Letters to the Editor
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Awareness is everything
and then action is everything. No, Berkeley, Live Earth won't kill the Hummer - gas prices will do that on their own. But Live Earth is a massive outpouring of largely positive energy that puts options on the table, pure and simple.
That's the same table where Al Gore almost singlehandedly laid the issue of global warming in the last few years. I don't need him to be a saint to know that my respect for him has risen astronomically because of that enormous achievement. If Live Earth can accomplish anything towards making alternatives palatable, even hip, rather than gloomy......well, damn. It's made Cintra Wilson snark-free for one thing, which is a miracle of the highest order. And it may even serve La Paglia notice that Al Gore has not "compromised the long-term credibility of environmentalism", as she claimed in these pages recently. Boy does that one ring hollow.
Flower Power was a corporate media name for the anarchic but joyous energy that became the environmental movement, among other much-valued social threads of today. And if you remember the first Whole Earth Catalog cover, with the breath-taking image of earth from space - I'd say that's navel-gazing that we could really get behind.