Posts Tagged → environment
You see the darnedest things while hunting
Southeastern Pennsylvania has an overpopluated deer herd of Biblical proportions. Every drive results in shots and deer scrambling across the landscape, making their momentary escape.
On a recent hunt, a midget deer presented itself to every hunter in our group. It was a dwarf deer, without question not a baby or a fawn, apparently fully developed but the size of a fox. I am not making this up or exaggerating.
Although its tail was the regular size for an adult deer, its body was tiny. We nicknamed it the chihuahua deer, and no one shot at it. It was just too cute and freakish. I wanted to adopt it as a pet, which is a big no-no, as wildlife never goes home to become a pet. But it was entertaining to think of it as a pet. I bet it would become mean and spoiled.
Hunters see the darnedest things while afield: Endless trash left by someone too lazy to clean up after themselves; hawks taking snakes and mice; animals fighting; meth labs; you name it, someone you know has seen it.
Today we saw the chihuahua deer, a first-time experience. Maybe it’s a new species. Maybe its extremely diminutive size spawned too much silliness. Maybe hunting is more than killing; sometimes it’s just the experience of witnessing God’s amazing creation.
Bless you, chihuahua deer.
A brief, simple reminder
With the obvious flaws in the new religion of human-caused global warming/ global cooling/ climate change, way too many conservatives lump together all of the environmental issues and then dismiss them with equal carelessness.
Just a reminder: Clean air comes from nature’s natural processes, mostly from trees and other large plants that convert carbon dioxide to oxygen.
Another reminder: Clean fresh water comes from underground filtration through rock layers and sand, in undisturbed or otherwise healthy watersheds.
Both clean air and clean water are necessary for human life to continue as we know it. Both air and water are produced by free ecosystem services that nature perfected for a long time. Humans can kind of reproduce these processes mechanically, but they are energy-dependent and hard to maintain.
Yes, the whole global climate change religion thing is a political effort to shut down western civilization and transfer its wealth to authoritarian countries. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t real environmental quality problems. Fact is, humans pollute, and pollution needs to be resolved. Fouling our own nest is a sloppy, stupid thing to do. We don’t need to do it.
So quit lumping all environmental issues in with human – caused global climate change politics. Focus on the real, measurable problems and solve them. Ignoring them is foolish, and humans are not fools. Basic land and water conservation are necessary to keep people healthy.
Want to add beauty to the world?
If you want to add some beauty to the world, and who doesn’t, then do this simple thing: Let milkweed grow on your property.
Monarch butterflies follow the world’s most incredible migration, but they are increasingly challenged by unnecessary weed control and manicured lawns that eliminate milkweed.
Why milkweed became Public Enemy Weed #1 is probably lost to early 1900s history. But the negative association in most Americans’ minds keeps it suppressed far and wide.
In an urban and suburban environment, milkweed is no worse than the ailanthus (“tree of heaven”) growing everywhere, and it provides a home for beautiful butterflies that make our summers happier and more fulfilling.
So if you see a patch of milkweed growing on your back corner, please leave it. Beauty on wings will thank you, and that miraculous journey will continue for another year.
Freak snow. Does it mean global climate change?
Global climate change, caused exclusively by humans and especially Western democracies, has been a cornerstone article of faith among the most outspoken environmental advocates.
No matter what the weather is, it’s always too extreme, too variable, too much of an outlier for the activists. Wild and even moderate swings in weather are proof of global warming, they constantly say.
If it’s unusually hot for a day, a week, a year, why that is obvious proof of global warming, they say.
If the weather turns prematurely cold or snowy, then that unusual deviation becomes yet another proof of global warming. After all, goes the thinking of the advocates, all unusual weather is evidence. Their first baseline is the past 100 years since weather data has been collected. Their second baseline is the past few hundred years of relatively stable weather patterns around the planet. The past couple of thousand years have seen several long periods of drought and wet, long before human populations either grew significantly or developed modern technology and industrial processes.
Their third baseline is the past ten thousand years, a period of relative calm when compared to the hundred-foot-thick glaciers that covered huge portions of Earth for thousands of years.
Yesterday we had an unusual October snow storm that left an inch or two of wet, heavy snow clinging to trees, buildings, light poles, and lawns. Could this be more evidence of global warming?
Let’s compare this snow to a mid-April snow storm I experienced on the first day of trout season in 1986, in central Pennsylvania. That day I was casting flies on Big Fishing Creek to hungry trout while enveloped in a white-out fog of swirling, blowing snow flakes. At that time, experts claimed the freak snowstorm was evidence of the mini ice age the planet was entering. Not global warming, but global cooling.
