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 killed millions of creatures and was ignored…”
Don’t concern yourself Willis, Fish were reclassified as vegatables a long time ago, ask any vegatarian, they will reassure you.
@ur momisugly vboring (12:39:31) :
“I’m a science-based environmentalist with socialist and vegan leanings.
That is why climate change pisses me off. It distracts from humanity’s real problems.”
Vboring, there is no joined-up logic in your statement – in fact the more I read it, the less sense it makes. Furthermore, I would suggest that as a socialist you ARE humanity’s real problem.
James Sexton (21:57:55) wrote:
“You, uhmm, ever watched a cat and a mouse? Most cats don’t actually eat the mouse, they play with it to death. I had a curr dog once. Dad bought a bunch of chicks to raise for the year. Came home from church one day and had 50 bright yellow and red spots all over our lawn. None ate, just dead. Oddly, dog died of lead poisoning an hour later.
“Do you people ever really know what your talking about? Do you ever really observe their behavior? Do you know what bull bovines do on occasion do to the people that care for them? Deer? Raccoons? “Other examples”????? R U kidding me? You ever drag bodies that were killed by mountain lions home? Because the bodies were moved affirms they weren’t ate. Nor were they armed. Animals kill. It’s not good nor bad, that’s just what they do. There’s no psychology about it, it is their nature.
“I’ve a black lab. I love the guy. He has a great demeanor and I wouldn’t part with him for love nor money. But he’s an animal. His life is in no way comparable to the life of a human. Any human. Its an apple and orange comparison that shouldn’t even be attempted to be made. It is obscene to even try to draw a comparison.”
Obscene to draw a comparison? Says who, what, where, where, and why? Your letter is ungrammatical, so I doubt you are particularly well-read on animal psychology or anything, for that matter. And how do you know your dog died of lead poisoning? Did you have a necropsy performed? Did it occur to you that perhaps your dog was just playing with the chicks, unaware that he (she) was hurting them in the process? Dogs do the same thing with socks, shoes, and all kinds of things on the ground.
I feel sorry for your current black lab. To have a human who regards one as an inferior being is awfully sad. The fact that you think comparing his life to YOURS is obscene tells me how highly you think of yourself.
I would give my life for any of my creatures. As the person responsible for them, I am supposed to place their well-being above my own. When you love someone, that’s what you do. If you think you’re superior to the other, it isn’t love. I don’t know what it is. But, it sucks.
where, WHEN, and why.
Are we talking about the same indians who hunted buffalo by chasing their flocks over cliffs?
Willis Eschenbach (22:52:21) :
regeya (21:20:36)
“The natives in North America always had a sustainable way of life and thanked every animal and the Earth for giving what they used or eat. They are the first Conservamentalists.”
Here’s a related curiosity. One of the less known stories of the prairies is that the Early Asian Immigrants didn’t live much on the prairies until the coming of the Europeans. This was because buffalo are very hard and very dangerous to kill if you are on foot.
The Early Asian Immigrants *did* “hunt” buffalo on foot — they’d stampede a herd over the edge of a precipice.
Fifty to a hundred dead and crippled buffalo in a heap at the bottom of a cliff provided a lot of meat, hides, and sinew at a very low risk to the hunters — and provided a lot of leftovers for scavengers.
davidmhoffer (21:24:49) :
As a rule, animals don’t kill except to eat or in self defense. If that isn’t a sense of morals, I don’t know what is.
Morals have nothing to do with wild animals generally not killing for sport.
Think about it: killing for sport uses energy, thus requiring more killing for food, which depletes the food source and further exposes the animal to the risks to it of making the kill, as well as consuming precious time obviously better used toward basic survival hunting – where in a balanced relationship between predator and prey, the situation usually requires it; killing for sport also further exposes such an animal to its own predators as well as to injury, again. An injured wild animal is a dead animal.
In general, it doesn’t make survivalistic sense for animals to kill for sport, and that’s all there is to it, not “morals” or “choices”.
regeya (21:32:46) :
@Jack:
‘ “Environmentalist”
‘The word was demonized by the right wing scream team.
[…]
Amen.
Right, the “right wing scream team” caused every “Environmentalist” organization I’ve heard of to essentially make Environmentalism’s chief cause the CAGW hoax.
But a few years ago one Environmentalist had already told me that I couldn’t call myself an “Environmentalist” because I didn’t want to tear down all the dams on the Columbia and Snake Rivers to “save the Salmon”, which is a gigantic fiasco as is. That after I’d purchased 200 acres of land 30+ years prior, situated almost entirely within a legal Wilderness, partially to preserve it from development or commercialization and later took him on as a partner!
I guess the “right wing scream team” must have finally got to me./sarc.
magicjava (16:05:32) :
Great video.
Biofuels are a farce. And palm oil is particularly pernicious.
