In their sties with all their backing
They don’t care what goes on around
In their eyes there’s something lacking
What they need’s a damn good whacking.
- george harrison

Let’s look at this simply. A pristine land is laid out before you. A land untouched by human hands. The moment you place your foot upon it, you have intruded upon the land. Such is the nature of human expansion throughout time. So when former British Cabinet member Nigel Lawson is quoted from his new book “An Appeal to Reason: A cool look at Global Warming”, as saying “Environmentalism is an unlimited license to intrude.” (a statement that is so far from “reason” that it calls into question his “Appeal”),  I’m again amazed how a formal education and a position of influence can make some people so amazingly dumb.

I’m certainly not an environmental activist by any sense of the word. Each debate has truth on both sides, however I live and breathe and understand the necessity to be careful with our limited resources. I accept they are limited simply because our earth, this little ball in space, is quite obviously a closed system. It does not take a scientist to see oil slicks on the water and imagine that oil getting into our drinking water and the fish we eat. When mudslides bury people because the hills have been stripped of trees I can amazingly extrapolate the problem. When 10% of a population consumes 70% of the food, I understand the injustice. Are not such things sort of well, obvious?

I also understand something that Mr. Lawson apparently missed; Environmentalism is a RE-action. Environmentalism at its core is nothing more than someone seeing a negative consequence to a human action and saying something about it. I can’t help but think that someone should at least understand the difference between an action and reaction before they are deemed an authority on anything let alone, the environment.

Can you imagine? By this logic if you are hit by a car, this is not a problem. However if you react (assuming you survive) you are intruding on the freedom of the guy who ran you over. If someone punches you in the nose its hardly worth noting, and yet if you were to punch back you suddenly are intruding on the attacker. Interesting. “Environmentalism is an unlimited license to intrude.” Is in a sense, intimidation. It implies that one must keep their mouth shut. That if you don’t allow a person or government or corporation to do whatever they wish, YOU will be deemed an intruder. One only has to guess what is done with intruders.

Of course as paddlers we all probably lean a bit more toward environmental preservation than not. We do have a vested interest. Still it has to be said that in general we come down on the side of “leaving things alone” and only find conflict with folks who want to profit in some way by changing or taking from the environment in a damaging way. Still, if all sides in any discussion are to come to a realistic compromise they certainly have to understand the most simplistic realities; Up-Down, Left-Right, Action-Reaction and so forth. These days however we are apt to face a bizarre new reality where doing as we wish has neither cause nor effect and is the base point of the discussion. Any suggestion of deviation from environmental anarchy is of course an obvious intrusion, a twist of reality that takes Orwellian “New Speak” to an exponential new level.

Related Posts:

1. penny wise
2. biting the hand
3. Arianrhod
4. Freya Says. . .
5. The Hauntings