Posted by
Doctor Demex on Tuesday, October 03, 2006 10:00:27 AM
The typical leftist environmentalist feels guilty about being human and
walks through the woods as though he's a guest in someone else's house,
afraid he'll knock over a lamp. Other plants and animals might
occupy the environment, much like flowers and pets reside in our own
homes. And like our own homes, the environment has no meaning to humans other than the way it can be used by humans.
Humans are as much a part of nature as anything else in the universe,
so the environment is very much our home. We can trash it
entirely, though we have little incentive to do that, or we can keep it
neat and clean, which we do most of the time. But we "use" things
like forests whether we're clearing them or just admiring their
foliage. For us humans to treat the environment as something on
which we must avoid leaving our fingerprints at all costs is pointless
to even try because it is impossible.
The environment is the human's house just as much as it is a place for spotted owls, and humans have at least
as much right to use the environment for their purposes as the spotted
owls have for theirs. Every creature and plant on the earth would
horn in and displace humans if they could, and humans have just as much
right to be here as any other living thing. If a tree can fall on
a human and kill him, why can't a human cut down the tree and do
something useful with it?
Humans who care about the spotted owl (which, I'll wager, perceives its
environment differently from the way liberal environmentalists do) care
not because they know any spotted owls or any good that spotted owls
have done for the world, but for the way they fantasize the spotted
owl's fitting into their own perception of their own environment.
Spotted owls are not necessary for human survival. How do I know
this for a fact? I don't, but I'm reasonably sure I'll never be
proven wrong on this one. I believe it is immoral to subjugate
the best interests of humans to the interests of spotted owls. And by
the "interests of spotted owls" I mean of course the interests of
narcissists who feel that it is more important to be able to "imagine"
a spotted owl than it is to be allowed to cut down some of the owl's
trees to increase the supply of housing for humans and thereby reduce
the cost of housing for the two or three homeless people who are not
homeless by choice.