It is not often that I turn a comment into a complete post, but this comment from Willis Eschenbach on the Trust and Mistrust article today, merits such a promotion. – Anthony
Which death is more troubling? (images: from NOAA, upper, Wikimedia, lower)
Willis Eschenbach
I am surprised at the visceral nature of the rejection of the term “environmentalist”. I had not realized it had gotten that bad. I don’t think I’d want to be one of those if that’s how people feel.
It also appears that the new preferred term is “conservationist”. But as I said, I don’t make those fine distinctions, so I’m not sure how that differs from the “e-word”.
So let me modify my statement, and say that I am a conservamentalist. I would define that as someone who thinks long and hard about the effect of our actions on the tangled web of life that surrounds us.
I was fishing herring in the Bering Sea one season. I heard on the radio that the annual killing of the Canadian Arctic fur seals had begun, along with the obligatory protests that seem to be required these days.
We’d caught about fifty tonnes of herring that day, killing on the order of a million living beings. I remember thinking how if some creature has big soft baby eyes, it gets lots of sympathy. But if a creature is slimy and has cold fish-eyes, its death doesn’t matter. People hated the seal killers for killing a few dozen creatures, while I killed millions of creatures and was ignored.
If I had to pick one word to describe my position on the ecological webs that surround us, it would be “realist”. Life eats life to live. I am not a man who eats the meat and blames the butcher.
I’ve worked a good deal as a builder. I build with wood. I cut down trees to make room for the building I live in. I grew up in the forest, my step-daddy was a timber feller, the royalty of the logging fraternity. I’ve worked killing trees on an industrial scale.
And I’ll also fight like crazy to see the logging done right. with proper roads and proper setbacks, and proper slope limits, and reforestation. I’ve seen what bad logging practices look like and do.
So for me, a conservamentalist is someone who has thought hard about and balanced the needs for wood and cleared land, balanced those needs with the way that wood is harvested. I grew up in the middle of hundreds of square miles of virgin forest. I have a deep and abiding admiration for that raw wildness. And yet, I cut down trees. I just want to see things done carefully and with forethought, see them done properly with respect for the consequences. I don’t elevate some mythical “Nature” above humans, and I don’t forget nature either.
I was a sport salmon fishing guide a couple years ago, on the Kenai River in Alaska, as I described here. Kenai River king salmon are magnificent beings, fifty pounds or more of powerful, glittering, awe-inspiring fish. When one of my clients caught a salmon, I always thanked the fish in a loud voice for giving up its life for us. Life eats life, beings die so that I can live, and I can’t ignore that. I don’t let it keep me from fishing salmon, but I won’t pretend that I am not killing a splendiferous entity. Some of my clients understood.
Heck, I apologize to trees when I cut them down. Yeah, I know it looks dumb, a grown man talking to trees. But it doesn’t stop me from cutting them down by the scores if need be, I’m a realist. Life eats life. Me, I don’t take killing anything lightly, be it redwood or herring or salmon. Someday, I’ll be chopped down in the same way.
So I’m forming the Conservamentalist Party, our motto will be,“Conservamentalists unite! You have nothing to lose but your minds”.
Now, back to the climate…
I don’t necessarily think that one life can be equated to another. I don’t think it is an axiom that a herrings life is equal to that of a seals. Of all the life forms on this planet I think there is a continual spectrum (given variation between and within species) of awareness. If we think it is natural to equate the value of one animals life to that of another then it would be logical to equate the life of a dolphin to that of a bacteria as they could be linked progressively to each other by other life forms. If you don’t believe that the life of a bacteria is equal to that of a dolphin then there has to be somewhere along the spectrum where you place a cut-off line or grey area and this would not be objectively placed but subjective. It becomes very hard then unless you think all life is equal to argue where that cut-off is.
Also I was wondering if you had ever tried to cut down the biggest tree in one of your forests with one of your herrings?
peterhodges (17:47:04) :
” i guess i am saying that monopoly-capitalism as practiced today is incompatible with freedom”
Peter,
Either you don’t know what capitalism is or what freedom is – or both.
