Word: sane
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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There is a simple way. First, distinguish between environmental luxuries and environmental necessities. Luxuries are those things it would be nice to have if costless. Necessities are those things we must have regardless. Then apply a rule. Call it the fundamental axiom of sane environmentalism: Combatting ecological change that directly threatens the health and safety of people is an environmental necessity. All else is luxury...
Ozone depletion and the greenhouse effect are human disasters. They happen to occur in the environment. But they are urgent because they directly threaten man. A sane environmentalism, the only kind of environmentalism that will win universal public support, begins by unashamedly declaring that nature is here to serve man. A sane environmentalism is entirely anthropocentric: it enjoins man to preserve nature, but on the grounds of self-preservation...
...sane environmentalism does not sentimentalize the earth. It does not ask people to sacrifice in the name of other creatures. After all, it is hard enough to ask people to sacrifice in the name of other humans. (Think of the chronic public resistance to foreign aid and welfare.) Ask hardworking voters to sacrifice in the name of the snail darter, and, if they are feeling polite, $ they will give you a shrug...
Read what? I am not talking exactly about reading to escape. Nor about reading to edify and impress oneself. Paradise Lost is not much help at 3 in the morning, except of course as a heavy sleeping potion. I mean the kind of reading one does to keep sane, to touch other intelligences, to absorb a little grace. In Vietnam the soldiers said, "He is a man you can walk down the road with." They meant, a man you can trust when the road is very / dangerous. Every reader knows there are certain books you can go down the road...
...DANGEROUS WOMAN by Mary McGarry Morris (Viking; $19.95). This searching novel about a woman who is one of life's losers creates a character who is crazy enough to be interesting and sane enough to describe her own incompetence...