Onion On Environmentalists

Seattlest has a friend who absolutely refuses to credit the Onion with anything other than creating a joke form. Every time we're blown away by one of their dead-on slayings we'll send it along to him as soon as we can compose ourselves, but the response is pre-ordained. "Dumb." He appreciates what the Onion has done...in the past. Unlike Seattlest he doesn't appreciate a particularly effective implementation of the Onion formula in, say, the current issue.

We're not even going to bother sending him the Onion's take on individual environmentalism. We will post it here, though. If you're like him you won't be impressed. If you're like us you'll think it's pretty funny. If you're too uptight you'll be offended.

By using mass transit or riding my bike whenever possible, I may not be able to influence greenhouse-gas emissions standards or reduce mass global addiction to fossil fuels one iota. Nor, by slavishly collecting every banana peel or coffee ground to make my own rich garden compost, will I alter our consumer culture's pathological tendency to devour everything it encounters at an exponentially advancing rate. Restricting my household energy use to non-peak hours does not make me capable of reversing temperature changes in the gulf stream that even now have begun to throw the world's climate out of equilibrium. The question, however, is not "What can't I do?" but rather, "What can I do?"

The answer: next to nothing.