Willis Eschenbach (17:46:36) :
u.k.(us) (17:04:40)
Willis,
I agree with all you said, but showing the seal pup is not the way to win the war.
Well, I’m not in a war, so I’m unsure of your meaning. My point was that the death of a fish-eyed herring and the death of a bunny-eyed seal pup are equivalent, regardless of the bunny eyes. I was attempting to illustrate the illogical nature of protesting the death of a single seal pup, while ignoring the death of a million herring. That’s environmentalism gone way off the rails, in my book. Which is why I’m a conservamentalist.
==============
Make no mistake, whether you call it:
“environmentalism gone way off the rails”, or
Catastrophic AGW “Theory”, it is a war.
A “war” against the latest Utopian fantasy, we are being subjected to.
BTW, I thought I was the only one that apologized to things I kill 🙂
Me dad hunts and fishes. I occasionally read the magazines he subscribes to on those subjects.
Yes, the preferred term in all those publications is ‘conservationist’. I agree with some that it may not be the best word. But it currently works.
I disagree with the ‘New conservationist’ and ‘Old conservationist’ comment way up there(sorry max). The conservationist I read are partially described well as the 1st, and most definitely not the 2nd.
Some(most?) fisheries need to be given time to restore themselves, so these conservationists willingly lobby to restrict or otherwise reduce fishing in that fishery.
Unlike environmentalists, these conservationists willingly, and with the same amount of vigor, lobby to loosen restrictions and allow increased fishing when these fisheries recover.
Same with hunters.
Conservationists don’t have a problem with accepting the evidence that many offshore oil rigs increase sealife. Environmentalists don’t care. They hate evil oil.
Proper logging which is sustainable and, in certain forests/regions increases animal, especially large(non-human) mammal, life? Conservationists can get behind that, provided the evidence shows such. Environmentalists’ only argument is killing trees is bad.
Ohh crud. I’m being incredibly provincial. Conservationist is an accepted term in certain parts of the US. I fully understand why the term doesn’t get much coverage and while my description of environmentalists is very general and stereotypical, it’s mostly true across both the US and Europe.
For research purposes:
http://www.floridasportsman.com/confron/
‘Northern Early Asian Immigrants’ you say ?
I saw some research indicating some of them travelled from the East, along the fringe of the retreating ice, from Greenland &/or Scandinavia. Similarities in primitive toolmaking, distinct from Asian characteristics.
The further we’ve “progressed” and removed ourselves (as a species) from Nature and lorded over every other species on the planet, the more “OUT OF TOUCH” we have become from reality. Is there any wonder then why “civilized” humans can’t bare the thought of killing another animal to feed themselves, or have some problem with cutting down a tree –if they knew how to do either?
Civilization is a great accomplishment but it is not without its fatal faults and illusions. Nothing in life is free. And, if and/or when we (the species) get hungry enough, civilization goes right out the window and we revert to kind. That’s an ugly fact, but absolutely true.
I’ve given up trying to define myself in a way that nobody else can co-opt the term and twist into something that I find distasteful.
So I’ve settled back to things like “Homo sapiens sapiens” and Top Of The Food Chain.
For those of The Book, the key words are “And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”
There are responsibilities and duties in there and I accept them.
Alexander Feht (17:41:06)
Well, kinda … you should read “Memoirs of a Captivity Among the Indians of North America” for the story of someone who was actually there. I’m not holding them up as “noble savages”, that’s a straw man. They are folks like us. I’m simply saying that there are things we can learn from the Early Asian Immigrants, just as there are things that they can learn from us. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Nonsense. Before the whites reached most Early Asian Immigrant villages, a variety of imported diseases had already reached them and wiped most of them out them quite efficiently. You haven’t been keeping up with modern scientific research in this field.
And killing each other “with a passionate fury of obsessed madmen”? That’s something out of a dime-story novel. For many tribes it was much more honorable to count coup on an enemy (by striking them with your “coup stick” and getting away alive) than to kill them. That’s formalized and ritualized warfare, not the action of “obsessed madmen”.
I never said environmentalism is not a religion, that’s another straw man. For some people it is, for some it’s not.
