This week the Argus saw the return of a darling activist issue to its pages—an issue whose inherent emotional appeal to many students on this campus can only be compared to the formulaic emotional appeal inherent in the struggle against all forms of “inequality,” and the emotional appeal of Joss Whedon-directed Saturday morning cartoon shows. In the Argus op-ed article “350: What’s Behind the Number?”, Sam Bernhardt ’10 and Daniel Fischer ’12, both members of the Environmental Organizers Network (EON), Wesleyan’s self-appointed set of environmental moral guardians, inform their readers that “either we change our destructive ways, or we face a self-induced annihilation.”
I hate to rain on Bernardt and Fischer’s parade—who am I kidding, with these temperatures, I’d be sleeting on it—but there is a third option: that we maintain our “destructive” ways and when nothing happens, radical environmentalism suffers yet another self-induced annihilation of its own scant credibility.