Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: What's wrong with the (modern, w...

Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: What's wrong with the (modern, w...: 

Lex Anteinternet: What's wrong with the (modern, western) world, part 3. Our lost connection with animals.

ICELANDIC MILKMAID ON HER MORNING ROUND

This is a fine, sturdy pony standing so stockily for his photograph, and he can make light of his burden of buxom beauty with her heavy can of milk. She cares not for saddle or stirrups, for most of these island people are born to horseback, and her everyday costume amply serves the purpose of a riding-habit for this strapping Viking's daughter, with her long tresses shining in the breeze.  

(Original caption, of interest here I wouldn't call this young lady "buxom" or "strapping", but just healthy.  This might say something about how standards have changed over time.)

The other day, I posted this in a footnote on a completely different topic.

Lex Anteinternet: What's wrong with the (modern, western) world, par...:   

4.  One of the odder examples of this, very widespread, is the change in our relationship with animals.

Our species is one of those which has a symbiotic relationship with other ones.  We like to think that this is unique to us, but it isn't.  Many other examples of exist of birds, mammals and even fish that live in very close relationships with other species.  When this occurred with us, we do not know, but we do know that its ancient.  Dogs and modern wolves both evolved from a preexisting wolf species starting some 25,000 to 40,000 years ago, according to the best evidence we currently have. That likely means it was longer ago than that.

Cats, in contrast, self domesticated some 7,000 or so years ago, according to our best estimates.

Cat eating a shellfish, depiction from an Egyptian tomb.

We have a proclivity for both domesticating animals, and accepting self domestication of animals, the truth being that such events are likely part and parcel of each other. Dogs descend from some opportunistic wolves that started hanging around us as we killed things they liked to eat.  Cats from wildcats that came on as we're dirty.  Both evolved thereafter in ways we like, becoming companions as well as servants.  But not just them, horses, pigs, sheep, cattle. . .the list is long.

As we've moved from the natural to the unnatural, we've forgotten that all domestic animals, no matter how cute and cuddly they are, are animals and were originally our servants. And as real children have become less common in WASP culture, the natural instinct to have an infant to take care of, or even adore, has transferred itself upon these unwilling subjects, making them "fur babies".

It's interesting in this context to watch the difference between people who really work with animals, and those who do not.  Just recently, for example, our four-year-old nephew stayed the night due to the snow, and was baffled why our hunting dog, who is a type of working dog but very much a companion, stayed the night indoors.  The ranch dogs do not. . . ever.  The ranch cats, friendly though they are, don't either.

I started this thread back in February, when the entire news on "transgenderism" really hit the fan, so to speak.  Since that time there's been the filing of the sorority lawsuit in Laramie, a host of transgender mass shooting, and an absolutely freakish campaign by Budweiser in which a guy trying to channel a girl of the 1960s is sponsoring Bud Light.  Anyhow, this thread was to tie into it somehow, but now a lot of time has gone by, and working seven days out of seven, etc., I've really forgotten what my brilliant point here was to be, more or less.

But I'll go on anyhow.

This photograph shows a young woman at work, doing something that counted, and doing it in a way that was very close to nature.

So does this one:

Mid Week At Work: Mail Carrier, 1915, Los Angeles

And also this one:

Rural Nurse, Virginia. 1919.

And this one:

LOC Caption:   Sarah Crutcher, 12-year-old girl herding cattle. Route 4, c/o S.O. Crutcher. She was out of school (#49 Comanche County) only 2 weeks this year and that was to herd 100 head of cattle for her father, a prosperous farmer. She said: "I didn't like it either." She is doing well in school. Is in Grade 8.] Location: [Lawton, Oklahoma]

I think one of the interesting things about this photographs is, contrary to the modern image of what women wore when doing livestock work in the early 20th and late 19th Centuries, she's dressed in completely typical female attire for the time. She's riding wearing a fairly long skirt and a woman's hat that is typical for the period.

The point here?

Well this.  

We've gotten to the point where we don't deal with animals as they really are, daily.  We also are at the point where a large percentage of the original WASP demographic of the nation (more on this shortly) has lost most of the values it originally had, and replaced them with very weak tea instead.  And we've so removed ourselves from a state of nature, that most people don't have a grasp on what nature really is.

