Tag Archives: environmentalism

Vegans—Not Hunters—Are the Best Environmentalists

Posted on by
3

Originally posted on April 22, 2012

You’ve probably heard the cliché, “Every day is Earth Day to an environmentalist.” Well, it’s true actually, at least to a true environmentalist—the kind of person who makes daily choices based solely on their concern for our planet and the life it supports. The gal, for example, who chooses not to eat farmed animals because of the enormous amount of abuse (not to mention gargantuan carbon footprint) inherent in those Styrofoam and shrink-wrapped packages that clog the sprawling meat isles across the country; or the guy who does not hunt because wild animals are a part of the living Earth he loves and respects.

Eager to look like the sensible ones, conventional environmentalists often assume the wobbly, half-hearted stance of dismissing, rather than embracing, the animal rights movement. On the other hand, dedicated animal rights advocates don’t shy away from calling themselves environmentalists. They know that only by adopting a vegan lifestyle can one truly be an environmentalist. Vegans understand that the Earth cannot sustain billions upon billions of hungry bipedal carnivores and they recognize that the surest way to ease suffering for all is to eat lower on the food chain—in keeping with our proven primate heritage.

Absurd as it sounds to folks who really do care for the planet, certain atypically adroit sportsmen have been caught spreading the dogma that gun-toting Bambi-slayers actually have a “love for the land” and a concern for the animals they kill—that murdering animals is a wholesome Earth Day activity. Proselytizing hunter-holy-men try to downplay the obvious lethal impacts hunting has on individual animals and entire populations, wielding one of the weariest—and wackiest—of all clichés, “Hunters are the best environmentalists,” despite well-documented proof that hunting has been—and continues to be—a direct cause of extinction for untold species throughout the world.

Over-zealous hunters completely eradicated the once unimaginably abundant passenger pigeon and the Eskimo curlew (both killed en masse and sold by the cartload for pennies apiece), the Carolina parakeet (the only species of parrot native to the US) and the great auk (a flightless, North Atlantic answer to the penguin).

Hunting is the antithesis of environmentalism. The very notion of the gas-guzzling, beer-can-tossing hunter as an environmentalist is laughable even to them. Show me a hunter who is not antagonistic toward the rights of animals and I’ll show you a rare bird indeed.

____________________________________________________

Portions of this post were excerpted from the book, Exposing the Big Game: Living Targets of a Dying Sport: http://www.earth-books.net/books/exposing-the-big-game

304224_10150323421256188_1151389461_n

 

Hope for a Humane and Environmentally Sane Future

Posted on by
10

The following is my review of a new book published by Earth Books…

Often, over the years, I’ve thought about taking on the task of chronicling the ways in which humankind is destroying the Earth, and how we need to change to survive as a species. Now, equally sensing the dire need for such a book, long-time animal activist, Will Anderson, has risen to the challenge with his new book, This is Hope: Green Vegans and the New Human Ecology.

I have to admit, the title, This is Hope, sounded to me like it could be almost, well, overly-hopeful. But in fact the book takes a hard, realistic look at where we’re headed if we don’t make some major changes in our destructive ways, our eating habits and our view of non-human animals as commodities. For instance, Anderson doesn’t buy into the increasingly popular fallacy that hunting can somehow be sustainable in this rapidly growing human world. Not only does he take on hunting, and those groups who promote it, he employs the term “neo-predation” for the myriad of ways in which the modern world disrupts biodiversity—to the peril of all who share the Earth.

And the author does not fall prey to the politically correct notion that human overpopulation is an overstated myth. Instead we learn that as environmentally-conscious, green vegans who truly want to see a future for all life on the planet, addressing and reversing our overpopulation is a must.

If we are willing to embrace Will Anderson’s prescription for a “new human ecology,” there truly could be hope for the future. As Anderson puts it, “The new human ecology can be the transformation of human behavior all of Earth has waited for.” Some of the positive results he foresees from this transformation include:

• Vast landscapes subjected to grazing and growing food for livestock are released from animal agriculture.
• Some of that land will be banked and rotated with other croplands. Soil erosion and pollution are sharply reduced. Sustainably grown, organic food becomes more reliably available.
• Conceivably, fewer people on Earth and the efficiency of botanical agriculture will allow lower food prices and raise food availability.
• We will reduce our greenhouse gas emissions immediately by 18% to 51%.
• Other human pressures on ecosystems decrease and allow them to trend toward recovery.
• Vegan diets will create better human health. This should result in lower health care costs.
• We stop the intentional impregnation of billions of domesticated individuals from other species, the torment of their enslavement and denial of their innate needs, and their early, violent deaths.
• The science and implementation of wildlife and habitat management is transformed…control by the small minority of people who hunt, fish and trap is ended.
• Livestock fences will be removed. Wild herds of indigenous wildlife can reoccupy habitat and have room to migrate long distances. Ecosystem keystone species like black-tailed prairie dogs will not be cruelly persecuted on behalf of animal agriculture.
• There are no new ghost nets, those fishing nets that break away from vessels, drift with oceanic currents, and continue to trap fish, turtles, marine birds, and marine mammals.
• We stop bottom trawling that destroys sea bed marine ecosystems. Since vegan human ecology does not require fish, it ends the trashing of millions of tons of unwanted bycatch (non-targeted species), eliminates shark-finning that is decimating shark populations, stops the killing of octopi, and ends the drowning of dolphins and turtles.
• We finally create a moral code of behavior that is based upon biocentric innate value; it is more consistently applied to all individuals of all species and ecosystems.

Photograph ©Jim Robertson

Photograph ©Jim Robertson

The Infertile Union

Posted on by
29

So you don’t get the idea I go around unfairly picking on small grassroots groups, here’s an excerpt from my book, Exposing the Big Game: Living Targets of a Dying Sport, wherein I take on the Goliath of all national green groups for siding with hunting…

Sport hunters have enjoyed so much laudation of late they’re beginning to cast themselves as conservation heroes. What’s worse is that many modern, influential green groups are swallowing that blather, hook, line and sinker. Maybe they ought to reread the words of Sierra Club founder, John Muir:

“Surely a better time must be drawing nigh when godlike human beings will become truly humane, and learn to put their animal fellow mortals in their hearts instead of on their backs or in their dinners. In the meantime we may just as well as not learn to live clean, innocent lives instead of slimy, bloody ones. All hale, red-blooded boys are savage, fond of hunting and fishing. But when thoughtless childhood is past, the best rise the highest above all the bloody flesh and sport business…”

Henry David Thoreau, another nineteenth-century nature-lover whose forward-thinking writings were an inspiration to Muir, cautions, “No humane being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature which holds its life by the same tenure he does. The hare in its extremity cries like a child. I warn you, mothers, that my sympathies do not make the usual philanthropic distinctions.”

If those dated messages and mockery are lost on twenty-first-century Sierra-clubbers, Edward Abbey’s sentiment should be obvious enough for anyone, “To speak of harvesting other living creatures, whether deer or elk or birds or cottontail rabbits, as if they were no more than a crop, exposes the meanest, cruelest, most narrow and homocentric of possible human attitudes towards the life that surrounds us.”

Early vanguards of ecological ideology recognized Homo sapiens as just one among thousands of animal species on the planet, no more important than any other in the intricate web of life. They also abhorred sport hunting.

But a shocking turn-around is taking place in the current bastardization of the environmental movement. The Sierra Club and other large, corporate green groups are embracing (read: sleeping with) powerful hunting groups like the Safari Club International and the National Rifle Association (NRA). In a transparent effort to appear down-home and therefore more in touch with nature, they’re making the fatal mistake of joining frces with sportsmen whose conservation “ethic” exists only so their preferred prey species can be slain again and again.

The infertile union between super-sized modern green groups and mega-bucks hunting clubs must have been sired by their shared conviction that humans are the most crucial cogs in the wheel of life (or at least the squeakiest wheels in the dough machine). As the only animal capable of coughing up cash when the collection plate comes around, human beings (every last gourmandizing, carnivorous one of them) are the primary concern; their wants must be given priority over those of all other species. Contemporary environmental organizations, seduced by a desire to engage as many paying members as they can get their hands on (regardless of their attitudes towards animal life), must believe blood-soaked money is as green underneath as any.

Forever stagnating in “thoughtless childhood,” members of hunting groups like the NRA live for the day they can register a record-breaking trophy with the Boone and Crocket Club—formed by Roosevelt “to promote manly sport with rifles.” Fund for Animals creator, Cleveland Amory, took issue with the sporty statesman in his anti-hunting epic, Man Kind? Our Incredible War on Wildlife. A benevolent humanitarian for humans and nonhumans alike, Mr Amory wrote, “Theodore Roosevelt…cannot be faulted for at least some efforts in the field of conservation. But here the praise must end. When it came to killing animals, he was close to psychopathic. Dangerously close indeed (think: Ted Bundy). In his two-volume African Game Trails, Roosevelt lovingly muses over shooting elephants, hippos, buffaloes, lions, cheetahs, leopards, giraffes, zebras, hartebeest, impalas, pigs, the not-so-formidable 30-pound steenbok and even (in what must have seemed the pinnacle of manly sport with rifles) a mother ostrich on her nest.

