Why do environmentalists hate America?

I love hyperbole. I use it a lot because it makes me laugh - sometimes I laugh so hard my head explodes. But I digress.

I sometimes enjoy when other people use it, as is the case with two examples from this week - both from the same newspaper, the Las Vegas Review Journal.

#1- this editorial: Environmentalists are against human prosperity.

Favorite quote besides the headline: "Such a scenario, which would lay waste to America's economy and quality of life, is the stuff of dreams for environmentalists. And they're doing everything they can to make it a reality."

That's right, we don't want anyone to succeed in this world. You've discovered our huge secret! How about smart and sensible energy policy in this country? How about not letting companies that pollute continue to create loopholes in regulations? It's about balance, people. Yes, I know we need energy for our country, but it should not come at the expense of the planet and human well-being.


#2- this editorial: Environmentalists threaten civilization.

Favorite quote besides the headline: "Nature, (environmentalists) insist, has 'intrinsic value,' to be revered for its own sake, irrespective of any benefit to man. As a consequence, man is to be prohibited from using nature for his own ends. Of course, environmentalists invoke the doctrine of intrinsic value not against wolves that eat sheep or beavers that gnaw trees; they invoke it against only man, only when man wants something."

Really? We're supposed to go into the woods and picket the beavers who are making dams? We're supposed to march into the fields and protect sheep from wolves? You see, that's just not the same thing.

Beavers are doing what beavers do, as are wolves - they have a natural balance. Are they gnawing down every tree in the woods near you? Guess who's fault that is? Humans. For infringing on their habitat, drastically cutting its size, and throwing off the balance of predators and prey. Wolves are eating your sheep? Same reason. Their habitat is threatened, making them come into areas where humans live and picking off the animals easiest to nab.

I don't see any wolves marching into my home to knock it down. I don't see any wolves knocking down my neighborhood so they can put in a shopping mall. I don't see any beavers dragging my furniture out into the street so they can make houses. But man continues to overuse the planet's resources - with little regard for anyone besides himself.

There has to be a balance, folks. And yes, from both sides.

Still, though, I can't stop laughing at that line about the beavers and the wolves. I keep picturing holding up a beaver by its tiny ears and yelling in its face, "STOP INFRINGING ON MY VALUE AS A HUMAN!" I picture chasing a wolf through the woods with broom.

Sigh.


As part two of this post -
John Muir has some great lines in his book "A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf" about how humans think they have perfect domain over all other creation. Call me a dirty hippie all you want, but I'm still going to list some of these quotes:

"The antipathies existing in the Lord's great animal family must be wisely planned, like balanced repulsion and attraction in the mineral kingdom. How narrow we selfish, conceited creatures are in our sympathies! how blind to the rights of all the rest of creation! With what dismal irreverence we speak of our fellow mortals! Though alligators, snakes, etc., naturally repel us, they are not mysterious evils. They dwell happily in these flowery wilds, are part of God's family, unfallen, undepraved, and cared for with the same species of tenderness and love as is bestowed on angels in heaven or saints on earth."
...

From Chapter 6 of the book (lengthy, but a great read):
The world, we are told, was made especially for man a presumption not supported by all the facts. A numerous class of men are painfully astonished whenever they find anything, living or dead, in all God's universe, which they cannot eat or render in some way what they call useful to themselves. They have precise dogmatic insight of the intentions of the Creator, and it is hardly possible to be guilty of irreverence in speaking of their God any more than of heathen idols. He is regarded as a civilized, law-abiding gentleman in favor either of a republican form of government or of a limited monarchy; believes in the literature and language of England; is a warm supporter of the English constitution and Sunday schools and missionary societies; and is as purely a manufactured article as any puppet of a half-penny theater.

With such views of the Creator it is, of course, not surprising that erroneous views should be entertained of the creation. To such properly trimmed people, the sheep, for example, is an easy problem -- food and clothing "for us," eating grass and daisies white by divine appointment for this predestined purpose, on perceiving the demand for wool that would be occasioned by the eating of the apple in the Garden of Eden.

In the same pleasant plan, whales are store. houses of oil for us, to help out the stars in lighting our dark ways until the discovery of the Pennsylvania oil wells. Among plants, hemp, to say nothing of the cereals, is a case of evident destination for ships' rigging, wrapping packages, and hanging the wicked. Cotton is another other plain case of clothing. Iron was made for hammers and ploughs, and lead for bullets all intended for us. And so of other small handfuls of insignificant things.

But if we should ask these profound expositors of God's intentions, How about those man-eating animals -- lions, tigers, alligators -- which smack their lips over raw man? Or about those myriads of noxious insects that destroy labor and drink his blood? Doubtless man was intended for food and drink for all these? Oh, no! Not at all! These are unresolvable difficulties connected with Eden's apple and the Devil. Why does water drown its lord? Why do so many minerals poison him? Why are so many plants and fishes deadly enemies? Why is the lord of creation subjected to the same laws of life as his subjects? Oh, all these things are satanic, or in some way connected with the first garden.

Now, it never seems to occur to these far-seeing teachers that Nature's object in making animals and plants might possibly be first of all the happiness of each one of them, not the creation of all for the happiness of one. why should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation? And what creature of all that the Lord has taken the pains to make is not essential to the completeness of that unit -- the cosmos? The universe would be incomplete without man; but it would also be incomplete without the smallest transmicroscopic creature that dwells beyond our conceitful eyes and knowledge.

From the dust of the earth, from the common elementary fund, the Creator has made Homo Sapiens . From the same material he has made every other creature, however noxious and insignificant to us. They are earth-born companions and our fellow mortals. The fearfully good, the orthodox, of this laborious patch-work of modern civilization cry "Heresy" on every one whose sympathies reach a single hair's breadth beyond the boundary epidermis of our own species. Not content with taking all of earth, they also claim the celestial country as the only ones who possess the kind of souls for which that imponderable empire was planned.

This star, our own good earth, made many a successful journey around the heavens ere man was made, and whole kingdoms of creatures enjoyed existence and returned to dust ere man appeared to claim them. After human beings have also played their part in Creation's plan, they too may disappear without any general burning or extraordinary commotion whatever.

Plants are credited with but dim and uncertain sensation, and minerals with positively none at all. But why may not even a mineral arrangement of matter be endowed with sensation of a kind that we in our blind exclusive perfection can have no manner of communication with?

But I have wandered from my object. I stated a page or two back that man claimed the earth was made for him, and I was going to say that venomous beasts, thorny plants, and deadly diseases of certain parts of the earth prove that the whole world was not made for him. When an animal from a tropical climate is taken to high latitudes, it may perish of cold, and we say that such an animal was never intended for so severe a climate. But when man betakes himself to sickly parts of the tropics and perishes, he cannot see that he was never intended for such deadly climates. No, he will rather accuse the first mother of the cause of the difficulty, though she may never have seen a fever district; or will consider it a providential chastisement for some self-invented form of sin.

Furthermore, all uneatable and uncivilizable animals, and all plants which carry prickles, are deplorable evils which, according to closet researches of clergy, require the cleansing chemistry of universal planetary combustion. But more than aught else mankind requires burning, as being in great part wicked, and if that transmundane furnace can be so applied and regulated as to smelt and purify us into conformity with the rest of the terrestrial creation, then the tophetization of the erratic genus Homo were a consummation devoutly to be prayed for. But, glad to leave these ecclesiastical fires and blunders, I joyfully return to the immortal truth and immortal beauty of Nature.