It's hard not to know the reality of the world if you live in it.

This past week, the Wyoming Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case in Casper in which the plaintiffs claim they suffered emotional distress as their two pet dogs were caught in snares which they claim were improperly placed on public lands by a trapper.  Apparently, in a companion criminal case, the trapper was exonerated.  The state land is very close to the city, which is a problem, but it's still state land, and still unincorporated.

Losing dogs is a tragedy, but emotional distress?  This has never been allowed in the common law, as the law always held that the law is, basically, for people.  If you can claim emotional distress due to the loss of a pet, why not anything?

Now, that sounds cruel, and I understand grieving over the loss of an animal.  I've done it myself.  That is, in fact, one of the things about owning pets.  Normally, you outlive them, and if you are normal, you'll miss them when they die.

It's a part of life.

But emotional distress has been reserved, in the common law, for the loss of humans, based, in the end, for what we feel with the loss of a loved human being.  Not an animal, no matter how loved.

And of course, up until recently, there was no such concept as a legally recognized animal for "emotional support".  Support they did provide, but the bond was in a naturalistic way, not one for which the law afforded protection.

Have we lost something here?

I think we have, and it's connected with real work and real animals.

We'll explore What's Wrong With The World more in this series of threads, but here's one.  Being connected with animals in a real sense, and not in the sanitary removed from nature sense, helped keep us real.  

We've lost that.

It's hard to be obsessively focused on yourself, including your reproductive self, if you're around animals as animals, particularly great big ones that can hurt you.

And I'll bet the thought "I'm a girl, but I want to be a boy" didn't much cross the minds of Icelandic pony riding milkmaids, Oklahoman girl cowpunchers, or Los Angeles mounted mail carriers.

Related Threads:

What's wrong with the (modern, western) world, part 1. A thought on community

What's wrong with the (modern, western) world, part 2. Care, lack of care, and an existential lack of focus.

Lex Anteinternet: Wha't's wrong with the (modern, western) world, pa...Cats and Dogs.

Lex Anteinternet: Wha't's wrong with the (modern, western) world, pa...:   

4.  One of the odder examples of this, very widespread, is the change in our relationship with animals.

Our species is one of those which has a symbiotic relationship with other ones.  We like to think that this is unique to us, but it isn't.  Many other examples of exist of birds, mammals and even fish that live in very close relationships with other species.  When this occurred with us, we do not know, but we do know that its ancient.  Dogs and modern wolves both evolved from a preexisting wolf species starting some 25,000 to 40,000 years ago, according to the best evidence we currently have. That likely means it was longer ago than that.

Cats, in contrast, self domesticated some 7,000 or so years ago, according to our best estimates.

Cat eating a shellfish, depiction from an Egyptian tomb.

We have a proclivity for both domesticating animals, and accepting self domestication of animals, the truth being that such events are likely part and parcel of each other. Dogs descend from some opportunistic wolves that started hanging around us as we killed things they liked to eat.  Cats from wildcats that came on as we're dirty.  Both evolved thereafter in ways we like, becoming companions as well as servants.  But not just them, horses, pigs, sheep, cattle. . .the list is long.

As we've moved from the natural to the unnatural, we've forgotten that all domestic animals, no matter how cute and cuddly they are, are animals and were originally our servants. And as real children have become less common in WASP culture, the natural instinct to have an infant to take care of, or even adore, has transferred itself upon these unwilling subjects, making them "fur babies".

It's interesting in this context to watch the difference between people who really work with animals, and those who do not.  Just recently, for example, our four-year-old nephew stayed the night due to the snow, and was baffled why our hunting dog, who is a type of working dog but very much a companion, stayed the night indoors.  The ranch dogs do not. . . ever.  The ranch cats, friendly though they are, don't either.

Lex Anteinternet: A Nature Party and a question. Does this comport with nature?

Lex Anteinternet: A Nature Party and a question. Does this comport w...:   

A Nature Party and a question. Does this comport with nature?

 

Altered from imagine done by Di (they-them) - This SVG flag includes elements that have been taken or adapted from this flag:, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=114863039

All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts.The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants and animals, or collectively the land.

