July 15th, 2008 | | 444 views |
Articles decrying environmental practice as “a tyranny of environmentalism” which is leaving people with more “fear, self-loathing and a religious-style sense of meekness than any piece of anti-terror legislation ever could” are interesting cultural artefacts to examine.
Like fossils, they help us understand how previous cultures and the people that lived in them went about their business; how they were able to internalise huge global inequities by focusing on impossibly narrow elements of societies and their rare incidents of rhetorical argument. E.g., such as the work of newspaper columnists.
This is the type of fossil that turned up in my RSS feed this morning, from Brendan O’Neill, editor of Spiked, writing today in The Guardian. I felt like one of the actors in Bonekickers, faced with the same quality of writing.
Firstly, comment is free–up to a point. That’s why we have things such as the 1976 Race Relations Act to ensure socially-accepted parameters on the treatment of individuals are upheld, whatever you want to think about freedom of speech. (By the way, I worked unpaid for Index On Censorship, and I’ve led editorial projects in the Balkans, so I have some pedigee). Second, I have no problem with O’Neill bringing issues to the table in this way, and a national newspaper is probably the best place to debate them.
The problem is that journalism, even opinion, is meant to say something new, be interesting, and be accurate.
This article is none of these things: it’s a rehash of something O’Neill did back in 2006, when he was already late to the party on assessing the rhetoric of climate change debates. In that sense, the article is predictable and disappointing in a number of ways, adding nothing to the debate. So, why else is it so bad? More »
Tags:
climate change,
comment,
environmentalism,
rhetoric 