But don’t let on to a hunter your informed opinion of their esteemed idol, because, as Mr Amory points out, “…the least implication anywhere that hunters are not the worthiest souls since the apostles drives them into virtual paroxysms of self-pity.” Amory goes on to say:

The hunter, seeing there would soon be nothing left to kill, seized upon the new-fangled idea of “conservation” with a vengeance. Soon they had such a stranglehold [think: Ted Nugent] on so much of the movement that the word itself was turned from the idea of protecting and saving the animals to the idea of raising and using them—for killing. The idea of wildlife “management”—for man, of course—was born. Animals were to be “harvested.” They were to be a “crop”—like corn.

Fortunately, a faithful few are seeing through the murky sludge spread where green fields once thrived. Sea Shepherd Conservation Society’s Captain Paul Watson (founder and president of about the only group still using the word conservation to mean protecting and saving animals) recently took another in a lifetime of steadfast stands by resigning from his position on the Board of Directors of the Sierra Club. He refused to be a part of their whorish sleeping with the enemy—their pandering to sportsmen by holding a “Why I Hunt” essay contest, complete with a grand prize trophy hunt to Alaska. To think of how many trees were needlessly reduced to pulp for this profane effort when the answer to why hunters hunt was so succinctly summed up in just one sentence by Paul Watson, “Behind all the chit-chat of conservation and tradition is the plain simple fact that trophy hunters like to kill living things.”

Just as the naïve young girl who falls for the charms and promises of a sunny sociopath learns, the hard way, about his hidden penchant for abuse and violence, the Sierra Club and other middle-ground eco-friendly groups may soon learn the dangers of looking for Mr. Goodbar in all the wrong places. How will they divorce themselves from this unholy alliance when the affair goes sour and sportsmen reveal their malicious, hidden agenda by calling for another contest hunt on coyotes or cull on cougars, wolves or grizzly bears to do away with the competition for “their” deer, elk, moose or caribou?

front-cover-low-res6

Memos to the President

Posted on by
7

Now that the post-election reverie is dying down, it’s time to remind the president why he got our votes and what we expect from him in return.  Several environmental groups have spelled out some of the issues and concerns we all have. The following reports are from three whose newsletters I’m subscribed to, and whose websites are worth visiting…

…First, from Defenders of Wildlife:  http://www.defenders.org/

“We congratulate President Obama on his victory and look forward to working with him and his administration in the coming months and years. With the el  ection now behind us, President Obama and the new Congress must find a balanced way to avoid the so-called fiscal cliff. This budgetary gridlock is threatening to unleash a series of devastating budget cuts that will slash funding for wildlife conservation to the bone.

The harsh reality is this: If Congress doesn’t get its act together and pass a budget before December 31, a cascade of crippling budget cuts will automatically sweep through all federal programs. The effect on wildlife will be devastating.

•The listing and recovery of endangered species will be severely curtailed.

•Urgent research on threats to endangered animals — like the white-nose syndrome that is wiping out entire colonies of bats — could be abandoned.

•Wildlife law enforcement reductions will leave wildlife refuges vulnerable to criminal activity and will decimate anti-wildlife poaching and smuggling enforcement operations.

•Many national wildlife refuges, forests and parks will be closed entirely — harming local economies that benefit from millions of visitors each year.

•Many public lands’ visitor centers will close, resulting in loss of education and recreation programs that benefit outdoor enthusiasts and children.

•Important protections for migratory birds will go unenforced.

Tell your representatives in Congress to do their job, and maintain needed protections for wildlife and their habitats. When Congress returns next week, they must act to stop this budget disaster. Tell them they must come to an agreement that will not harm crucial wildlife conservation programs.”

Wildlife lovers like you and me have a busy and challenging year ahead.

… Meanwhile, from the executive director at  WildEarth Guardians: http://www.wildearthguardians.org/site/PageServer asks of the president…

“While you savor your victory and contemplate your vision for the next four years, I’d like to share my vision of how to create a brighter future for our environment and our people.

