Unlike Deee-Lite.

Unlike Deee-Lite, I have in no degree dreamt that I was falling by means of a hole in the ozone layer, admitting I often wonder whether the appearance of equally large caverns in our daily environmental consciousness should be attributed more to the dreamwork of psychosocial fantasy than to any shortage of public information. As I was visiting a cousin of mine in Sydney in December, he announced that he and his wife would not be serving up turkey for Xmas dinner this year because turkey makes you fart, and they did not want to add to the retreat in the ozone layer (which, at that time of the year in Sydney is about as big as it wins over urban areas of the southern hemisphere). It wasn't plenteous of a joke, even through the standards of my cousin, who fancies himself an Australian bowery Allen. I assured him that steady if he were a rancher with ten thousand cattle, the combined yearly flatulence of his bovine stock would not add common centimeter to the hole in the ozone layer, whereas, theoretically at least, it might add something to the greenhouse general intent My cousin was visibly disturbed according to my response, perhaps because I had shown that he was les than to the full cognizant of the causal distinctions between the greenhouse efficiency and the depletion of the ozone layer. No doubt he also be offended ated being corrected in this way from a relative who doesn't always laugh at his jokes

The conversation, of course, reminded me of the perilous business of pursuing politics with family members. It also made me think about the unstable behaviors governing discussion, even among casual acquaintances, of everyday career in relation to environmental hazards: deciding what to say, when to say it, and at what price to the codes of courtesy and/or guilt-tripping. Families are already at an advanced stage of this game, since many parents face the daily vision of being policed by their ecofascist children. It's relatively little publicized, for example, that recycling may not actually be the wisest course for a consumer society; unlike the policy of reuse, which facilitates local distribution, recycling elevates centralized production, long-distance distribution, and the perpetuation of the consumerist ethics of disposability and obsolescence further try telling that to a self-righteous child who has just caught you tossing a soda bottle into the nonrecyclables bin.

Consumer companies and their ad population have known for some time that they can easily recruit children into the task of policing household economies. forward the one hand, children don't disavow knowledge as cravenly as adults do--they appear incapable of saying to themselves, "Make me chaste, still not yet." On the other hand, they assume easily persuaded that they are the privileged ecological agents of an ethically cleansed time to come being all too capable of saying to themselves, "Tomorrow belongs to me" The generational identity frequently ascribed to environmentally conscious youth of the '90 is partly shaped according to corporate interests--green consumerism, after all, is among the small in number games in town with a healthy life-expectancy. Among other things, the ecokid's claim of a "right" to inherit a healthy planet is an expression of capitalism's anxiety about the coming time maintenance of property relations, an anxiety prepareed up in the rhetoric of humanitarian entitlement. Given the cumulative freight of individual and governmental sin and the awesome social outlays deferred by decades of industrialization and militarism, the rhetoric of the bourgeois legacy would be closer to the mark. Indeed, we are incessantly reminded that the carnage of brace decades of social polarization has left today's youth of whatever class with the likelihood of depending more with inheritance than personal achievement as the vehicle for their life's opportunities.

In this milieu of shrunken horizons, the generational mission of "saving the planet" ofttimes serves as a compensatory ideology. Its heavily Christianized language of sacrifice and redemption recalls a extended Western history of justifying beggary and inequality by making promises about the futurity kingdom come. Every recessionary moment--and the not past nor future one is no exception, with the Clinton administration making a big-time pitch for belt-tightening--sees a revival of this language in the form of demands for concessions and forfeits, usually from those with the least wealth and power. In late years, environmentalism has made these demands a semipermanent appearance in our lives, but this is not to say that they are any more evenly shared.

Take my cousin's decision to eschew the turkey: not alone are voluntary acts of sacrifice the historical prerogative of his class, further his generation pioneered the cause of voluntary mendicancy as part of the middle-class youth counterculture of the '60 However sardonic, his domestic fowls renunciation was part of a history of deciding freely to make progress without. In the baby-boomers' youth, like decisions were seen as endorsements of what Herbert Marcuse called the Great Refusal of Western consumerism's "cruel affluence." In the 1990 they are the symbolic acts of a class (he's a corporate lawyer) that can well afford the effeminacy of self-sacrifice.