It's not just the Brits that are barmy, it's an international problem. Robin Hanson posts about an OpEd:

. . . top universities accept hundreds of individuals who have demonstrated the highest levels of citizenship. These teenagers have volunteered in more food banks, sponsored more fundraisers and lobbied more officials than any previous generation. ... Sometimes some of these students will denounce world hunger but be unfriendly to the homeless. They will debate environmental policy but never offer to take out the trash. They will believe vehemently in many causes but roll their eyes when reminded to be humble, to be generous and to "do what is right."

It is these people, though, who often climb America's ladder of success. They rise to the top, partly on their own merits yet also partly on the backs of equally deserving but "nicer" people who let them steal the spotlight. ... Watching the race for the presidency, I cannot help but wonder whether our candidates, with their prestigious degrees and impressive credentials, are nice people. I wonder if, in their trek to the top, they have pushed aside the kind of quietly brilliant altruists who mean what they say and say what they mean. I wonder if our society is crippling itself by subjecting its youths to an almost-Darwinian college selection process.

Supporting Amelia [Rawls, the author of the OpEd], here is a pict I took at Harvard Thursday:

There are many foot paths, but even so without fences students cut across and kill the grass, to gain that extra few seconds. (Fences come down when parents show up for graduation.) Many other campuses have social norms that keep folks off the grass, but not Harvard.

The comments following the post reminded Robin about "path's of desire", the insightful landscape and architecture notion that paved walks should be where people want them, where they actually walk, and that a good way to determine proper locations is to just let people wear paths going about their business and then pave those areas.

Robin rebuts them saying: "Guys, if you put in a path for every pair of points on the perimeter of a grass area, it will cover the entire area." This is wrong in some interesting ways. It never turns out that paths are everywhere, but if it did then the grass would not be trampled to death since traffic would not be concentrated in a few areas, it would be evenly distributed. Even if traffic was so heavy that it killed everything there would be some paths that stood out, that had the heaviest traffic. Pave those and people would use them preferentially since they keep their feet dry and clean while getting approximately where they want to go.

The real issue here is priggishness. It isn't about altruism, it is about selected ostentatiously altruistic behaviors that give "a Roundhead feeling of virtue as its own reward", as noted in the previous post, and also in the earlier post Enviro-Dorks where the green-exploitation journalist Michael Pollan complained:

Tell me: How did it come to pass that virtue — a quality that for most of history has generally been deemed, well, a virtue — became a mark of liberal softheadedness? How peculiar, that doing the right thing by the environment — buying the hybrid, eating like a locavore — should now set you up for the Ed Begley Jr. treatment.

There's nothing virtuous about driving a hybrid, locavorism or keeping off the grass. This is just fashion crime, priggishness, the Roundhead feeling of virtue as its own reward, without the substance.

This is an old subject here. A couple of years ago the post Adult Supervision noted the cruelty of priggish true-believers.

Bill "we're all gonna die" McKibben is frustrated.

I wrote a few paragraphs disparaging the most powerful of my local environmental groups, the Adirondack Council, for the way they'd worked on clean-air issues. Both criticisms were respectful -- I am my mother's son -- but they were also stern. . .

They were also, at some level, divisive. In both cases, you could truthfully say I was willing to inflict a little damage on an important part of the environmental movement. It doesn't mean, I hope, that I'm growing a mean streak. I think it means something else: the environmental movement is reaching an important point of division, between those who truly get global warming, and those who don't.

By get, I don't mean understanding the chemistry of carbon dioxide, or the importance of the Kyoto Protocol, or something like that -- pretty much everyone who thinks of themselves as an environmentalist has reached that point. By get, I mean understanding that the question is of transcending urgency, that it represents the one overarching global civilizational challenge that humans have ever faced. That it's as big as the Bomb.

I've always thought of McKibben as one of the meanest folks around, completely insensitive to other humans and indifferent to their concerns - a sociopath in other words - so it's surprising to hear how he thinks of himself. But he has a point. There are paleo-environmentalists who truly see climate change as being "like the bomb".

And that's revealing since while they were worrying about the bomb, or the population bomb, or any number of other emergencies de jour over the past couple of decades - nuclear winter? - the climate has been changing, heating up in ways that have a human signature. In each instance their analysis of the issue was deeply mistaken and their prescriptions for policy were ludicrous - mean spirited as well as ineffective.

Another way to see this is as grim green romanticism.

Our longstanding agricultural romanticism has been compounded by our new-found environmental romanticism. In the United States fears of climate change have been manipulated by shrewd interests to produce grotesquely inefficient subsidies for bio-fuel. Around a third of American grain production has rapidly been diverted into energy production. This switch demonstrates both the superb responsiveness of the market to price signals, and the shameful power of subsidy-hunting lobby groups. . .

The ban on both the production and import of genetically modified crops has obviously retarded productivity growth in European agriculture: again, the best that can be said of it is that we are rich enough to afford such folly. But Europe is a major agricultural producer, so the cumulative consequence of this reduction in the growth of productivity has most surely rebounded onto world food markets. Further, and most cruelly, as an unintended side-effect the ban has terrified African governments into themselves banning genetic modification in case by growing modified crops they would permanently be shut out of selling to European markets.

Again, the feeling of virtue as its own reward, without the substance. It's toxic romance that has no interest in the realities of hungry people living lives of desperation, unable to educate their children, lacking even the energy to care for, much less better, themselves.

There are real environmentalists, people who work for true environmental preservation and remediation rather than squandering their energies on politics, movements, rent-seeking and self-congratulatory feelings of virtue though their analyses are mistaken and their policy proposals are deadly. There are those who quietly and effectively live and work in increasingly more benign ways while still delivering, still supporting their communities. They are realists who simply load the wagon and pull, knowing that there are many issues and that they must all be balanced in order to achieve true improvement on any of them. That broad view, whole systems approach prevents the counter-productive actions that come from pursuit of narrow objectives and indifference to consequences. The zealots break lots of eggs but make damned few omelettes.

Like Hanson, I can support the intent of the excerpt of the Amelia Rawls OpEd. There are "quietly brilliant altruists who mean what they say and say what they mean". They are pushed aside by ambitious climbers, and also by priggish zealots. Our system does select for this sort of thing, and it begins at an increasingly early age as the primary school system becomes more politicized and dogmatic. The rewards grow ever larger, accountability grows ever more lax, and cynicism increases.

But it is so obvious, and there are now so many pointing and laughing - amplified by the power of ICT - that I anticipate change. Even among those who call themselves environmentalists there is increasing awareness that politics and movements aren't the way to do effective environmentalism. All politics does is give power to the sociopaths who exploit the real concerns of others.

And there is growing sophistication in environmental thinking that takes broader and longer term views, recognizing that policies must be realistic, cures better than diseases. Bird brained environmentalism of the sort made infamous by Paul Ehrlich and Bill McKibben that flits from panic to panic squawking loudly all the while now seems ludicrous and archaic. Climate change was the last straw. What the green-exploitation industry thought was their killer issue, the one that would allow them to take control, is blowing up in their faces as people react to the policies implemented and proposed.

Or so I hope. It may be wishful thinking. This may just be a moment of lucidity in a downward spiral as happens for those who have progressive mental diseases: social Alzheimer's. Societies don't often alter course until great damage has been done, at least they haven't in the past. The hope that ICT can increase awareness and hasten change before great damage is just that: hope.