Naomi Klein on I. F. Stone

“I. F. Stone may have thought that environmentalism was distracting the youth of the 1960s and early 1970s from more urgent battles, but by today's standards, the environmentalists of that era look like fire-breathing radicals.”

“Environmentalists have a long history of behaving as if no issue is more important than the Big One-why, some wonder (too often out loud), is everyone wasting their time worrying about women's rights and poverty and wars when it's blindingly obvious that none of this matters if the planet decides to start ejecting us for poor behavior? When the first Earth Day was declared in 1970, one of the movement's leaders, Democratic senator Gaylord Nelson, declared that the environmental crisis made "Vietnam, nuclear war, hunger, decaying cities, and all other major problems one could name... relatively insignificant by comparison." Which helps explains why the great radical journalist I. F. Stone described Earth Day as "a gigantic snowjob" that was using "rock and roll, idealism and non-inflammatory social issues to turn the youth off from more urgent concerns which might really threaten our power structure." They were both wrong. The environmental crisis-if conceived sufficiently broadly-neither trumps nor distracts from our most pressing political and economic causes: it supercharges each one of them with existential urgency.”