Twenty-five years later the global climate change claim is the opposite.
The problem with all this talk of global warming and cooling is that no matter what the weather is, unusually hot or unusually cold, certain advocates claim it is more proof for their current pet end-of-the-world issue. With all weather types and the full spectrum of weather now used to bolster the claim of global warming or climate change, it becomes an un-disprovable claim. All weather is “evidence.”. There is no weather that can be used to prove the opposite claim.
The biggest problem with “global climate change/warming/cooling” is that its advocates steer limited resources away from solving real environmental issues, like water pollution and profligate land development patterns.
I’m going to enjoy this unusual, pretty snow laying out on my lawn, because although it felt like the sky was falling, I rest happily knowing that it really isn’t.
Abandoning the Helm, Here & Afar: How Hypocrisy Has Ended the Moral Claim
Abandoning the Helm, Here & Afar:
How Hypocrisy Has Ended the Moral Claim
© Josh First
July 31, 2011
Time was, for people in need only the local churches helped them. Every frontier town had a church, and its doors were always open to the needy. In a frontier society, the needy are ever-present. Over time, America grew, and seeking America’s promise, the needy increasingly arrived, and the model expanded. Are you hungry, do you need clothes? A local religious group was there to help you or your family. Bethesda Mission, Hebrew Free Loan Association, a myriad of Catholic charities, all served increasingly robust communities and then whole populations of American immigrants from across Europe. Immigrant aid societies flourished, most aimed at their own ethnic or linguistic group.
That model of bare-bones, volunteer-driven organizations advancing and increasingly advocating for the rights, needs, and interests of everyday shlmiel citizens is a uniquely American development. It is something to be proud of. That safety net for newcomers released their potential, increased the opportunity that awaited them, and enhanced their ability to become integrated, productive Americans.
Over decades, mirror image organizations evolved out of more refined social expectations, like human dignity and individual rights, wildlife habitat, environmental protection, and consumer protection. Out of this distinctly private and mostly religiously-based effort came public commissions, bureaucracies, laws, and then government mandates, with increasingly complex goals and symmetrically mixed results. Public health offices aimed at cholera, orphans, and clean water were useful; Prohibition spawned the Mob.
Beating Jim Crow in the South began in the late 1950s, and infused other movements. Responding to the Cold War, international causes became popular in the 1960s, spawning Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, among others.
Increasing public and private financial resources, and increased economic and individual opportunities across America created more defined political jockeying between these safety net groups. Many eventually morphed into highly tuned political machines with sophisticated interest groups, grassroots armies, funders, political backers, friendly media outlets, and crafted messages, many arriving at their final destination and recognizable form in the 1960s and 1970s. Those two decades are also recognizable as the turning point in American public political activism. Gun control, animal rights and welfare, gay rights, etc., all followed, and the laundry list is now long and well known. The political lines are now well drawn in the sand.
What impelled and set the original “founding” interest groups above, apart, and beyond their original surrounding circumstances was a powerful, convening clarion call that coalesced universal conscience: The moral claim.
The moral claim was based on a distinct and publicly recognizable difference between what was common practice at the time, on the one hand, and what was obviously needed to elevate and fairly improve the human condition, on the other hand. The moral claim was a non-partisan standard that appealed to nearly everyone, rallying and focusing fair-minded citizens from across religious, economic, racial and regional boundaries.
One of the most famous examples of the moral claim is King’s I Have a Dream speech. Dead people in coffins have been widely documented to sit up and cry when it’s replayed in their presence, because it is undeniably powerful medicine for a nation designed for freedoms it hadn’t yet delivered.
Similarly, when the Cuyahoga River actually caught on fire, advocates for environmental quality had one hell of a moral claim, and legitimately aimed at ending a long tradition of egregious pollution that privatized profits and socialized the costs. Three decades later, River Keeper was shutting down the last industrial pipes bleeding privately conjured PCBs and other chartreuse-colored ooze into the Hudson River’s very public waters.
But times change, and thankfully, the vast majority of the moral claims have been settled (more on this later, obviously). The problem is that the well-oiled machines that got those moral claims over the goal line are still running on high octane, and they have to keep going, or die. So they stay in the groove that worked for them, well worn over decades, and the growing differences between their goals, methods, and reality is now making hypocrites out of many of these the now-former bearers of the now-former moral claim. Hypocrites do not make good standard bearers.
For example, here in Pennsylvania this past January, purported environmental activists (self-appointed keepers of the green moral claim) banged drums and shouted into bull horns, doing everything possible to disrupt Governor Tom Corbett’s inaugural speech, occurring three hundred feet away. What was the issue that impelled them into their most moral rage? Why, it was the very most moral issue of natural gas drilling. And not just any gas drilling, but hydrofracturing deep gas wells. You’d think from their behavior that gas drilling is a moral issue found directly in the Constitution and the Bible, or that terrible crimes are occurring.