The Land Ethic, A Sand County Almanac.  Aldo Leopold

I wish there was a political party whose first principal was a question; "does this comport with nature?"

And asked that question, as its first principal, honestly.  Not seeking to ask it in some preconceived of manner in which the answer to the question is known before the question is posed.

And not in a way that always aligns with the questioners personal interest and economics.

One that posed it honestly, and went from there.

Such a party would make nearly every political pundit and national politician today squirm.

Senators who come on Fox News every other week, or on Twitter every week, who are from the State of Extraction would disappear behind the dour looking Mitch McConnell rather than answer the question first, and go on honestly from there.

So would left wing politicians who take to the floor in Big Green Rectangle to proclaim allegiance with "gender care", having undergone "gender care" themselves, without answering this question first.

It'd be a step towards sanity in a major way.

Indeed, the very fact that such a question is not the first posed is responsible, in no small measure, for why American politics are as stupid as they currently are.  The rational middle is gone, with the irrational agenda driven extremes in control.

This is why discussions on economics and production are totally divorced from reality on the right and the left.

And this is why discussions on existential biological issues devolve into anti-scientific diatribes that are linked with ill-informed world views rather than reality.

And this is also why those same issues become attached to extremist whose world view is ground not in science, but in ideologies of all type that are of their own fantastical creations, or those whose fantastical creations match a world the way they wish to see it, causing it to become impossible to debate or discuss any issue, as all issues all end up lashed to the philosophy, rather than the science, and reality.

Primum non nocere, first do no harm, we are told, is the first and most ancient rule of medicine.  Perhaps for politics, that branch of philosophy which is applied in the same way that engineering is applied physics, should consider  An hoc pertinet ad naturam?, does this comport with nature. This should be added be added to philosophy of all types, applied and not, as the first principal.

Related Threads:

We like everything to be all natural. . . . except for us

"We keep you alive to serve this ship", Part 1 of societal institutions and work.

"We keep you alive to serve this ship"

Ben Hur

Just observing things, It's really struck me over time how certain social programs, of the left and the right, basically amount to nothing other than serving the needs of businesses, particularly large business entities, no matter how they are styled. This is so much the case that certain huge proponents of some programs who would regard themselves as real fire breathing leftists are actually heavy-duty capitalists, and don't know it.

This shows in their justification for the programs.

Let's, once again, make reference to our evolved place in a state of nature, and where we are actually at.

In a state of nature we'd not do what most of us do daily, which is to leave our abode and clock in time somewhere else, to come back to our home.  In our natural state, while we would leave our families, the family would be the focus all the time.  In our industrial societies, our work is.  Most people spend most of their lives with people they are brought in contact with solely because they serve an economic interest, and nothing else.

Men got there first, long before women. But starting in the early part of the 20th Century, if not slightly before, that changed for women and now women are basically expected to work away from their homes and families.

Everyone is.

When looked at this way, we see why left wing emphasis on child care, and paradoxically abortion, are part and parcel of serving industry.  If women can be prevented from having children, they can, ie., they'll have to, go to work. That's what they should be doing, working.  If they must have children for some weird biological and psychological reason, well then government sponsored child warehousing, i.e., daycare, will force them back into work in another fashion.

Either way, they'll be freed, i.e., forced, to serve work.

Almost all the post 1945 liberalization of domestic law and structure works this way.  Easy no-fault divorce makes it easy to dump families, sending everyone unhindered and untethered into work. Where that results in women falling below the poverty line due to their children, as they foolishly chose to have children, government funded daycare will address it.  Abortion must be kept legal, we are told, as it means women can go to work.

What if things didn't work this way?

Well, men would still be men, and women be women, but they'd have to fund their families themselves, and at least attempt to choose more wisely.  That would have a lot of collateral impacts, but chief among them would be, frankly, less of a focus on work and more of a focus on the domestic.

But that would also mean that a society based on consumption, and which reduced its members to consumers, would be focused on families instead.

And then who is going to make and buy all that crap?

So the next time you here Bernie Sanders spouting off about something like universal child care, remember, what he's really saying, whether he means it or not, is:

"We keep you alive to serve this ship"

Lex Anteinternet: Gang Warfare Erupts Between Thomas Gobbles Gang an...

