The environmental movement was born out of legitimate goals. There was greed and shortsightedness on the part of resource industries. I have experienced it first-hand. It was appropriate to go to government to get problems addressed. Much of the work that was done was necessary and successful and that is part of the problem with it.The primary role of government has turned from forcing rapid economic growth to the exclusion of all else, to an obsession with constraining people from anything that can be construed as harmful. It is certainly not encouraging anybody to do "good." It is a politics born out of the paradigm that people are fundamentally incapable of harmonious interaction with each other or the planet. That misanthropic notion has been rolled into a quasi-religious set of beliefs that is being used by those with every intent of motivating the body politic to trade away its most precious freedoms out of unreasoned fear. Now that environmentalists and regulators are in power, we have greed and shortsightedness on their part. It must be stopped before we lose all that is dear.
I don’t say this lightly. To these same organizations, I owe many of the pleasures of my youth for having preserved those places that taught me much of my first love for the land, but these are not the same people and they do not share the same purpose. This book is, in part, a response to the sense of having that love betrayed.
As environmental organizations have grown, their common agenda has diverged from its purpose. Their adherents’ principle goal has devolved to pursuit of funding to support a political and legal agenda. They have ignored scientific evidence and overridden legitimate discourse over technical differences in the name of preserving entrenched bureaucracies and political power groups feeding off taxes, grants, and lawsuits. It has even led to an odd form of corporate welfare: membership in an oligopoly in return for selling out or buying up smaller competitors. The consequences have compounded. Ruined lives have been rendered into political cannon fodder. In the conduct of battle, the environment has been subordinated to the status of a political hostage. Much like a child in a custody case, the object of the dispute is the one that suffers. The worst of it is, it does not have to be this way.
When one begins a process like this, it starts as a polemic, for much of what starts you writing is a sense of what's wrong. This book takes to task environmental activists, all levels of government, universities, developers, irresponsible loggers, lawyers, rural/suburban residents, bankers, the urban public, politicians, insurance companies, and more! Each of us is a user of the environment and anyone who would buy this book and read it shares such a love of nature and an investment in how we got here. Maybe we have to see the egg on our faces before we can work with those with whom we have struggled for so long. At least we all have something in common!
Perhaps for some it is enough to simply state an injustice, but love of the land won't let you get away with just that and will lead you to wonder what might be done instead. The polemic took nine months. Taking the answers from the abstract, to the concrete, and then to the elegant took far longer. I have done my best to make them simple. I ask your forgiveness for anything less, but this book had to get out. It is time.
I remember shoping at the Eddie Bauer store in Seattle and looking at the shotguns, rifles, and stuffed animal heads from African safaris. I remember shoping at the original REI Co-op store, when one use to go there to buy camping gear for use on hunting trips. Actually, I have an old Mountaineers Book that has a section that praises the outdoor skills needed to be a good hunter.
If I went into either an REI Co-op store or an Eddie Bauer store and said I needed equipment for a hunting trip, the sales people would probably have no concept of what was required and be upset at me for wanting to "harm nature."
Enjoying and protecting the environment so that one can enjoy is now a quasi-religious issue, where some uses such as hunting, fishing, riding trail motorcycles are considered forms of blasphamie. I find it facinating that the original "concervationists" like Teddy Roosveldt were avid hunters who really enjoyed not only the out of doors but pitting their wits & skills against those animals.