- Posturing, in fact, is one of the biggest weaknesses of the environmental movement, where everyone wants to be seen doing the right thing, without paying the costs of actually doing it.
The summits have actually outlived the problem they were initiated to discuss. Their demise will force many charlatan professors to look elsewhere for their boondoggles, expenses paid catch up visits with friends from around the world in exotic locations, mutually reinforced by their research findings recommending the very same meetings they then attended. It's a wonder PhD programs have difficulty recruiting. Never mind philosophy and methodology -- how good are you at self-promotion, the art of implied crises and the conceit that an annual conference of like minds ever achieved even a modicum of divergent, let alone creative, thought?
Not to despair, there's always a new environmental dystopia waiting to be "discovered", embraced and fearlessly promoted by those same displaced intrepid summit groupies.
Meanwhile, the world continues to flourish and improve, globally. No, it is far from perfect and it is still has ample room for improvement. But it is steadily, and occasionally spectacularly, better than in the past. So why do environmentalists persist in dystopian visions of limits, impending doom, stasist control and constraint?
The environmental movement will continue to be irrelevant, and a circus for Orwellian distraction of the chattering classes, until such time as it embraces the necessity for the future to be embraced with hope, optimism and creative energy, with ideas that actually transpose and facilitate empowerment, improvement and sustained growth that is the very imperative inherent in human existence.