Lex Anteinternet: Gang Warfare Erupts Between Thomas Gobbles Gang an...: 

Gang Warfare Erupts Between Thomas Gobbles Gang and Other Turkeys

Well of course somebody is out feeding them.

Turkeys in town are a nuisance. They're mean, dirty and a large road hazard.  I wish the Game & Fish would relocate them.

 

The Prairie:  Where Veggies Don't Grow But The Cows Are Happy.

Lex Anteinternet: Yellowstone. A really radical idea.

Lex Anteinternet: Yellowstone. A really radical idea.: 

Yellowstone. A really radical idea.

A really radical idea that won't happen, but maybe should.

There have been really horrific floods, as we all know, in Yellowstone National Park. Roads in the northern part of the park may be closed for the rest of the summer.  Here's a National Park Service item on it:

Updates

• Aerial assessments conducted Monday, June 13, by Yellowstone National Park show major damage to multiple sections of road between the North Entrance (Gardiner, Montana), Mammoth Hot Springs, Lamar Valley and Cooke City, Montana, near the Northeast Entrance.
• Many sections of road in these areas are completely gone and will require substantial time and effort to reconstruct.
• The National Park Service will make every effort to repair these roads as soon as possible; however, it is probable that road sections in northern Yellowstone will not reopen this season due to the time required for repairs.
• To prevent visitors from being stranded in the park if conditions worsen, the park in coordination with Yellowstone National Park Lodges made the decision to have all visitors move out of overnight accommodations (lodging and campgrounds) and exit the park.
• All entrances to Yellowstone National Park remain temporarily CLOSED while the park waits for flood waters to recede and can conduct evaluations on roads, bridges and wastewater treatment facilities to ensure visitor and employee safety.
• There will be no inbound visitor traffic at any of the five entrances into the park, including visitors with lodging and camping reservations, until conditions improve and park infrastructure is evaluated.
• The park’s southern loop appears to be less impacted than the northern roads and teams will assess damage to determine when opening of the southern loop is feasible. This closure will extend minimally through next weekend (June 19).
• Due to the northern loop being unavailable for visitors, the park is analyzing how many visitors can safely visit the southern loop once it’s safe to reopen. This will likely mean implementation of some type of temporary reservation system to prevent gridlock and reduce impacts on park infrastructure.
• At this time, there are no known injuries nor deaths to have occurred in the park as a result of the unprecedented flooding. 
• Effective immediately, Yellowstone’s backcountry is temporarily closed while crews assist campers (five known groups in the northern range) and assess damage to backcountry campsites, trails and bridges.
• The National Park Service, surrounding counties and states of Montana and Wyoming are working with the park’s gateway communities to evaluate flooding impacts and provide immediate support to residents and visitors.
• Water levels are expected to recede today in the afternoon; however, additional flood events are possible through this weekend.

Here's an idea.

Don't rebuild the roads.

For years, there have been complaints about how overcrowded Yellowstone National Park has become.  A combination of a tourist economy and high mobility, and frankly the American inability to grasp that the country has become overpopulated, had contributed to that.  For years there have been suggestions that something needed to be done about that.

Maybe what is needed is. .. nothing.

Well, nothing now, so to speak.

Yellowstone was the nation's first National Park.  It was created at a time when park concepts, quite frankly, were different from they are now.   Created in 1872, its establishment was in fact visionary, and it did grasp in part that the nation's frontier was closing, even though the creation of the park came a fully four years prior to the Battle of Little Big Horn.  There was, at the time of its creation, a sort of lamentation that the end of the Frontier was in sight, and the nation was going to become one of farms and cities.

Nobody saw cities like they exist now, however, and nobody grasped that the day would come when agricultural land would be the province of the rich, and that homesteading would go from a sort of desperate act to something that people would cite to, in the case of their ancestors, as some sort of basis for moral superiority.  Things are much different today than they were then.

Indeed, in some ways, the way the park is viewed is a bit bipolar.  To some, particularly those willing to really rough it, Yellowstone is a sort of giant wilderness area.  To others, it's a sort of theme park. 