•Create a new, clean energy economy . We need a carbon tax whose basis is both moral and economic; fossil fuels are killing the planet and Sandy’s wrath is just the latest example that the climate crisis is upon us. While it’s true that Americans want energy independence, it’s also true that the continued use of fossil fuels is endangering other core freedoms like a clean, safe environment. That’s unacceptable.

•Safeguard America’s endangered species. Whether gray wolves, sperm whales or tiger beetles—all species have a right to exist. It’s our moral and ethical imperative to protect imperiled species, as is beautifully articulated in the Endangered Species Act. We must defend and strengthen the Act to ensure that future generations inherit an earth as beautiful and diverse as the one we enjoy today.

•Protect our wetlands and rivers. Aquatic ecosystems are vital, now more than ever, and the Clean Water Act is a cornerstone of protecting these vital arteries of life. In a warming, overpopulated world it is critical that we do more to ensure that rivers have secure flows and that wetlands are protected as filters to pollution and buffers to intense weather events.

•Defend our last wild public lands. One of the most enduring and unique aspects of America’s natural heritage is simply that we still have wild country left. That’s because we have public lands that keep these places wild. Places like the Greater Gila in New Mexico and Arizona, the Roan Plateau in Colorado and the Red Rock canyon country of Utah. We want you to not only defend the ideal of public lands, but also use your authority under the Antiquities Act to protect these last wild places.”

…and from the NRDC: http://www.nrdc.org/ …

“American voters not only re-elected a president who made green jobs a cornerstone of his first term and his campaign, they also rejected some of the shrillest champions of Big Oil and Big Coal in key Senate races from Massachusetts to Ohio, from Virginia to New Mexico.We should be heartened that the fossil fuel lobby could throw $270 million at so many candidates hawking “drill, baby, drill” and climate denial — and get so little back on their investment.

Apparently, democracy lives … as does common sense. Voters roundly rejected an extremist agenda that says protecting polluter profits is job one, while the rest of us pay the price in illness, poisoned ecosystems and apocalyptic weather. That last point was hardly academic this Election Day, as millions in the Northeast are still struggling to recover some shred of normalcy after Hurricane Sandy.

Today, we are calling on President Obama to confront the urgent threat of global warming by reining in carbon polluters and dramatically boosting the role of renewable energy in American life. That is our very best hope for breaking Big Oil’s stranglehold on both our economy and our climate.

Toward that end, we’ll work closely with the second Obama Administration to build on great progress already made in so many sectors — like the new clean car standards we championed that will double the fuel economy of the average vehicle on the road. But we’ll also be watchdogging the administration to ensure it does the right thing: that the EPA proposes carbon limits for existing power plants … that the State Department delivers on its promise of a complete and independent review of the climate-wrecking Keystone XL tar sands pipeline … that the BLM cracks down on dangerous fracking.

Of course, NRDC always stands for the environment, not for any party or elected official. So if the Obama Administration strays from its avowed commitment to the environment, then we will hold their feet to the fire — in court — just as we’ve done with every other president over the past forty years. As you read this, we are suing the administration to save the Polar Bear Seas from Shell’s reckless plans for drilling in the Arctic … and to safeguard the very last 284 beluga whales in Alaska’s Cook Inlet from oil exploration.

Simply put, we will do everything in our power to help President Obama deliver on his goals of clean energy and environmental protection. But NRDC will hold him accountable — for our planet’s sake — if and when he falls short. As for Congress, it is time for the House Republican leadership and Tea Party members to face reality: the American people are in no mood for more ideological intransigence. By rejecting Big Oil’s candidates, voters sent a message loud and clear that they want more clean energy, less climate denial and an end to the $4 billion in taxpayer subsidies for fossil fuels. Those are the priorities NRDC will be putting front and center when the lame duck session of Congress begins next week.”

…No doubt we’ll have to continue to repeatedly remind our politicians that though the animals don’t vote, we can and will continue to vote for them and for the natural habitats they call home.

Text and Wildlife Photography ©Jim Robertson, 2012. All Rights Reserved

There Was Magic in the Underwear

Posted on by
22

There was magic in the air last night—magic underpants, that is. Mitt Romney must have been wearing a crisp new pair for the debate. It’s not likely he would have beaten an intelligent, popular incumbent president without them.

Special skivvies aside, Mitt’s disregard for the environment showed through in the first few minutes with the line, “I like coal” and his promise to approve the Keystone pipeline. It was if he was saying, “Bring it on!” to the disastrous impacts of global warming. And by boasting about having five sons, he was clearly thumbing his nose at the problem of over-population.

