An ode for Paula Dobri­an­sky, John Baird, and all the other nihilists in Bali who press on toward a “triumph where all things falter.”

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A For­saken Garden
Alger­non Charles Swinburne

In a coign of the cliff between low­land and high­land,
At the sea-down’s edge between wind­ward and lee,
Walled round with rocks as an inland island,
The ghost of a garden fronts the sea.
A girdle of brush­wood and thorn encloses
The steep square slope of the blos­som­less bed
Where the weeds that grew green from the graves of its roses
Now lie dead.

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In his column today at the NYT, Thomas Fried­man writes:

We have to show [China] what Wal-​Mart is show­ing its competitors—that green is not just right for the world, it is better, more prof­itable, more healthy, more inno­v­a­tive, more effi­cient, more successful.

Fried­man wants to go green. He knows that the threat of global warm­ing is real. He chas­tises the fed­eral gov­ern­ment in gen­eral, and the Bush admin­is­tra­tion in par­tic­u­lar, for not doing enough to try to stop it.

But what Fried­man, ever gleam­ing in his Pan­gloss­ian naivete, doesn’t seem to under­stand is that his pre­scrip­tion for fight­ing the prob­lem dumps us right back into the think­ing that caused the prob­lem in the first place. If the bottom line is the bottom line, if the ulti­mate arbiters of every polit­i­cal deci­sion are eco­nomic values—profit, inno­va­tion, effi­ciency, success—then we leave our­selves help­less in the face of prob­lems that can’t be—or aren’t*—adequately described in eco­nomic terms.

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