This passage from Amanda's interview with Richard Branson really resonates with me:
Have you become a born-again environmentalist? If so, how has your climate activism changed your own personal lifestyle?
Well, I think I've always been an environmentalist. I've been fortunate enough to have an island in the Caribbean; when I was 26 years old, I managed to buy it for $100,000. It's a beautiful little jewel. And so every day that I live there or I'm on holiday there, looking out, it's just something that's perfect. It connects me to the awe and beauty of the natural world, and reminds me that we must be a generation devoted to preserving this beauty, not destroying it.
Why Branson and SuperFreakonomics are wrong, in pictures
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caniscandida Posted 2:56 am
08 Dec 2006
I feel pretty confident, though, that if when I was 26, I discovered an extra $100,000 in, say, the pocket of pants I had not worn in a while -- you know how that can happen, and what a happy feeling it produces -- , I think I would not have used it to buy an island. Or any real estate, anywhere, for that matter.
Mind you, I have nothing against extravagant splurges for One Beautiful Object. The little parable of the Pearl of Great Price, in the Synoptic Gospels, is very pretty. And Isaak Dinesen's "Babette's Feast" is a moral masterpiece.
But I have a grave disinclination to own land. Owning land does not strike me as at all attractive. And so, I wonder: Is there an unexamined prejudice in favor of property-owning, and literally land-owning, in our Euro-American cultures? Is it up there, say, with the unexamined habit of eating meat? But does it not have a more serious morally positive content too?: that a young man knows he is an adult when he has married a woman, and fathered children, and bought land, with a house on it? And his "mature" paternalism therefore covers not only his woman and his children, but also his land, and the creatures that live upon it?
Chickens are our cousins!
So are other sensitive animals!
Enough is enough!
No more factory farms!
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