Comment Re:Not just Reno (Score 1) 444
Conservationists tend to be rational, environmentalists are for the most part off their rocker.
People, for the most part, are perfectly rational but have been socialized to value power over any other goal. And prestige is a form of power. So any issue tends to turn into a power struggle where facts are cast aside in favour of "winning".
It doesn't help that "enviromentalism" - or any other group - has a subculture with its own value systems, which don't necessarily have anything to do with the nominal goal. Thus someone who identifies themselves as an enviromentalist inherits a set of default positions, such as antipathy towards nuclear power, and can't change them without expenditure of willpower, since that risks expulsion from the group.
So it's not that people are off their rocker, it's that human mind is bad at properly prioritizing things in its current environment. We've simply grown too powerful too fast for evolution to keep up.