The appreciation of the need to preserve wilderness existed then, but what that meant wasn't really understood.  The park was very much wilderness at first, and some things associated with wilderness went on within it, and of course still do.  Early camping parties travelled there.  People fished there, and still do.  Hunting was prohibited early on, which had more to do with the 19th Century decline in wildlife due to market hunting than it did anything else.  This has preserved a sort of bipolarism in and of itself, as fishing is fish-hunting, just as bird hunting is fowling. There's no reason in fact that Yellowstone should have not been opened back up to hunting some time during the last quarter-century, but it is not as just as the park is wilderness to young adventurers from the National Outdoor Leadership School in Lander, and hearty back country folks of all ages, it's also a big public zoo for people from Newark or Taipei.  

Since 1872, all sorts of additional parks have been created. Some are on the Yellowstone model, such as Yosemite.  Others are historical sites such as Gettysburg or Ft. Laramie.  All, or certainly all that I've seen, are of value.

But they don't all have the same value.

Much of Yellowstone's value is in its rugged wilderness.  Some cite to the geothermal features of the park, but that's only a small portion of it.  And for that reason, much of Yellowstone today would make more sense existing as a Wilderness Area under the Wilderness Act of 1964, the act that helps preserve the west in a very real way, and which western politicians, who often live lives much different than actual westerners, love to hate.

A chance exists here to bring back Yellowstone into that mold, which it was intended in part to be fro the very onset, and which many wish it was, or imagine it to be, today.

Don't rebuilt the roads.

That would in fact mean the northern part of the park would revert to wilderness, truly.  And it means that many fewer people would go to the park in general.  And it would hurt the tourist communities in the northern areas, and even in the southern areas, as the diminished access to the park would mean that the motorized brigade of American and International tourists wouldn't go there, as they wouldn't want to be too far from their air-conditioned vehicles.

But that's exactly what should be done.

Lex Anteinternet: Earth Day, 2022

Lex Anteinternet: Earth Day, 2022: 

Earth Day, 2022

Human beings are the only species in the world that is not happy being themselves.

Fr. John Nepil (What Say You Nature/Grace, 25:30).

That's certainly the case for modern Western man, to be sure.

Today is Earth Day for 2022.

Take a closer look at that pile of ashes.  All those silver things are nails.

Given the recently and ongoing news, my prediction is that this will be a gloomy Earth Day.  War rages in Eastern Europe, with Vlad Putin working on going down as one of history's worst people.  In the future, Vlad the Impaler will have to take second fiddle to Vlad the Would Be Czar for Bad Vlads, reputation wise.  Now, war is a pretty obvious glum thing to start with in this thread, and I don't want to get into the sappy type poster crap, but war is a pretty big environmental insult in certain ways.*  We're not going all maudlin and frankly goofy superficial with a Mothers Against War type of theme here, and we're sure not going to put up a "War is not healthy for children and other living things" poster, the same being one of the stupidest sentiments ever put up on a serious topic, emphasized by constructed juvenility on a topic that's not very juvenile.

But that's part of the problem here.  More on that as we carry on.

Earth Day is something that gets politicized, for obvious reasons, pretty quickly.  The irony is however, in its heart of hearts, it's a deeply conservative, and conservationist, thing, and not really much in sync with the liberal ethos.  Because of the ultimate problem, however, that being narrow self-interest, we tend never to realize that, and for that reason, we don't make the progress in this area that we really ought to.

What we ought to be thinking of is 1) things are defined by our narrow self interests; and 2) ultimately in order to protect nature, we have to realize our own actual natures, and that isn't defined by us.

And hence the photo above.

This might seem to be on the superficial Earth Day level.  I.e., don't pollute.  And indeed, that point certain needs to be made. The photo depicts ashes and nails. But more than that, the ashes are dead center on a very heavily travelled county road that's closed for the winter.

More precisely, it's right where the road is closed.  And I'm certain that I know what happened here.  A group of somebodies traveled down to the end of the road and had a huge bonfire, with the firewood being made up of pallets.

Now, who did that?  I don't know.  If I had to guess, I'd guess that there are two logical groups of suspects.  One are young adults.  Young adults do stuff like this all the time.  A group may have gone out for the night, camped, probably, built an enormous bonfire on a space where it was safe to do it, and stood around and drank beer.  A probable guess.

