At 09:59 PM 5/19/2001 -0700, Lee Corbin wrote:
>Still sounds strange. The only thing that I can relate this to is
>the way that environmentalists and nature worshippers aren't the
>people who've actually grown up in natural surroundings. The
>bonafide rural population tends to take nature for granted, and
>be rather uninterested in eco-thought.
I think this is an incorrect characterization.
The bonafide rural population doesn't take nature for granted, rather it
sees nature for what it really is. The "environmentalists and nature
worshippers" who have spent little time living in natural surroundings have
a very black and white perspective of nature that is naive and wildly
underestimates the complexity and interactions of the system. True rural
folk see a big mixture of gray and colors, not the imagined contrast of the
urban environmentalist. Therefore, most rural folk tend to be
"conservationists", which work with nature rather than trying to
artificially enforce an extreme contrast that any rural folk could tell you
is neither good nor natural.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions; the environmentalists may
mean well, but could stand to first learn a few lessons in reality from the
people who have lived in those rural lands for many years, lest they
destroy the very thing they intend to save. Many environmentalists are
utopians in the same sense that communists were in the first part of the
20th century, having constructed wonderful ideas that necessarily rely on
poorly evaluated assumptions.
-James Rogers
jamesr@best.com
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