As I see it, the challenge and dilemma for what is rapidly and dangerously becoming our strident and unwelcoming little sub-culture is to navigate a more compelling course, by avoiding on the one hand to appear as being hostile towards economic well-being, and by resisting on the other our facile habit of demonizing anyone and everyone who can be dismissed as strictly "feeding their self-regarding needs." Where does the latter line of thinking end, really? And who will reign in this reflex of ours which stands to dilute the most important stories we have to report about the worst offenders?
There are certainly those abusers of Nature who merit our strong censure and worse. But what also worries me is that the "environmental community" is increasingly seen as lacking any ability or willingness to make those finer sorts of distinctions that most Americans rightly see themselves as capable of settling through a "common sense".
I start with two glaring phrases that project his elitism: "worst offenders" and "abusers.. who merit .. strong censor and worse." At no time in any of his posts has O'Connor supported environmental activism that sustains or supports protections of forests and watersheds prior to their destruction. His entire thematic context is to target only those profiteers whose actions are so vile, and without doubt, personally affecting himself, that they must be made the story. Does O'Connon support Bhopal based efforts to protect future environments from potential disasters? NO! Would he argue that the manipulation and bending of laws in Applachia that destroy the entire environmental habitat is a worst offender case? Probably not! Why? Because he must at all costs put property rights of the private and wealthy elite above and beyond the interests of the poor upon whom most rapacious environmental degradation occurs. He only wants to take down the worst because they are the ones that make the liberatrians look bad, they are the ones that make the "common sense: of the citizens want to act to make laws to stop them. He has no interest in keeping roads out of forests or off BLM land. He has no interest in restricting and regulating clearcutting, mining and drilling behaviors of the extraction industries especially if they are conducted on private lands, even if the runoff pollutes and toxifies all down stream and down wind.
That "strident and unwelcome sub-culture" he keeps referring to is his way of saying that only his brand of environmentalism is right and all others wrong. He is the worst of the abusers of rank. His pronouncements are nothing more than carefully crafted statements supportive of his corporate investments and propertied classes against any and all who would insist for a plethora of necessary and fundamental reasons to regulate and restrict their behaviors. How dare those in the environmental community suggest that citizens of the US are trained and educated to consume the earth without even the slightest cognitive awareness that these behaviors destroy their own lives--is how he really would rather put it. His consistent attacks on what is essentially the "left" within the environmental movement is his faux straw man argument. He is painting a broad canvas that portrays anyone who doesn't think as himself, and other libertarians, as members of the groups who think and behave like Greenpeace, EarthFirst! Ruckus, and ELF. He insists on this in constant subtextual frames, hoping it seems to denigrate the whole of the environmental movement, sufficiently attacking the core constituency's tendency to place the earth at the top of the pyramid of sustainable life rather than his, and his supporters/audience prefered scales of balancing the economy with some degree of environmental protection.
His rejection of GAIA centric principles for guiding environmental movements is nothing more or less than someone pretending to be an environmentalist as long as it supports his own NIMBY attitudes. He will always put economics first, he must do so in order to sustain his own livelihood and well being for himself and family and friends. He is quite simply the very core reason that environmentalism is DEAD.
