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As an amateur conservationist, naturalist and environmentalist I live my life in relative simplicity, and consciously keep my consumption of products and goods at a low level. I enjoy the natural world on many levels, from hiking to gardening; I promote kindness to animals; I’ve gone vegan – this, and more, places me on those lists without being labeled a tree-hugging wacko. Since I strive to live by the credo ‘everything good within reason’, this especially holds true in the area of environmentalism. For me, to be an environmentalist does not mean that I need to believe in every cause that every environmentalist puts forth. Like all of life’s big challenges, I want to be able to choose which mountain to die on.
Saving the delta smelt is not one of those mountains. During California’s recent three year drought in the Sacramento San Joaquin Delta, instead of the state looking for ways to help suffering farmers who were losing farms and facing upwards of 40% unemployment, the Endangered Species Committee, also known as the “God Squad,” was allowed to impose ‘water curbs”, thereby reducing flow from pumping stations to parched agricultural areas. These measures were implemented to save the delta smelt, a small fish who they believed was endangered from being caught and killed in the irrigation pumping stations.
Since then, The Pacific Legal Foundation has petitioned the governator to remove the water curbs. However, like most issues, it’s complicated, with some wondering whether the smelt is the real culprit leading to the loss of water in the area; that perhaps the present problems would be the same from just the three-year drought alone; or, that farmers should simply learn to adapt to changes in their environment. In any case, for California, a state whose financial crisis is reaching the breaking point, the delta smelt issue is just one more example of how over regulation can have disastrous outcomes for all.
So, do we save a little fish or save the livelihood and homes of thousands of farmers? Though a complicated issue, the decision is clear. Common sense and reason must prevail. For some of you, please do not tell me you care about these fish as you – yes, you meat-eating hypocrites – bite down on your flesh sandwich in one hand and hold up your Save the Planet placard with the other. Don’t screech about the loss of these fish while millions of factory farmed chickens, pigs, sheep and cows are treated cruelly and butchered in appalling manners each minute of every day. And isn’t it ironic that the waste from these same factory farmed animals is the leading contributor to ground water pollution in the world? Perhaps this is the mountain you should make your stand on.
“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves.
And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”
Henry Beston American writer and naturalist
Energy Crisis? :: Man-Made Global Warming?
October 12, 2009 in ALL, Environment : Conservation, News Media Current Events | Tags: coal, commentary, Environment : Conservation, global cooling, global warming, ice age, joe bastardi, man-made globlal warming, natural gas, offshore drilling, shale oil | Leave a comment
“We have made a mistake.”
Gerd Leipold, Executive Director of Greenpeace 2009, forced to admit that his organization put out false and misleading information about the effects of climate change.
“We have just four months. Four months to secure the future of our planet.”
United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon 2009
President Obama “has four years to save the world.”
Dr. James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies 2009
More …
“Two thousand scientists, in a hundred countries, engaged in the most elaborate, well organized scientific collaboration in the history of humankind, have produced long-since a consensus that we will face a string of terrible catastrophes unless we act to prepare ourselves and deal with the underlying causes of global warming.”
Al Gore 2005
“you can’t be value free when it comes to marriage”
Al Gore (sorry ,could not resist putting this one in)
Item: I wonder if this major story on recent fossil fuel extraction technology breakthroughs that literally turns our current fuel crisis on its head will make the popular print and electronic media headlines.
Item: There have also been an increasing number of scientific news reports that there are virtually no sunspots on the sun at this time. Sunspots=earth heating up. No sunspots=earth cooling down. So, contrary to the the global warming alarmists’ theory that the earth is heating up, scientific evidence is pointing to a mini ice age within the couple of decades.
Item: Then there is the classic on-air debate between global warming alarmist scientist Bill Nye and the global warming skeptic, meteorologist Joe Bastardi:
Naturally occurring Mini Ice Age … a more likely future