If you want to ignore or gloss over the fact that you go around killing things without a second thought, that’s your choice. My choice is to acknowledge that no man is an island, and that my actions have effects. I’ve worked as what we called a “shade-tree butcher”, killing and skinning farm animals all day long. I’ve worked doing nothing but cutting trees down. I’ve personally killed millions and millions of fish. And I would do any of those jobs again. It’s not just theory to me, you are making a huge mistake if you think I’m a vegan or a tree-hugger. I am a hard-working man who takes an equally hard and unflinching look at my own actions.
Finally, I would venture that I’ve worked as hard and I think as clearly as you do. Did you ever fish the Bering Sea as I have? That’s as hard a work as a man might do, day after day of gruelling physical labor with no sleep in a cold, nasty, dangerous environment. I don’t recommend it for any but fools like myself.
Your pretence that there are two kinds of people, those that care about the effect of their actions in the larger world on the one hand, and those that work hard and think clearly on the other, is a specious but puerile point of view so common that it has it’s own fallacy named after it, the Fallacy of the Excluded Middle.
Is it just me, or “what up with that” James Hansen and his April 5th post on Huffington Post , what the ??? “Obamas second chance?”
I’m not too much for guilt. So I’ve never wanted to be an environmentalist whose tool is guilting people. I’ve never wanted to climb the Golden Gate Bridge in some environmental protest like Woody Harelson did. I eat meat. I don’t have a problem with anyone that wants to be Vegan. And I don’t want to try to control people. I don’t believe in the global warming hysteria because I’ve looked into it for myself and saw that it isn’t real.
Most of all I think America should go to Alaska and get as much oil out of it as quickly as humanly possible and release some of the economic pressure that is on America. We have all benefited from oil here in America, including every environmentalist that takes his microwave for granted. I say let’s bring even more benefit to America.
And let’s get so much oil out of Alaska that we have a super abundance of it and then can sell it cheap to poor countries. 🙂 America the beautiful!
Just out of curiosity, does anyone know why the seals were harvested?
Has anyone wondered what would happen to the seals if they were not?
Did anyone check out what happened to their natural predators?
And last, is it better for an animal to be immediately killed with a tool devised for the purpose of instantly killing, or to die in agony of starvation?
Things are not always as they seem.
Alexander Feht (17:41:06) :
We are being offered, as a “noble example,” a primitive, bigoted, and ruthless religion of savages who lived in constant fear, prejudice, disease, and misery, exhausting natural resources without having a clue about sustainable agriculture or hunting, robbing, raping, scalping, torturing, burning, and eating — yes, eating — each other. Their life was a never-ending disaster.
Alexander, I know of one exception to your rule: the Nez Perce of N.E. Oregon and adjacent area. I live there. They were not the “noble savage”, but they were easily more intelligent and ethical than the people who eventually pushed them out in 1877. Read up on ’em! You’ll be amazed.
Check out the works by Alvin Josephy, esp., “The Nez Perce Indians and the Opening of the Northwest”. Josephy “was a vice president and editor of American Heritage magazine, the founding chairman of the board of trustees of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, and president of the Western History Association. Josephy died in the fall of 2005.”
Wow, that is one ADORABLE little seal pup.
Christoph Horst (18:38:49)
You seem to think I do it for them. I don’t. I do it for me. I do it to stay human and humane, to keep myself from forgetting that I am engaged in a lethal, death-dealing business. I know people who kill animals and fish without a single thought. I don’t want to become like them, coarse and brutal, laughing about the death of some magnificent animal. I am willing to kill. I am not willing to say that killing is no different than pounding a nail.
I don’t know if you’ve ever had a job where your task was to kill living things all day long. I’ve seen it turn decent men harsh and hard. Perhaps that is the difference here, I’ve done mass killing as a job, and most people never have. They are free to eat the meat and then blame the butcher.
I don’t have that luxury. When you kill things for a living, you have no choice, you have to come to some kind of peace with it. I’ve told you how I do it, by respecting the beings that I kill, by seeing that I am no better and no different than what I kill, whether it’s a herring or a seal pup. Might not be the best way, but it’s what has worked for me. Hasn’t stopped me from killing, hasn’t turned me into a Vegan or a tree-hugger …
Where did I say it was wrong to kill seal pups?
