San Francisco journalist David Curran has an odd article in today’s San Francisco Chronicle. Under the title “Eco Worriers,” Curran describes an environmentally-aware neighbor whom he fears — without having ever spoken to this person.
The simple fact that this neighbor sports a cute license plate (‘ECO BRAT’) on his or her Prius, it appears, sends Curran and the neighbors with whom he does speak into paroxysms of guilt. “We fear his opinions,” Curran writes, although those opinions seem entirely imagined on his part.
It’s obviously an attempt at humor. The neighbor stands in as a scold to his conscience whenever Curran does something that is less than environmentally friendly.
Since the neighbor doesn’t appear ever to have actually been a scold, though, the humor falls rather pathetically flat. But the rhetoric is interesting.
“I’m trying and I want some credit for it,” seems to what Curran is saying. Fair enough. Changing your lifestyle is no easy thing. But inventing what could be called an eco-scold as a form of self-justification is something else. As tensions over climate change start to impact political decisions, can we expect this figure to become a rhetorical favorite of anyone who’s seeking to push back against what they perceive as (to coin another term) ‘eco-correctness’ ?
EarthQuaker 