But it’s not a moral issue. Gas drilling is an every-day issue like plastics or peanut butter, arising from modern social needs, demands, and industrial processes that environmental activists themselves help perpetuate in their individual daily lives. It is subject to scientific analysis, assessments of risk-benefit tradeoffs, and regulations, both sufficient and insufficient. It is not a matter of principle.
But once Tom Corbett became governor, within his first two minutes and thirty-eight seconds, as a matter of fact, the activists turned gas drilling into an artificially manufactured issue of principle. Invoking the moral claim, protestors complained that the new Corbett administration, in office for exactly two minutes and thirty eight seconds, was environmentally immoral.
Uhhh, where were these folks during the eight-year tenure of the immediate past governor, Ed Rendell? You know, the same governor who handed out gas drilling and hydrofracking permits like they were potato chips, for years before Corbett was even a candidate? Rendell got a free pass from these purported keepers of the flame, apparently because he was of a political party that the activists otherwise generally concur with. Holding Corbett accountable for something he hasn’t yet done, while giving a free pass to Rendell who done a lot, makes them partisan, makes the gas drilling issue partisan, employs a double standard, makes the activists hypocrites, which terminates their moral claim.
Looking farther abroad, international human rights groups were once the only lifeline of political prisoners in Soviet, Socialist, and authoritarian gulags around the world. Today, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch disproportionately criticize democratic countries where press freedoms, free movement, and economic comforts make it easy to get access to friendly advocates and information, like Israel and America. And they ignore egregious violations among the harder targets, like Saudi Arabia’s all-encompassing barbarism and summary executions, China’s crushing occupation of Tibet, Iran and Syria’s mass executions of peaceful protestors, and Turkey’s ongoing genocide against the Kurds.
Saudi Arabia, that epitome of cruelty, barbarism, discrimination, lacking basic human freedoms and rights, in fact, has recently become the actual benefactor of Human Rights Watch, and thereby bought off the group. Getting access to authoritarian countries is hard, and if the masters of all things human rights play hardball with authoritarian regimes, they get tossed out. So they withhold full criticism, and instead criticize the enemies of the worst brutes, just to keep the machine running. And they take the brutes’ money, too.
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the United Nations and other supposed watchdog groups, are now such giant hypocrites that their misdeeds have spawned watchdog groups to hold them, the self-appointed human rights organizations, accountable to their own purported standards. Groups like NGO Monitor (www.ngo-monitor.org) and UN Watch (www.unwatch.org), which is “tasked with measuring the UN by the yardstick of its own charter,” are playing backup to maintaining the moral claim, and not allowing it to be watered down in the name of convenient politics.
Internationally, certain pet issues predominate, monopolizing press exposure and the supposed moral claim. Despite a nearly two-to-one ratio of Jewish refugees from Jerusalem, Hebron, and Arab and Muslim countries, versus the number of Arab refugees from Israel in the same time period, today we hear only, hypocritically, about the Arabs. Compensating Jewish refugees, whose farms, homes, religious sites, and businesses remain under Arab colonialist occupation, is not a vogue subject. It’s still not vogue in Poland, either, by the way, another mass event held at the same time.
Similarly, Turkey’s still-smoldering genocide against the Armenians, its ethnic cleansing of the Kurds, its brutal occupation of Cyprus complete with an Islamic Apartheid wall, and its officialization of Islamic imperialism all get no media juice. Being a NATO member has its benefits, I suppose, but where oh where is the moral claim? Hypocrites all, the Human Rights Watches of the world. They are focused on tiny, democratic Israel.
In conclusion, if someone abdicates their self-appointed role and abandons the helm, which had been based on a universal standard, and instead becomes a hypocrite, then their moral claim has been badly cheapened or lost. Since the beginning of modern social activism, based on the early faith-based model, public deference was automatically given to those who made the moral claim, who rallied us around a universal conscience. No longer. We are in the beginning of a historic shift of moral authority away from the partisan establishment grievance groups and back into the hands of wired up, dialed-in citizens, whose blogs aggregate and focus public wrath on the official failure du jure. Tunisia one day, British Petroleum the next. Shifting and diffusing power back into the public venue is an inevitable and necessary cog in the evolution of social activism. Who knows what beautiful things will come out of it? Thankfully, hypocrisy won’t be one of those things, because it doesn’t pass the public’s sniff test.
Originally published by and licensed to www.rockthecapital.com