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August 30, 2005
The Bush Adminstration vs. nature
This administration and the congressional majority are profoundly anthropocentric, following a line of thinking that nothing is doing any good unless it is producing a commodity for human beings. Human beings are, according to the fundamentalist theology of this administration, God's chosen species. We have have therefor been authorized to despoil as necessary in order to accumulate rich trusts, houses on steroids in gated communities, Cadillac SUVs, and golf memberships on exclusive links. Commodity outdoor recreation is the closest thing to a commodity that a national park can produce; it's quantifiable in user-days and park admission dollars and is focused on what is fun for the people involved, not what is good for America's crown jewels of nature.
That's Jordan Fisher Smith, author of Nature Noir: A Park Ranger's Patrol in the Sierra, a memoir of his years as a Ranger on the American River in northern California. He's being interviewed right now in inkwell.vue, an online interview forum I am involved with.
Smith goes on:
...in this administration, science and resource protection are subordinated to the will of big business and a kind of posturing toward freedom--freedom to drive a snowmobile in a national park. Meanwhile real personal freedoms--freedom from unreasonable search and siezure under the Fourth Ammendment, for example, are curtailed in the name of national security. We've been seeing multiple cases where environmental scientists report findings and the president's people change those findings before they're released.
The interview is a good read, and I expect the book is, too.
Posted by gans at August 30, 2005 9:51 PM
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