The other day I ran into the term "environmental pornography," hurled in the general direction of my recent piece on the grim international environmental impacts of China's growth, "The Last Empire" (http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2008/01/the-last-empire.html). The term apparently refers to stories which describe, sometimes in despairing terms, the international environmental calamity which is starting to gather momentum. The phrase is intended to suggest that such stories are a kind of excess, indulged in by those who take pleasure in the idea of collapse, who revel in dark thoughts.

  Perhaps out of politeness, the wielder of the phrase was careful to exempt my piece from the characterization, but I still take offense— less personally than as a member of the community of environmental writers. The truth is that the planet faces an environmental Holocaust. Global warming, shortages and pollution of water, plummeting biodiversity, the destruction of the oceans, the increasing threat of lethal disease,  on and on and on— all these are looming, and at least some of them will wreak horrors unless they are addressed head-on now, unless now is already  too late. Were stories written in mid-1930s Europe about the impending fate of Jews labeled "genocide pornography"? In my view, "environmental pornography" makes about as much sense.

  The subtext of many of the interviews I conducted for the China piece was nearly always despair, for the scientists and environmental science students who followed these developments most closely understand their ominous implications. Indeed, one professor said he'd help me only if I promised that my piece would offer hope. I often thought about him as I wrote the story, chiefly because I knew I couldn't deliver on the pledge I gave him. Hope is a prerequisite for any meaningful action, but in the environmental arena it still only a glimmer, mostly an insistence on affirming life even in the absence of convincing evidence that conditions will improve. All this is terrifying, of course, and I suspect that fear is what lurks behind the "environmental pornography" assertion— it reflects our unwillingness to face the dire future, an impotent wish that the seasons do not change, that the food supply remains ample, that the freshwater doesn't run out. I imagine the user of this phrase, perhaps a student, persuading herself that environmental crisis is only an elective, in which she declines to enroll.