Friday, April 03, 2015

Jonathan Franzen questions ‘overriding priority’ of climate change

The Corrections author accepts its urgency but confesses to ‘caring more about birds in the present than people in the future’

Jonathan Franzen
‘Miserably conflicted’ … Jonathan Franzen. Photograph: Ulf Andersen/Getty Images
Bird-lover and novelist Jonathan Franzen, a longstanding environmentalist, has said that he is “miserably conflicted” about climate change, and that its “supremacy as the environmental issue of our time” makes him “feel selfish for caring more about birds in the present than about people in the future”.
Writing in the new issue of the New Yorker, where he describes himself as “someone who cares more about birds than the next man”, the award-winning author of The Corrections and Freedom recounts how, last autumn, the glass walls of a new football stadium were expected to kill thousands of birds every year, and how “local bird-lovers had asked its sponsors to use a specially-patterned glass to reduce collisions; the glass would have raised the stadium’s cost by one tenth of one per cent, and the sponsors had balked”.
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