And of course these are human decisions. All I’m saying is that we need to be honest and thoughtful about both the immediate and indirect results of our human decisions, and not treat the death of a herring as somehow less than the death of a seal pup, or treat killing something as though it was the same as stacking bricks to make a wall.
Oh please…. Most plant won’t grow? And you just cherry picked a paper? Have you read the paper, BTW?
Let me copy and paste just one sentence of the Abstract:
And of course it is. For 1 paper where you find no increment of growth you can find hundreds of papers proving that CO2 increments result in plant growth increments.
Here are a few:
http://www.co2science.org/subject/r/rubiscoag.php
http://www.co2science.org/data/plant_growth/dry/dry_subject_r.php
Elizabeth (Canada) (19:22:52) : edit
Oh, very good, I busted out laughing …
Please, less emotion, preaching, finger-pointing, and noble posturing on both sides of the climate debate. Let’s be honest for a moment: while we argue passionately about fur, fish or a few degrees Celsius, mankind is cheerfully overpopulating our way toward oblivion.
Every single environmental issue originates in human population pressure. Until we seriously address this, the rest is just meaningless tinkering.
igloowhite (19:11:09) :
“Is it just me, or “what up with that” James Hansen and his April 5th post on Huffington Post , what the ??? “Obamas second chance?””
Relax – it’s just another “product” produced by that great scientific team at NASA GISS – LOL!
Sorry for the double posting:
Here are 6 papers, also using Nicotiana tabacum as the plant being tested, and in all 6 of them plants increase their growth a mean of about 60% (dry weight) when the CO2 concentration was increased by 300 ppm.
http://www.co2science.org/data/plant_growth/dry/n/nicotianat.php
Maybe something went wrong in the experiment on the paper you cited.
That bottom picture of a polar bear snack sure is cute.
If you give yourself a classification, you get lumped in with the criticism of the group, which can cop nastly little pieces like this one:
Exposed: green shoppers’ dirty little secrets
GREEN consumers sometimes take the moral high ground – but it’s all too easy to slide back down. New research suggests that those who make “green” purchases are more likely to behave selfishly, cheat and steal afterwards.
Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong of the University of Toronto in Canada presented students with simulated online stores. Half were given a store stocked mostly with “green” products – compact fluorescent lamps instead of incandescent light bulbs, for instance – to make it more likely that they would shop green. The other half were given a store stocked with mostly conventional products, and all the volunteers were told to spend up to $25.
The students then did one of two tasks. One group was told to share $6 between themselves and another participant, Mazar and Zhong found that green shoppers in this group kept more for themselves than the others did {Psychological Science, DOI: 10.1177/0956797610363538).
(More in original article)
It’s unclear how far the moral glow of green shopping makes people feel it’s OK to cheat and steal in the real world. Still, moral “self-licensing” could explain the counterproductive results of some attempts to reduce environmental footprints, such as the recent finding that people in the UK who have made their homes more energy-efficient are more likely to turn up their heating or keep it on for longer. “New Scientist” 27 March 2010.
(I thought that the Gore mansion syndrome had been known for longer than that).
Jack Maloney (19:39:01) :
Interestingly species which historically suffered catastrophic population reductions tend to compensate with catastrophic population growth, so the present human population explosion could be due to an underlying causation based on our past.
Quite a few native peoples as well as our own societies, have accounts of earlier global catastrophic events that affected humanity, Aztecs, etc etc.
Yet after Charles Lyell’s time 2 centuries ago, “civilised” man rejected that anything catastrophic ever happened to humanity in the past, but, and perhaps not so strangely, is presently obessing over a potential future climate catastrophe that’s going to affect everything.
Velikovsky called it “mankind in amnesia” and it was his contention that as long as humanity kept denying our catastrophic past, then that well known pyschologically based suppression of the past will keep resurfacing into the present as humanity tries to relive that past in order to understand it.
As a species we seem to be expecting another future catastrophe, hence the population explosion.
