“Environmentalism is essentially elitist. You have to be pretty secure economically before you can care about trees and animals and how beautiful your environment is.” The remark, which I overheard in someone else’s conversation, struck me as both familiar and startling. I can’t guarantee that I remember it verbatim, as Stan Mack used to in his Real Life Funnies, but that may be because its import is so familiar that I grasped it only a few words in. What startled me about the remark was how deeply I objected to it. It doesn’t square with what I understand about the Read more