Morford and the virtues of small things

Morford, a columnist for SF Gate, specializes in 'over the top' rhetoric. Sometimes it's tiresome, but often it's oddly agreeable. I liked this one...

You Cannot Save The Earth / Does buying that cute recycled organic lip balm really do any good? Your government snickers

... maybe all this good eco-vibration spurs you on even further, and you decide to green up the whole house, get into gray water and solar and reclaimed wood and non-VOC paints and all the rest, and fill the joint with organic cotton sheets and chem-free cleansers and passive heating systems...

...Just look around. It feels as though your heart is being eaten by angry capitalist cockroaches. Like your id is being munched by deranged zombie architects. And your eyes, oh God your eyes, they can't help but be burned like charcoal as they take in mile after mile, town after town, dreary suburban dystopia after dreary suburban dystopia of massive gluttonous eco-mauling overdevelopment, more Wal-Marts and SUV dealers and scabby strip malls and so many generic prison compounds that are apparently actually tract-home complexes it makes you want to rip out your soul with a pickax and feed it to the few remaining wild coyotes in Joshua Tree before someone shoots them all to make way for a new Home Depot...

He's a sensitive soul, but he does have a good, if obvious, comment about individual versus global action. Organic cotton sheets are an aesthetic choice, not a game changing action. The same thing applies to global poverty -- education and tariff reduction do much more to reduce poverty than coins in a box. Still, if a butterflies wings can trigger a storm, then perhaps organic lip balm can lead to a carbon tax..