I suggest that those interested study the http://www.thunderbolts.info site and see what progress has been made in the understanding of humanity’s past, and the physics behind the those earlier catastrophes which so many of us refuse to admit ever happened.
Christoph Horst (18:38:49) said:
“Animals don’t think in categories like that (to say nothing of plants). They don’t think at all. They don’t know the meaning of the word “category.” Or morals. They aren’t even indifferent to that kind of thing, because they don’t know what indifference is. They aren’t even aware of themselves.”
This is stupidest thing I’ve read in many years. Clearly, Christopher, you know nothing about animals, and live in a day dream fostered by religion or some such. Animals DO think, they ARE aware of themselves, and those who live with humans demonstrate extraordinary abilities and awarenesses, including morals and ethics.
Years ago I read an asinine book by some bible-thumper that claimed animals didn’t REALLY feel pain, and that what we perceived as suffering was nothing more than unconscious reflex actions. The author had to concoct this theory in order to reconcile his religion with the observable world, and to justify all those animal sacrifices in his religious textbook. Incidentally, this is the same argument put forward by human abortionists to spin away the obvious suffering of their human unborn victims.
_____________________________
Larry Sheldon (19:03:01) said:
“For those of The Book, the key words are “And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”
“There are responsibilities and duties in there and I accept them.”
Larrry, IT’S A BOOK. It isn’t reality; it’s a collection of plagiarized tribal myths. To live your life by a story compendium and to base your treatment of other sentient beings on said compendium is beyond unconscionable. You are exactly the kind of person I was referring to in my original post. It isn’t your duty to reproduce yourself ad infinitum or to subdue and control all the other beings on this planet, and your acceptance of such an imaginary duty tells me you are far less evolved than the the poor animals you disparage. What an ego. So the Universe revolves around YOU, huh?
I’ve spent most of life rescuing sentient, intelligent, self-conscious, but horribly abused and neglected, animals from people like you and Christopher. Every cent I have goes to veterinary care, most of which would never have been necessary if it weren’t for spiritual snobs of your kind who think themselves special, unique, superior, blah, blah, blah.
Reply: Biblical references to humans’ relationships with non-humans will no longer be discussed, nor biblical reference to sentience or non-sentience. If you need to go down the path of sentience or consciousness discussions please discuss in terms of Behaviorism, ie Skinner. This is not a blog to debate religion. ~ ctm
Jack:
You are a neo-Malthusian. Malthus was wrong on the issues and so are you. The earth could support three times the current 6B if do-gooders did not convert grain to alcohol (instead of oil for the environment – what a joke) and began to distribute food properly. This attitude is the reason we slaughter babies for stem cells (another fraud, BTW) and push to euthanize the elderly by passive or active means. No prayers for these humans, I’ll wager. Neo-Malthusians are based in hatred of all living things, starting with humans. They are fundamentally racist elitists from their beginnings with Margaret Sanger and Mengele. Oh, the hypocrisy.
My advice? For population control, why not volunteer?
Thank you Mr. Eschenbach for writing this post! Though I am a daily “lurker” here on WUWT, I felt compelled to write a comment.
I am not the standard WUWT reader. I am a 31 year old, female, skeptic, left leaning independent who’s former career included working on an oil rig as a geologist and cleaning up contaminated sites for reuse. I have seen environmental protests from the small scale to the large-a couple people with signs to a whole community of people with shot guns!
In 5 years as a geologist, I saw protests beginning to change from peaceful and informational to violent and irrational. While I once considered myself an environmentalist, this shift has caused me to take a look at my views and actions and make changes as I did not want to be identified in the same breath as someone who would hurt someone else or destroy property to keep a tree from being cut down. I felt I was not doing enough good in this world and decided to end my geology career and become a science teacher at the middle school level to help young people challenge the accepted understanding of what science is and how they impact their surroundings.
Mr. Eschenbach, thank you for giving a name to the actions and beliefs that I have made a part of my daily life. I am excited to say that I am a conservamentalist….ok, at the very least, I am glad you gave a name to what has given me peace at my roll here on Earth. By the way, I too talk to my plants when I am working in my garden and thank them for growing for me. I thought I was alone in that and, therefore, a little off of my rocker!