Phil Gutis's Blog
Musings of a Desk Jockey
August 30, 2007
Posted by Phil Gutis
I'm a desk jockey. I drive a vintage law partners desk that was inherited by NRDC a long time ago from the very generous law firm of Simpson, Thacher, which handles many of NRDC's general counsel type issues on a pro bono basis. (Rumor has it that my desk was originally driven by Judge Thomas Day Thacher, a son of one the firm's founders.)
I was delighted to find the desk in the NRDC library. It had been overly loved if you know what I mean and was showing its age. We had it restored and it is now sitting proud once again.
But I'm not always so lucky. Yes, we all want to be able to reuse and I do love antique shopping. But that doesn't work all that often. (How many Blackberries have you seen in an antique store lately? Or laptop computers? (Although I do still have the first laptop I ever used…A Tandy 200 that The New York Times assigned to me back in the late 1980s. That machine and I had some wild times, most notably when we chased the infamous garbage barge up and down the east coast and to several foreign countries. But we'll get to those stories some other day.)
Today's musings were brought on by a video produced by the International Forum on Globalization, a not-so-subtle organization based in San Francisco that says it "promotes equitable, democratic and ecologically sustainable economies." Good stuff, but its video (see below) takes the argument too far and, I fear, threatens to turn off the very people we need to persuade to buy with the environment in mind if we hope to turn around global warming and many of the other environmental crises facing us these days.
For example, the IFG video takes on the Toyota Prius and says that some of its components are very damaging to the very environment the car is supposed to be saving. Probably true. But if I'm going to buy a car – and, like most Americans, chances are pretty darn good that I'll be buying a replacement one in a year or so – isn't it better that I buy the imperfect hybrid over the alternatives?
Same goes for clothing, food, furniture, etc. We consume. It is what we do. Most of us don't live in tents and eat only what we can grow. I suppose that would be good for the planet, but, hey, it's just not going to happen anytime soon.
So in this desk jockey's opinion, organizations like IFG need to tone it down a wee bit. They are definitely funny, but I don't think they're very smart – at least this video isn't.
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Comments
Joseph O'Sullivan — Sep 1 2007 12:03 AM
Simpson Thatcher & Bartlett? Wow the NRDC is getting top shelf legal help!
I agree with the concept of toning things down a bit. We have to look at the political climate (pun intended) when we try to advocate for action on climate change.