Elaborate though it may be, this recent email hoax targeting the Canadian government and its lackluster showing in Copenhagen strikes me as precisely the kind of antic Erik has criticized environmental activists for, as it does more to distract from the issue than promote real action.
Listen, I worked on a province-wide energy efficiency campaign in Canada’s climate change black-eye province, Alberta, less than a year ago and I can tell you first-hand that by and large, the public opinion fight on climate change and environmental stewardship is in the back-nine of having been won. This is all the more true when one looks at public opinion on a global scale. What is really up for debate here is how we go about dealing with the issue and I don’t see how tactics like the above contribute to that discussion, at least on a substantive level.
Environmental activists are, in my mind, to be praised for fighting the good fight all these years and placing this issue at the forefront of global consciousness, but a certain segment of them also need to grow up. At some point, you need to stop denouncing what you’re against and start saying what you’re for.
Also, it would seem that Stephen Harper’s press secretary Dimitri Soudas owes Canadian environmental activist Steven Guilbeault an apology. Good luck collecting on that one, Steven.
Erik Kain 
Katherine 
CK MacLeod 
Robert Greer 
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I’ve never really got the Yes Men shtick. I tried to watch their documentary and I stopped it about 1/3 of the way through it was just so dumb and self-centered. I mean basically what I learned from them is that corporate and government bureaucrat types are not very stupid (surprise!!!) and can be punked. This helps the world how?
It’s just this postmodern loss of objectivity. There’s the sense that protests no longer really have any objective value, (like say the movement against the Vietnam War did) i.e. they don’t change anything, so therefore we should turn everything into a mocking event, thereby (I guess) trying to show the absurd nature of the whole thing. But the gesture trying to point from your action to their absurdity just makes the protester (I think) look absurd themselves. It also attracts nutters and a small fringe of more anarchic types.
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