The second guess would be similar. This area is heavily frequented by snowmobilers. So much so that when I saw something at the end of the road, I immediately associated it with them.  Maybe a group of them decided to have a late winter gathering, along the same lines.

My guess is that it's more likely group number one. Snowmobilers are already carting in a lot of stuff just to do that, and probably don't want to cart in pallets. Besides that, they're already pretty sensitive, in this area, to being dissed by people who just don't like snowmobiles.  Chances are pretty good, therefore, it was group number one.

Now, there's no reason to believe that they intended to hurt a soul. Rather, the evidence is actually the opposite. The road is wide here, and by building a fire there, they built it on a surface that wouldn't burn.  Moreover, it was shielded on the windward side by a high wall of snow.  All in all, that was pretty good thinking, fire risk wise.

Not lingering nail wise.

Probably just an overthought.

And hence the problem.

Our actions have consequences, even if we intend to them to be harmless.  Some thinking and consideration is in order.

Here, now, there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of nails on one of the most heavily travelled rural roads in the county.  

On the way out, I saw two highway patrolmen and reported the situation. They said they would head up as "we have shovels". Well, no matter how diligent their efforts, they won't be able to shovel up all those nails.  People will be getting flat tires all summer long.  Mountain bikes go by this area all the time, they'll get flats too.  Hikers go by, and hikers with dogs go by. And it's still in an area where mounted horsemen occasionally go by.  Nails pose a threat to them all.

Indeed, dating back to Roman times a device made of nails, the caltrop, was used to disable horses.  They're still made today to disable car tires.  

They didn't stop to think of that.  Or, if they did, they brushed it off.

And we all do both of those.

And here's the first thing to consider.  Just because it's in our own interest, whether for enjoyment, or for wages, doesn't mean it's good, long term, for everybody and everything.

That doesn't always mean we can avoid it.  Indeed, in someways, our daily actions are inevitably a secular example of what Catholic theology defines as "cooperation with evil".  Save for those who live cloistered lives, that will be hard to avoid.

Which gets to the topic of acting individually and collectively.

Now, individually, that's basically a don't build bonfires in the road sort of thing to some degree.  But in others, it's a be honest sort of thing.

And that means being honest with yourself, including where you are in cooperation with things. Beyond that, however, it's being honest that just because it profits you in some fashion, doesn't mean it's great for everyone in all senses.

To give an example of sorts, just because Colorado can tax weed doesn't mean getting a bunch of people stoned out of their heads and destroying their lives is really a good thing.

There are lots of other examples, to be sure.

But beyond individual, there's collective, and that has to do with community, and at the end of the day, that ultimately had to do with nature in a real, and existential, way.

We may all be individuals, and indeed we are, with each being unique, but beyond that we are all individuals within a single species, and therefore much more alike than different.  Our individualism takes us only so far.  It's easy to get diverted into "community" at this point, but the fact of the matter that our members of a species in fact defines our nature, and much of our modern, or as some would have it, "post-modern" individualism is a perversion of that.

It was in David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia that the central character grabbed his own flesh and stated that a man could "be what he wants, but not want what he wants".  This is true of the entire species.  As a species, we're little removed from nature, and when we act, on Earth Day, or any ohter day, as if we are not, even if we are the most rabid of environmentalist, we act in a fashion that's an insult to nature and does it harm. We must be of nature, in nature, part of nature, and consistent with our natures, to act on any fashion that's really beneficial to nature, including our own natures.

And that's a deeply conservative thing, as well as a conservationist thing.

And it's something that modern Western society doesn't want to be about.

Footnotes:

*". . .sappy type poster crap".  This and the following line referred to the famous poster depicting a highly juvenile drawing of flowers and the lines that "War is not healthy for children and other living things". 

Well, d'uh.

Related threads:

Be who you are.

Mehr Mensch Sein

The Agrarian Lament: A lamentation. The modern world

Knowing where you are.

Young Diognetus in the modern world.

Some odd things you can do for the environment on Earth Day that may or may not have occurred to you.

Today is Earth Day for 2021. . .

Earth Day, 2020

Earth Day, 2019

We like everything to be all natural. . . . except for us.

It's All Natural! Except for us.

Lex Anteinternet: This is the Year of the Tiger. . .

