Take a Bex, Elizabeth

A tragic tale of a nation that drowned in greed and neglect - Opinion

Good Lord, Elizabeth Farrelly, the SMH's architecture and planning writer, gets very overwrought in her article in today's paper. It takes 3/4 of the article to get to the reason she's writing it: her objection to the New South Wales State government reviewing the Building Sustainability Index. (Which apparently requires energy and water efficiencies in new houses.)

She may be right; doing away with the index may well be short sighted. But to go on with a rant for the first page like this (talking from the point of view of explaining to our grandchildren what happened):

Instead, we chose to get richer, fatter and smugger. We had resources to burn and, my, we burnt them. What a fire it was. We let our fauna drift into extinction and our indigenes into indigence. Instead of harvesting wind, wave, hot-rock or sun energy, which we had in sparkling abundance, we sold our forests for toilet tissue, our rivers for cotton-farming, our space for radioactive waste, our military for oil. While old Europe poured her energies into sustaining big, dense populations on the few renewables she could muster, we, stuck in neutral, let the mining lobby draft our energy policy and the developers draft our urban plans. So, while the old world leapt forward we new worlders went on filling our air with fossil fuels and covering our remaining farmlands with fat, eaveless houses.

And yet, as the icecaps started to melt and the earth to drown, we sank ever deeper into denial.

And so on.

Doesn't she realise that such hyperbole doesn't serve her cause well? Don't ruin a decent argument by claiming the end of the world if you lose the debate.