Wired Magazine revels in its contrarian approach to environmental problems. The magazine has run stories about why the guilt-fired approach to environmental advocacy has run its course; the editors love to catch environmentalists off balance by questioning the conventional wisdom (conserve! go organic! stay local! buy a hybrid! etc.) associated with the movement.

This month Wired spins it another way, arguing that we should be all about prioritizing climate: focus, focus, focus. "Winning the war on global warming means we're going to have to slaughter some of environmentalism's sacred cows," goes the cover story, "Inconvenient Truths: Get Ready to Rethink What It Means to Be Green." The bottom line, argues Wired, is that we should work to cut carbon emmissions and put the other causes on the back burner, since the effects of climate change would doom any progress we might make on say, biodiversity, anyway.

I appreciate the bold stroke. There are some sacred cows of questionable relevance in the environmental pantheon. The very safeguards that environmentalists have pushed for to protect coastlines, for instance, are hampering efforts to test renewable energy options.

But let's be honest. Bold stroke-ness aside, articles like this one provide Wired's unabashedly nerdy readership with intrinsic satisfaction: silly do-gooder environmentalists have too many causes! What they need is a serious engineer to draw up some specs for this project! It's clearly a left-brained thought exercise, not unlike telling people during wartime to give up painting pictures and writing poetry; it's a war out there!

But people simply will not play down the environmental causes they care about, even if the greater good should actually be the higher priority. We have only to look at Wired itself to see this conflicted dynamic in action: in the same issue that features the cover story calling us to set aside peripheral environmental causes, Wired columnist Clive Thompson warns that man-made sounds are drowning out natural ones that allow flora and fauna to communicate and adapt to their environments. Someone's got to develop "quite tech," writes Thompson. "Earth has a voice; we can't let it go silent."

Quiet, Clive, you're drowning out our plans for cutting carbon.