Doomists and Consumer-Bashers are the Useful Idiots of Anti-Environmentalism

What passes for a discourse about the world's environmental problems is notoriously pervaded by "doomism," and attacks on consumers. As the miserable failure of the environmental movement to realize its objectives has demonstrated, this has not been a terribly useful approach--but we are saturated in it anyway. The plain and simple reason is that this is because it is not a terribly useful approach. Knowing that doomism and consumer-bashing induce apathy, denial and hostility to environmentalism the mainstream media, which has not been on the side of redress of environmental problems (their "both sidesism" bespeaks not ignorance or clumsiness, but deference to the same interests to which they have always been deferential), is ever happy to give them a very considerable platform, precisely because these "inactivists," when not deliberately fraudulent, have been the "useful idiots" of opponents of such action (to the point of that long and increasingly worthless rag The New Yorker giving Jonathan Franzen a high-profile platform upon which to display the ignorance and superficiality which make him such a darling of the ignorant and superficial tastemakers of the literary scene).

The wonder of the situation is that many ostensibly progressive political media outlets give doomists and consumer-bashers so much time and space on their platforms. The answer, I suppose, is that they fail to recognize the perniciousness of their standpoint, confused as they are like a great many others about how the world actually works amid a colossal collective breakdown of the ability to think.