Have you noticed how people are using “eco” to modify everything and anything now, but nobody seems to want to actually take a hard, critical look at “eco” issues?
Take this story from MSNBC. A hummer was vandalized in D.C. The owner doesn’t understand why (“We recycle at the house,” he said.) But the reporter, Bertha Coombs, knows why: people worry too much!
She quotes a therapist who charges up to $250 an hour, for up to 80 patients a month, to treat “eco-anxiety” about issues like global warming. If those vandals had shelled out the 250 bone, maybe they wouldn’t have spray painted that SUV. Seriously. This is the state of American media.
“It can be overwhelming when day after day after day, you read the papers or listen to the television, and you hear what’s going on out there,†Pickett said. “People start to feel a sense of helplessness.â€
But global warming and the awareness promoted in the media are not the ones to blame, scientists say. Anxiety of this kind is caused by a misunderstanding of probability, like anxiety caused by the chance that a minor planet might hit London or New York. Now people just have one more reason to worry.
[Cue Bobby McFerrin.]
You silly worry worts. Forget about all that propaganda you’ve heard from radical, eco-terrorist organizations like the Pentagon. Global warming is a “probability,” like a “minor planet might hit London”!
I think Bertha, the FBI and Hummer dealerships might have some epiphanies about all so-called eco-terrorism if they stop and consider that meaningful dialogue about environmental issues–in the press, in Congress, in the courts–might be a better solution to “eco-anxiety” than hiring a therapist.