Built Green? No, Black

The top news on CNN's website at present--at least for the next five minutes until Hilary Clinton jaywalks or Britanny Spears leaves her kids at Saks--is an account of five $2 million-dollar homes burning in Seattle, apparently an act of eco-arson.
The ELF or Earth Liberation Front, it seems, decided that the most environmentally sensible way to deal with the insane land use represented by these houses was to burn them down. I'm curious how much carbon dioxide these fires released into the atmosphere.
I mention this event because I carry a certain amount of sympathy for these whack-jobs who torched these monuments to conspicuous consumption. Nobody on earth needs a $2 million house, just as nobody needs a Hummer. Food from South America isn't really cheaper than food from close by when we factor in all the costs of production and the effect that these foods have on our health. We live in a world with an unsustainable, indefensible way of doing a great many things. However, the way to change the world does not begin with burning down houses.
Of course, the ELF hasn't really thought things through from the outset, have they? What are they liberating earth from? Humans? Isn't there something paradoxical about human action serving to liberate the earth from human domination. Just yesterday, I thought I heard a tree in my yard say, "Gee, I wish some enlightened human would burn down the homes of some of the benighted types who are doing bad stuff to the earth."
Like so many people in our society, this brand of activist has opted for a lazy (and criminal) approach to effecting change. Rather than doing the difficult work of engaging people's minds and risking some questioning of their beliefs, these people just start burning. They're right up there with those who blew up government installations during the '60s or murdered abortion doctors in the '80s.
Such action is no more the mark of educated people than is living in ostentation and excess along Seattle's "Street of Dreams."