Green self-hate

AT first it seemed like a joke. Unsolicited forumemails informed me I could buy badges (or buttons, as Americans call them) with the slogan Polar Bears for Obama. Good one, I thought. Sometimes elections need to be shaken up with a bit of quirkiness, and if it can be snow-coated, animal-related quirkiness, that's all the better.

Only now I'm not so sure it was a joke after all. The polar bear 'issue' has become big news. Serious newspapers have published articles titled "Love polar bears, loathe Sarah Palin". MSNBC analysed the differences between Palin and her boss, John McCain, referring to Palin as a polar bear hater, and at an anti-Republican rally in Alaska last week one protester wore a polar bear suit and wielded a sign saying: Polar Bear Moms Say No to Palin. [snip]

Today's widespread polar bear concern is shot through with myth and misinformation. In 2001, the World Conservation Union study in 2006 found that the global polar bear population has increased from about 5000 in the 1960s to 25,000 today... [snip]

The political promotion of this animal represents the denigration of human desire, the subordination of the human will to the animalistic fearmongering of environmentalism. It represents the disavowal of human interests, which come to be seen as grubby, greedy and destructive.

The intervention of the polar bear even into the US election is striking. That many Democratic Party supporters and radical activists are claiming to act on behalf of the polar bear shows the extent to which environmentalism threatens to empty politics of its human, self-interested, democratic component.

Polar Bears for Obama does not spring from the typically dumb Disneyfication of US politics but from the misanthropic, people-less politics of 'being green'...

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