Lex Anteinternet: This is the Year of the Tiger. . .:  

This is the Year of the Tiger. . .

 on the Chinese lunar calendar.

Yikes.

Let's hope its a good year for tigers ecologically, as that's good for everything.

But not one, metaphorically.

Lex Anteinternet: Carbon Hypocrisy

Lex Anteinternet: Carbon Hypocrisy: 

Carbon Hypocrisy

Off to the side, in the blogs we follow section, is one called Buzzard's Beat.

"Buzzard" is a female rancher in southeast Kansas.  I know that everyone who isn't too familiar with Kansas thinks of it as one giant wheat field, but it isn't.  In actuality, there's a lot of ranch ground in Kansas.

I've had the opportunity to drive across Kansas twice.  People complain about places like Kansas and Nebraska being boring, but I really enjoy the states.  Moreover, I've driven across the back roads of those states in addition to the long, boring interstate highways.  This true of North and South Dakota as well.  I really love them, even though I'm not from there.

This isn't, however, a travelogue of the farm belt, but rather to point out two posts she makes.

One is entitled: Dear Richard Branson:  What's worse, a rocket or a steak?

It's pretty clearly the rocket.

What I want to point out here is hypocrisy, and not just the hypocrisy of Sir Richard Branson, although I do want to point out that.

Rather, what I want to point out is that in the discussion on global warming, everyone seems to feel free to blame others while their own conduct goes unnoticed.  

It's become trendy to blame agriculture, more particularly stock raising, for global warming.  That gets both to this post and another she's put up, that one being Raising Cattle for a Healthy Climate.  Both are well worth reading, as well as a number of other posts she's put up, including Dear Epicurious:  Your Meat-Free Resolution Confuses Me.

This also gets to the recent trend of the dim giving up meat as they think it helps the planet somehow.

Seemingly missed by the dim are some basic facts of animal production.  Every domestic meat animal can be raised on food, for it, that you can't eat.  You really can't eat prairie grass, for instance, but cows can.  You sure can't eat the crap that sheep do.  And even the finish grain that's used, unless you are buying "grass fed" beef (or simply eating a volunteer grass fed cow, like we are), that being corn, is a grain that you can barely actually eat.  I know that maize is a worldwide staple, but frankly unless its ground up and processed into something it's actually a human foodstuff that you can't really digest for the most part.  Corn on the cob may be delicious, and it is, but it, um, mostly passes through you. And we all know that it's really a vehicle for butter, salt and pepper anyhow.

As she points out, the greenhouse gasses that are produced by livestock globally are really small.  And contrary to what those self-declared non meat eating environmentalist may imagine, the carbon footprint of nearly everything produced by a "dirt" farm is massive.

Put another way, if you are dining on a big bowl of nice health brussels sprouts, unless you grew them yourself, they didn't get to your bowl during the annual brussels sprout migration.  No, they were grown by somebody using some pretty heavy-duty diesel powered things, and then trucked to market by a pretty heavy diesel powered thing, kept cool by something that was electric, and then you probably fired up your car and drove to the store to get them.  

Hmmm. . . .

Also, while we're at it, if you are  vegan or a vegetarian, you should be aware that production crop agriculture is a major killer of animal life, so you can pretend you don't have blood on your hands, but they're at least as bloody as somebody's who eats meat.  I'm not dissing farmers for this, it's just the way things are.  But if you spend a day on a combine you are going to mow down something, and that's just the start of it.

It's not that there aren't things everyone can do about this, but feeling sanctimonious about your own personal dinner plate isn't it.  The more you think that your bowl is planetary benign, the more likely it isn't.  Ideally, if we really wanted to be fully green, we'd grow our own vegetables, as much as possible (and it wouldn't be 100% possible) on our big urban lawns, and we'd buy a local beef or go hunting in the fall.  If you aren't doing at least one of those things, you aren't the least bit green and should quit pretending that you are.

And if you are so massively wealthy that you can afford to blast yourself into space, unless you are a neo Tolstoy living the peasant life, you're mere existence is carbon positive, let alone indulging yourself in being a space cowboy.

Lex Anteinternet: November 27.

Lex Anteinternet: November 27.:  

November 27.