Many moons ago, to quote my Native American Brothers (the ones who would kick me in the ass if they ever heard me call them Native American Brothers) the Great State of New Jersey decided to open High Point State Park to a very limited blackpowder hunt to reduce deer overpopulation. Deer browse the new growth of trees, eating the buds and green leaves. Deer are large animals, 100 to 200 pounds. They eat a lot of buds and leaves. When the deer eat all the buds and leaves, there’s nothing left for other animals that also eat them.
A signicicant deer population will browse the trees so much that they create a browse line. This is the lack of buds and leaves on the trees from ground level to about seven feet high, the height a large deer can reach if it rears up to eat the buds. A hunter can gauge the number of deer in an area by looking for browse lines. If there is a pronounced browse line, there are a lot of deer in the area. If the trees were browsed high up, there are large deer in the area.
So I got the special permit to hunt the park and went to scout the area. The whole place was a browse line. Everywhere I looked, there was not one green thing less than seven feet above the ground. This covered thousands of acres. It was obvious that the deer were destroying the place. Smaller animals faced extinction. Some plants were likewise threatened with total detruction. The deer had eaten everything in sight. Besides that, the overpopulation was so severe that if the park lacked for new growth in some year, significant numbers of deer would starve to death. The parks department opened the hunt to save the park from itself.
The so-called environmentalists threw a hissy fit. They sued and whined to an agreeable press. Oh, those mean deer hunters, how can the state indulge such sadistic and macho murderers when animals are our friends and they know what’s best for Gaia. These were very scientifically minded deer. Needless to say, the deer also supported the Kyoto Protocol and said so to anyone who was spiritual enough to commune with them. Why the deer would be against global warming when it would increase their food supply is anybody’s guess.
They lost and the hunt was planned to proceed as scheduled. So the environmentalists snuck into the park the night before the hunt opened and cut down oak trees to block the roads. Of course, some of these oak trees were fifty or sixty feet tall, and quite old. But the greenies were defending Gaia, so it was perfectly okay to defile the place. They also painted imaginative slogans like ‘murderer” in red paint all over the signage in the park. This turned out to be a boon to the hunters, who harvested a pile of deer, and had their pictures taken in front of the graffiti.
“I suspect the First Church of Fundamentalist Enviro-Mentalism was founded in the early 19th century, wrought by the Romantics and their anti-industrialism nature-worship.”
The first “back to nature” movements came as a knee jerk reaction to the earliest stirrings of the industrial revolution. They have appeared in many guises; with disaffected elitist and “bohemian” groups forming
taking up nature worshiping polytheistic religions, and forming numerous political movements that have come and gone. Now still another one is in its way out.