What Do You Do With a BA in English?

Save the Earth! Kill the people!

So I've been obsessively reading James Patterson's "Maximum Ride" series, about a group of kids who have wings (thanks to their 2% avian DNA). The story, told mostly in first person by the main character, a 14 year old hybrid named Max, is a trippy ride - there's lots of escaping from mad scientists, searching for birth parents, getting clues from the "Voice" in Max's head and, of course, flying around and kicking butt. It's awesome, if a little stressful for the characters - Max never knows who she can trust, who's really working for whom, and whether or not her disappearing/reappearing "father" is manipulating her for some sciency save-the-world-who-knows-what. Speaking of which, there's the recurring theme of "saving the world": You have to save the world, Max, that's why you exist!

Interestingly, even the bad guys are all about "saving the world" - by killing off half the people on it. And by exacerbating the environmental problems they complain about in the meantime. Evil scientists are not known for their logical reasoning skills.

In the fourth book, after Max and the flock (her five hybrid friends who comprise her "family") have basically defeated the evil corporation that's been funding the scientists who made and tortured them, they find a new hobby in Antarctica - helping nice scientists look for evidence of global warming, which Max isn't sure she buys into.

By the end of the book, Max is a Kyoto disciple and goes before Congress to try to influence them to be better team players and make evil corporations stop killing the world, as global warming is apparently a result of such evil corporations.

Sidenote: there is no such thing as an evil corporation. There may or may not be evil people who may or may not run/benefit from corporations, but, as corporations themselves are not sentient, they cannot be evil in terms of being guilty of anything. It's people who sometimes suck, duh.

Anyway, as Max gave her little impassioned speech, relating all the crap she's been through to the US not signing the Kyoto thingy (I sorta skimmed that part) I thought, poor Max, being manipulated again.

I'm all about reducing, reusing and recycling, and not junking up the planet.

I also don't want our economy to collapse in the process of making things better.

I did a little reading at http://www.cfact.org/, an environmental organization I found out about from a friend. Turns out some of the folks at the UN aren't what we would call team players themselves.

I'm not gonna freak out about this whole global warming thing or get an ulcer over being mad at "evil" polluting corporations (even if some of their CEOs may do really crappy things). What I am gonna do is research more about what little Ariah can do to be more environmentally friendly (already doing the things on the bulleted list at the back of the book) and like, tell other people about whatever good ideas I find out about. If they ask.

Labels: books

posted by ariah @ 1:49 PM