There is a point where an attempt at elegant prose can take a turn for the absurd — and the Seattle Times allowed Kathleen Dean Moore to take that far-left turn at high speed in a recent op-ed.
After laughing your way through her article, you might ask ‘who is Kathleen Dean Moore?’
Turns out that Ms. Moore is a Professor Emeritus at Oregon State University and co-founder/Senior Fellow of the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word.
As an “environmental philosopher,” she writes about “moral, spiritual, and cultural relationships to the natural world.”
Ms. Moore offered Seattle Times readers a taste of what exactly her job entails via her op-ed. Moore wrote:
“Imagine the day when oil-refinery smokestacks stop pouring toxic fumes over Fidalgo Island and fledgling herons launch into clean blue skies…
“By land and by sea, by bicycle and indigenous canoe, people will gather near the Tesoro and Shell refineries…
“We stand at the start of that adventure. The first step is to break free from old, world-devouring, soul-souring patterns of fossil-fuel exploitation…
“Together, we can break from the inertia of uncertainty and silence… Together, we can unlock the chains that bind the cowering and compromising politicians… Together, we can refuse to allow Big Oil to despoil wide swaths of wildland and farms…
“As the smoke clears, we can create a better world.”
You get the picture.
The entire op-ed reads like a pathetic attempt to mimic powerful imagery evoked in a T.S. Elliot poem… a very, very pathetic attempt. It’s a piece one would expect from someone educated beyond the bounds of their own intelligence.
The comical absurdity of it all undermines the point of Moore’s op-ed as a call to participate in a global action called Break Free. According to the organization’s website, Break Free is a “global wave of mass actions” that will “target the world’s most dangerous fossil fuel projects, in order to keep coal, oil and gas in the ground and accelerate the just transition to 100% renewable energy.”
In other words, it’s about as extreme as you can get when it comes to climate change policies — ironically, given the extreme absurdity of her writing, they’ve found a fitting spokesperson in Ms. Moore.
Leave a Reply