Today's Talking Point

[lollardfish]

Conservation of the environment should be a conservative issue, shouldn't it? If it's not, one of those two words has got to be changed! Mercury in the walleye is just not acceptable.

Comments

One would think

[bodi-kat.livejournal.com]

the two would go hand-in-hand, but "Conservative", when it comes to politics, doesn't mean what it's supposed to mean ...

Maybe we should lobby them and force them to make conservation issues part of their platform!

They've gone and called a federal election on us here and in spite of the fact that he's got a snowball's chance in hades of being elected, i'm going to vote for the Green Party candidate for my ridindg.

You know ...

[bodi-kat.livejournal.com]

One could really have a lot of fun coming up with more appropriate terms for the political "conservative" ...

Hmm ...

[zinzinzinnia.livejournal.com]

Well... actually, they use different words: Conservation and Conservatism.

But yeah.

[mia-mcdavid.livejournal.com]

See, problem is, political conservatives are for the status quo. The status quo has been to rape and despoil the Earth for basically all of human history. So, it's actually progressive to be in favor of conservation.

I keep thinking we're like a bacterium that has gotten out of hand. Eventually, our host has to either succumb or smash us down. Not looking forward to either . . .

[lollardfish.livejournal.com]

"The status quo has been to rape and despoil the Earth for basically all of human history."

Fundamentally untrue, I'm afraid.

[mia-mcdavid.livejournal.com]

Yes? I'd be delighted to be proven wrong.

[lollardfish.livejournal.com]

As I tell my students: "for basically all of human history" - pointless overgeneralizations mean you'll be proven wrong. They also tend to mask genuine shifts that are probably important. Probably. Too tired and pissy to deal with it though.

[lollardfish.livejournal.com]

Just as an example now that I'm awake. I have a peer who has done a great deal of work on medieval sustaintable forestry - the way that communities (she works on a monastic community) used forests as sustainable resources. You harvested wood. You raised pigs. You foraged. But you made sure to keep the forest a vibrant, viable, resource that would be there for future generations.

The 'rape and despoil' method is a relatively modern phenomenon.

"Sustainability" is the key phrase, over conservation, and the movement is growing. The reason it's doing so is money - it both saves and makes money.

[mia-mcdavid.livejournal.com]

That sounds admirable; I'm glad to hear about it.

In the other scale we have to weigh neolithic deforestations in Wales, the fact that most of the forests of Europe are gone, the loss of many species from ancient Roman times. Much more benign, as far as I know, was the maintenance of the North American prairie, but that too was made by man, and it's likely the mammoth and the mastodon fell to human predation. The horse was originally North American, but humans drove it extinct until its reintroduction. Less foresighted than their European cousins, they ate it.

From the days we learned to smelt, we have made slag heaps. We have thrown our refuse into rivers without caring where it went. I agree that the problem is really bad only now that there's more of us and we are more intensively civilized, but we're the same people we've been all along.

Including the enlightened few who practice sustainable forestry in the middle ages and who try to make recycling pay to make it possible.

I'm just sayin' . . .

BTW, still looking for an email if you wouldn't mind.

[lollardfish.livejournal.com]

I just don't think slag heaps are necessarily a problem if you can sustain the environment that sustains you. When you can't, then you're in trouble.

I thought I posted an email: lollardfish AT gmail DOT com.

[mia-mcdavid.livejournal.com]

I wonder how many people the earth could sustainably sustain, assuming they took reasonable care. Problem is, of course, nobody's volunteering to jump ship . . .