Geronimo unmasked by New York Times Dot Earth reporter Andrew Revkin

Andrew Revkin (NY Times Dot Earth columnist / blogger) made Geronimo an offer he couldn't refuse: drop the Chiricahua Apache persona, and Revkin would include Geronimo's latest rant in his column, under Harold's true name.  Harold and Geronimo met under the same hat, and decided it was worthwhile to accept Revkin's offer and observe the dress code.  

Recognition as an Editors' Selection has been the video game of choice for this blog since the beginning.  Geronimo's comments have won Editors' Choice a couple dozen times since the game began. The piece that got Harold to blink--and to have a heart-to-heart talk with Geronimo about making an exception to the rules--is below.  Laura, Harold's sister, asked, "Was it more fun to play the game, or to win it?"  Harold still hasn't figured out the answer to that.

2.

Geronimo

California

October 16th, 2011

6:26 pm

  








As the Great Recession meets the Green Revolution, two big factors get clearer: 

1) Global warming doesn't make a very good emergency, and doesn't go to the top of the triage list for most people; and, 2) The whole progress of the last millennium is tied up in energy-per-capita numbers, leaving the movement with an immobilizing lack of focus: "focus on everything!" Those marching orders are very hard for scared, busy, overloaded, underemployed people to integrate into their daily struggle to maintain their lifetime socioeconomic progress and pay their bills. Everything in our world that isn't rocks, dirt, or indigenous plants and animals was created as a result the result of energy expenditure by man--the vast majority of that, via fossil fuels. The dumbest fossil fuel advocates are easy to satirize, but Al Gore's credibility isn't exactly knocking it out of the park either. This will be a long, tedious series of pesky compromises over decades, not a glorious revolution where we rejoin some imaginary noble savage past of low energy consumption. The vast populations of developing countries aren't thrilled about the elite West's new cries of "move the goalposts" either, just as they're starting to see middle-class lifestyles percolate through their historically subsistence-level populations.

Looking to Machiavelli for a way to put some martial arts move on the West, and flip it into dense urban housing, bicycle commuting, and radical decreases in energy consumption may allow the green elite to feel superior. But the worldwide greening of industrial processes is more like a gentle fog creeping in to cool things off a bit than a revolutionary tsunami of raised consciousness and voluntarily changed lifestyles. Sorry about that.

It's the scope and complexity of the task, Mr Revkin, not the bad character of those living comfortable lives.