I hope we can stop the palm oil parade before all those species are extinct.
There is no need for palm oil for biofuels.
There is plenty of oil and will be.
Oil companies play along with the biofuels scam to score “green” points with the public, but their preference is to produce hydrocarbons from oil wells.
Willis, another keeper 🙂 I’ve always been taken by an aphorism I read in a magazine once many years ago: “There is but one sin — disrespect for life”.
Nothing wrong in talking to trees. I talk to my choc Labrador all the time, it’s only when he answers me back that I have a problem!
Bill Tuttle (01:05:33)
True, except for the part about the leftovers, the Early Asian Immigrants didn’t leave many.
However, since the buffalo herds were always on the move, you couldn’t build a lifestyle around hunting them that way. Once horses were available, the tribes could (and did) follow the herds in their wandering, and build a life around them.
@ur momisugly John A: “I also find that those most taken by eco-alarmism are those least likely to have experienced what they propose for others: subsistance agriculture and grinding economic poverty.”
The first part’s correct, but I’m not so sure about the “grinding economic poverty” bit, at least in Western society. When my wife and I took up subsistence farming (organic) in the early 80s, we were indeed *economically* impoverished, but we had lots of gourmet food, more than passable wine and beer far better than you could buy. (Guests used to bring the storebought stuff and leave it for me to drink!)
She Who Must Be Obeyed said on one memorable occasion: “I wonder what the poor rich people are having to eat tonight.”
Actually, I think there’s an easy way to tell the difference between eco-weenies and the conservamentalists: humour.
@ur momisugly Dave Springer (15:39:59) :
“There’s a difference in kind between eating a soy bean and eating a steer.”
There sure is! Where I live (Tasmania) soy beans mostly come from Asia. The steers eat the grass outside my back door. Their manure grows my vegetables.
So if I eat imported beans trucked here from overseas and buy my vegetables at the supermarket I’m saving the planet. But the planet is doomed because I prefer to eat what I can grow locally. Hmmmmmm….
Animal consciousness:
“Animal behaviour expert Dr Bekoff, of the University of Colorado had an encounter with four magpies alongside a magpie corpse as proof that animals have a ‘moral intelligence’. Birds such as this yellow-billed magpie may have a more sympathetic side to their character than their notoriously harsh image
‘One approached the corpse, gently pecked at it, just as an elephant would nose the carcass of another elephant, and stepped back,’ he said. ‘Another magpie did the same thing.
Next, one of the magpies flew off, brought back some grass and laid it by the corpse. Another magpie did the same. Then all four stood vigil for a few seconds and one by one flew off.’
After publishing an account of the funeral he received emails from people who had seen the same ritual in magpies, ravens and crows.
‘We can’t know what they were actually thinking or feeling, but reading their action there’s no reason not to believe these birds were saying a magpie farewell to their friend,’ he writes in the journal Emotion, Space and Society.”
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1221754/Magpies-grieve-dead-turn-funerals.html
kuhnkat (20:32:34) :
Dave Springer,
If you were more religious you would realise that the instructions in Genesis changed radically when God sent the flood and wiped out the natural riches that allowed an easy vegan diet. After the flood Noah’s descendants had different instructions.
Maybe God thought the vegan experiment had been a failure.:-)
——–
Where I live we have an avian problem. These Green Woodpeckers are destructive little buggers! Tearing anthills apart, exposing bare earth to rain and wind causing erosion. And all to feed their greed. And for this, murdering millions of innocent ants. I can’t see why these evil birds can’t become vegetarian, like Dr. Pachauri. After all the latest research (based on computer modelling designed by climatologists) proves that meat, when not eaten, lives forever. And they breathe out CO2. And they don’t even have the decency to be furry; they’re covered in feathers. FUR GOOD: FEATHERS BAD! FUR GOOD: FEATHERS BAD!
Willis Eschenbach (02:23:18) :
Bill Tuttle (01:05:33)
True, except for the part about the leftovers, the Early Asian Immigrants didn’t leave many.
They left enough to make 20-foot-high walls of bones and skulls at some of the sites, and the buffs, being creatures of habit and instinct, returned to the same sites — with predictable results.
However, since the buffalo herds were always on the move, you couldn’t build a lifestyle around hunting them that way. Once horses were available, the tribes could (and did) follow the herds in their wandering, and build a life around them.
Right you are. The sites of the “buffalo jumps” were mostly in the northern portions of the plains, or along the Missouri where the river carved steep bluffs. The horse not only untied the Plains Tribes from highly-localized hunting areas, but allowed them to become world-class light cavalry.
Pompous Git (02:41:48),
Another example: click
Phil M:
“I don’t elevate some mythical “Nature” above humans”
Are you arguing that all self-described environmentalists or conservationists ARE doing this?”
