Skye wrote:
> I've noticed a trend of what you might call, "armchair
> environmentalists." People who will strongly
> criticize polluting companies in private conversation
> with each other, who might recycle, who might write an
> editorial peice to the newspaper, might even have a
> poster on their wall somewhere, or a bumper sticker on
> their car, but whose interest in the environment is
> otherwise editorial. Few in the modern day seem
> willing to truly do anything about the environment,
> and I think this is in part due to social factors
> counteracting any sort of activism.
In the northern reaches of New Hampshire, whole townships that are undeveloped
or which have fallen back to nature outside of a few logging roads, where from
my camp I could actually walk 30 miles through total wilderness to cross the
Canadian border without crossing a single road, I have rarely seen anyone who
could be classified as an 'environmentalist'. There are a number that congregate
on Dartmouth's Second College Grant township, who are students or alumni of that
school, but I could count on one hand the number of times I've seen any of them
on the side of that property that my cabin is adjacent to, or in the whole Four
Mile Brook watershed that makes up almost 1/3 of the college's property.
>From appearances sake, the loggers, foresters, and hunters and fishers care far
more for the land and wildlife than the few 'environmentalists'. The few times
I've seen them, it is because they are so ignorant that they cannot read the map
in their hands, and are hopelessly lost (either while on or within shouting
distance of a logging road).
This weekend, while fly fishing on the west branch of the brook, I saw three
moose, a bear, a couple deer, and caught several dozen brook trout, only two of
which I kept and are sitting in my freezer for tonites dinner...
I have a great amount of respect for the dedication being shown by those who
have gone through the Ruckus Society's boot camp (and similar camps run by
Greenpeace, etc), though I don't have much at all for the ignorance they
typically show of the environment itself. They know nothing about identifying
and tracking animals, of foraging off the land, and about smart conservation
practices in the field. They seem to know a lot about law, of force, propaganda,
and other political activities.
> One needs look only so far as the results of the WTO
> "riot" to see why people are afraid of trying to
> accomplish anything. Eye-witness accounts report the
> use of tear gas, rubber bullets, and other deterrents,
> as well as physical attacks and long-term harrasement
> to drive protesters to the point of frenzy. There
> were also reports of plainclothes cops acting as
> rioters in order to stir up action-
> "I believe also the police had their own people in
> there, encouraging people to break stuff - if people
> think I may be exaggerating, I saw supposed protesters
> - they were screaming and so on - and then later, when
> everything was over, the same people tackled other
> protestors and put handcuffs on them."
> -Witness account from the WTO protest
> This kind of thing, paired with the public view of
> activists as somewhat crazy, makes people not want to
> put any serious effort into causes they believe in.
Actually, as one movie character once said:"Charlie has his shit together." So
far as political tactics, these people do good work. The tactic of 'jail
solidarity', where arrested protesters refuse to even identify themselves or
others, so that they cannot even be arraigned constitutionally, has been very
effective, not only in reducing the convictions protesters have received, but in
inhibiting the FBI's ability to do effective intelligence against these people.
The practice of weaving street theater and non-violent sabotage tactics are
effective in getting their message noticed.
> One wonders if there aren't more "armchair
> extropians", "closet environmentalists" and other
> sorts living in prohibitive environments where their
> voices cannot be heard, or perhaps only their voices
> cannot be heard, out of fear of violating social
> norms.
An odd thing happened to me at Sasha's funeral I had forgotten to mention: when
I had commented that it was unfortunate that he was not cryonically suspended to
some attendees, they laughed as if it were a joke, and these were friends of
Sashas.
> Even feeling strongly about things seems to be
> discouraged in the modern day- both from the popular
> cynicism that seems to be on the rise, and the idea
> that any effort of any kind is useless. There is a
> large group of people who are politically independant
> but vote for either democrats or republicans as "the
> lesser of two evils" one of which will, "inevitably
> win anyways."
The fact is that because of the lobster cooking incremental strategy being used
by authoritarians, most people either don't notice, or don't care that their
goose is slowly being cooked. The small small percentage that do complain are
easily painted as 'nuts' by the propaganda machine, and the sheeple want to
beleive it is so because subconciously they need to rationalize their own moral
compromise. So long as this incremental strategy continues, and so long as there
is no big moneybags willing to finance an extropian activist front, then things
will continue as they are. If you look at all of the protests that happen in the
media, on the streets, etc. these are not spontaneous things, despite the crap
you hear in the media. These people are very well financed, as evidenced by
Jeremy Rifkins groups that are backing the Turningpoint Project, which spent 1.5
million on full page ads in the NY Times.
No insurgency can function without sustained long term financial and material
support from some source. So long as extropians fail to acknowledge this and
decide to do something about it, we will continue to get pummeled by the
luddites.
Mike
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Oct 02 2000 - 17:37:54 MDT