was some limited truth in the statement because paper mills, especially older one are not very pleasant and the stores liked the plastic bags because they took up less space and didn't attract pest like roaches that feed on paper.

Most people had a justifiably hard hard time understanding how a biodegradable paper was more environmentally friendly than a plastic? Wouldn't it be better to have just built cleaner paper mills?

Because the environmental lobby was insistent and most people want to be left alone we went along with it. It made them feel good and we just wanted them to leave us alone. However, I think that most people looked at the change to plastic bags as nuisance in that the paper ones were useful as bin liners and for kids to use as construction and coloring paper.

Rant Two: Because normal people don't like to have environmental idiots yell at them and don't like to argue with people in public they found it easier to go along than to challenge the nuts. The nuts know this so they become aggressive and threatening in public and obsequious in private. Because they couch their idiocy in pseudo-philosophic language about higher purpose and "Saving the Earth" they feel they have the right browbeat any one who challenges them. What this means to me is that people who know better need to not worry about having ideological baboons call them names. Society needs to stand up thugs, especially those who think their actions are justified because some higher calling.

Rant Three: It appears to me that the real object of much of the environmental movement is not to protect the environment but to bring about some kind of political agenda and is besotted with some form of noble savage myth. I may be wrong but it appears to me that the environmental lobby wants everyone to live in a mud hut with no electricity and use dried grass for toilet paper after destroying the US, UK and sometimes Japan. I guess they can grow their marijuana organically in the back garden. I say this because they only seem focus on issues that hurt Western nations economically.

For instance; look at the thugs that bother the Japanese about whaling, do they ever go after Indonesian fishermen who dynamite a coral reef? No.

How about harassing some Chinese fishing boats catching sharks? Oh they'd never do that.

How many times have they picketed in front of the Chinese medicine factories that collect bear bile? None. Why not?

Could it be because Indonesian is not a free-market economy?

Could it be because whales have a cuter image than garoupa?

Or, is it as I believe because environmentalist are essentially cowards and know that they can harass a Japanese whale boat or American housewives with impunity and that the Indonesian fisherman would simply heave a couple of stick of dynamite at the environmentalist rather than into the reef? I don't know. I do know this. dynamite fishing is wide spread in Asia and I would bet is a greater threat to the environment the few dozen whales the Japanese kill for culinary research each year.

Please note, I don't support whaling. The Japanese should eat something else.

However, because the environmental movement focuses on easy targets or only in nations where they won't get arrested or who have a decidedly non-socialist agenda I think they are either cowards or have another agenda that they don't talk about. At least political psychopaths sometime have to stand and fight like the monsters the Colombian government whacked a couple of weeks ago. Speaking of that, why is it that everybody gets so worked over Columbia going after commie thugs and nobody cares when Turkey goes inside Iraq to kill a few Kurdish thug? but I digress.

A prediction: In ten years or so, maybe 15; after all of the factories that make paper and plastic bags have closed the environmental movement will start another hugh and cry. This time they'll say "Those awful Cotton bags! Don't you know how much pesticide is used on Cotton? Do you know how much water it takes to grow it? Don't you know how company 'X' based in the US/UK/Australia/wherever works poor migrants as slaves so that you can carry your groceries home? We've got to abolish cloth bags! they are bad for the environment!" You just wait, it will happen. By 2020 the environmental movement will advocate the use of brown craft-paper bags.

Until Next Time
Fai Mao
The Blogger who wants a clean environment not a dishonest environmental movement