For the sake of the natural world, Mr. Romney should trade in his magic undies for a crystal ball—or a dose of reality. Maybe then he’ll be able to see what rampant coal and shale oil extraction and burning are doing to the Earth and the atmosphere and how unbridled breeding is threatening this, the one and only planet we’ll ever know.

Text and Wildlife Photography ©Jim Robertson

Wolves Under Tyrannical Control

Posted on by
68

According to a recent article about the planned destruction of Washington’s Wedge pack, Bill McIrvin of the Diamond M ranch said in an interview in July that he believes radical environmental groups are conspiring to introduce wolves in order to force ranchers off public lands. Yeah right—nice thought—but that sounds pretty paranoid to me.

Most “radical” environmentalists are smart enough to know that cattle ranchers have wildlife and the wildlife agencies by the balls with a death grip that won’t let go until Nature hertself is under their tyrannical control.

If the rancher is this suspicious of environmentalists, how paranoid must he be of the wolves? And why should we blindly accept all his claims of depredation at an almost unprecedented level?

I can just see him laughing under his hat at the wildlife agents he’s duped into doing his bidding by annihilating the entire Wedge pack (he’s stated several times he won’t settle for anything less). Heck, even the presumed wolf-champions at Conservation Northwest (in an obvious effort not to appear “radical”) have turned their back on the pack for the sake of the cattle rancher.

Not only will McIrvin be allowed to keep grazing his cattle on public national forest land, but now he’s got the state sharpshooters’ promise that they’ll spend as long as it takes to kill each and every wolf in the pack.

No, there’s not much chance of crafty extreme environmentalists covertly re-introducing wolves to this crazy cattle-industry controlled world. But we can always hope that some animal ‘extremist’ will usher them back into Canada for now, until the ranchers of Eastern Washington can put their prejudices aside and learn to live with the diversity of wildlife they’re fortunate enough to have in their backyard.

Text and Wildlife Photography ©Jim Robertson

_____________________________________________________

Text and Wildlife Photography ©Jim Robertson

Vegans—Not Hunters—Are the Best Environmentalists

Posted on by
7

You’ve probably heard the cliché, “Every day is Earth Day to an environmentalist.” Well, it’s true actually, at least to a true environmentalist—the kind of person who makes daily choices based solely on their concern for our planet and the life it supports. The gal, for example, who chooses not to eat farmed animals because of the enormous amount of abuse (not to mention gargantuan carbon footprint) inherent in those Styrofoam and shrink-wrapped packages that clog the sprawling meat isles across the country; or the guy who does not hunt because wild animals are a part of the living Earth he loves and respects.

Eager to look like the sensible ones, conventional environmentalists often assume the wobbly, half-hearted stance of dismissing, rather than embracing, the animal rights movement. On the other hand, dedicated animal rights advocates don’t shy away from calling themselves environmentalists. They know that only by adopting a vegan lifestyle can one truly be an environmentalist. Vegans understand that the Earth cannot sustain billions upon billions of hungry bipedal carnivores and they recognize that the surest way to ease suffering for all is to eat lower on the food chain—in keeping with our proven primate heritage.

Absurd as it sounds to folks who really do care for the planet, certain atypically adroit sportsmen have been caught spreading the dogma that gun-toting Bambi-slayers actually have a “love for the land” and a concern for the animals they kill—that murdering animals is a wholesome Earth Day activity. Proselytizing hunter-holy-men try to downplay the obvious lethal impacts hunting has on individual animals and entire populations, wielding one of the weariest—and wackiest—of all clichés, “Hunters are the best environmentalists,” despite well-documented proof that hunting has been—and continues to be—a direct cause of extinction for untold species throughout the world.

Over-zealous hunters completely eradicated the once unimaginably abundant passenger pigeon and the Eskimo curlew (both killed en masse and sold by the cartload for pennies apiece), the Carolina parakeet (the only species of parrot native to the US) and the great auk (a flightless, North Atlantic answer to the penguin).

Hunting is the antithesis of environmentalism. The very notion of the gas-guzzling, beer-can-tossing hunter as an environmentalist is laughable even to them. Show me a hunter who is not antagonistic toward the rights of animals and I’ll show you a rare bird indeed.

     ____________________________________________________

Portions of this blog were based on excerpts from the book, Exposing the Big Game: Living Targets of a Dying Sport: http://www.earth-books.net/books/exposing-the-big-game

Image