All, I’m certain not. A large number? Absolutely yes.
When big wigs in the community can say with a straight face that the population of earth needs to decrease in order to be sustained, that’s putting “nature” above humans.
“http://www.npg.org/forum_series/sus_econ_91.htm
But to create such a sustainable economy would be impossible without a smaller world population than the 3.8 billion existing in 1972 when NPG was founded.”
“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overpopulation
n a study titled Food, Land, Population and the U.S. Economy, David Pimentel, professor of ecology and agriculture at Cornell University, and Mario Giampietro, senior researcher at the US National Research Institute on Food and Nutrition (INRAN), estimate the maximum U.S. population for a sustainable economy at 200 million. According to this theory, in order to achieve a sustainable economy and avert disaster, the United States would have to reduce its population by at least one-third, and world population would have to be reduced by two-thirds.[23
…
On the other hand, some researchers, such as Julian Simon and Bjorn Lomborg believe that resources exist for further population growth. However, critics warn, this will be at a high cost to the Earth: “the technological optimists are probably correct in claiming that overall world food production can be increased substantially over the next few decades…[however] the environmental cost of what Paul R. and Anne H. Ehrlich describe as ‘turning the Earth into a giant human feedlot’ could be severe. A large expansion of agriculture to provide growing populations with improved diets is likely to lead to further deforestation, loss of species, soil erosion, and pollution from pesticides and fertilizer runoff as farming intensifies and new land is brought into production.”[37] Since we are intimately dependent upon the living systems of the Earth,[38][39][40] some scientists have questioned the wisdom of further expansion.[41]
]”
When Willis declares that he isn’t one of these people, he’s declaring that he isn’t one of these people, not that every Leftie IS. You know that.
The “white coat” in the amended photo isn’t quite right either – they don’t get clubbed that young in Canada.
And, for the record, some people *do* eat the seal meat. Heck, if I could find it at my grocery store, I’d buy some in a minute…
Anton wrote: “And how do you know your dog died of lead poisoning?”
I think that one just sailed right over your head. I’d be willing to bet that there was no doubt whatsover.
I think that’s a brilliant post/article. Reminds me of something I’d read.
“We must forgive each other our arising, for our existence always torments others. The golden rule in the midst of this mutual misery has always been, not to do no harm, but as little as possible; and not to love one another, but as much as you can.” — Ken Wilber
Believing a fairytale that we can live without causing harm somewhere is more damaging that simply looking at reality and asking how our means and technology can be used to reduce suffering. The Vegetarian Myth is interesting reading in that light, along with Paleo-diets. The question is whether these things are broadly correct, and then we can, calculate the relative levels of suffering.
Speaking of technology, I look forward to the day when food products come packaged with RFID chips so I can view a detailed history of their production on my tablet reader whilst walking past them in the market.
Andy Mayhew 13:33:46. Alternatve view of Easter Island Disaster http://www.livescience.com/history/060309_easter_island.html
When you boil Fat Albert’s message down to it’s lowest common demominator (luv’ mixed metaphores) it’s all about population and how that population operates on this “beautiful blue marble” in the middle of this fantastic universe.
For them, Nature and its limited resources and beauty take precidence over people –especially those second and third world people who don’t know how to do anything except make too many copies of themselves. If you think he and his gang ‘care’ about humanity you’re sniffin’ too much glue or need some stronger specs to read between the lines.
The pure, wonderful, beautiful, brilliant campaign called “Climate Change” (I thought climate did change?) or AGW is only a means to an end, they (the organizers) couldn’t care less about the expense or the end impact on countries, industries, economies, or our way of life (civilization). They want to start over. They want to “really” start over and create Utopia.
To create their new, beautiful world, a lot of you’s and me’s on this planet are going to have to disapear, along with all our kids and our bloodlines.
Every reasonable person on the planet is a ‘conservamentalist’, but –as always– there’s some in the tribe who have big, bright ideas about how things could be sooooo much better if there weren’t sooooo many folks and smoke and smelly toilets in this little old cave of ours. Most people agree with most of what this group is preaching. Most think they’re going to be one of the ‘lucky’ folks who survive — after all “we’re NOT the problem” RIGHT?
People are really funny! Sometimes they’re really stupid too! It’s not the climate that’s changing –climate always changes– it’s the way we live and the who that live. This is politics not climatology.
BTW: The last stupidity: Have you seen, last night at Bill O´Reilly show, that in San Francisco it has been forbidden to eat meat on mondays?
♪♪♪
Monday, Monday, so good to me
Monday mornin’, it was all I hoped it would be
Oh Monday mornin’, Monday mornin’ couldn’t guarantee
That Monday evenin’ that steak would still be here with me
♪♪♪
…..This is a symptom that the Big One is coming sooooon!