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Recently, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum announced that the Trump administration is documenting the value of what we the people own: “enormous stores of oil, coal, minerals, timber, and geothermal power, all held within a vast property portfolio,” Kimberly Strassel of the Wall Street Journal writes, including “480 million surface acres, more than 2 billion offshore acres, and 750 million acres of subsurface minerals.”
These abundant assets potentially can create revenue for the federal government that could obviate the need to borrow trillions of dollars, and to extract billions more from our most productive citizens, in order to “rob selected Peter to pay collective Paul,” as Rudyard Kipling in 1919 described redistribution schemes. But as Strassel understates, such common-sense action will require “hard political choices.”
That’s because for two centuries, the West has practiced what Theodore Roosevelt called “nature fakery.” In a 1907 article, Roosevelt attacked Jack London and other romantic writers for practicing what TR called “nature fakery,” which made them “an object of derision to every scientist worthy of the name, to every real lover of the wilderness, to every faunal naturalist, to every true hunter or nature lover.”
Roosevelt was alluding to the Western transformation of how we think about the natural world and our relationship to it. Rather than recognizing nature’s “fierce eternal destruction,” as John Keats put it, we have idealized and romanticized nature, and indulged what Victorian art and social critic John Ruskin called the “pathetic fallacy.” This is the idealization of nature by attributing to it and animals the conduct and emotions of human beings. Thinking your dog “loves” you, for example, is wish-fulfillment, not a statement of reality. Stop feeding it and see how much it loves you.
The fact is, nature is literally inhuman. It has value such as beauty and awe only because it stirs in us pleasing and gratifying emotions. But these attitudes are the luxuries of the modern West, in which nature is, as Joseph Conrad put it, “the shackled form of a conquered monster,” its destructiveness tamed and domesticated in order to benefit human beings. Today, technology and science have further liberated, not completely of course, us from most of nature’s tyranny and indifference to this one small, weak, slow, puny species that, as Apollo says in the Iliad, “live like leaves now flourishing full of fire . . . and now wither and perish.”
In other words, we idealize and romanticize nature because we are protected from its destructive powers that science and technology have tamed and controlled. Another factor is the liberation of the great majority of Westerners from the endless drudgery of growing and producing food, which before the modern period required the lion’s share of human labor, but takes only a fraction of us today, and much of that fraction comprising immigrants. This means that few Westerners in our times know firsthand, as farmers do, nature’s fickle cruelty and indifference to our survival or misery.
As a subject of imaginative art, literature, and landscape tourism, then, such idealism is not dangerous, but therapeutic like pets. But in the Sixties environmentalism shifted from resource-management that benefits humans by managing resources for people in the present and the future; to idealistic nature fakery that sacrifices the well-being of humans to advance a political ideology, especially one that demonizes free-market capitalism for degrading nature for grubby corporate profit. This distortion of nature’s value has led to destructive policies that are jeopardizing our economy in order to solve environmental “crises” from endangered species regulations, to global warming mitigation programs and policies.
Just how destructive was made clear a few months ago when wildfires stoked by powerful Santa Ana winds, heated by the desert, blew into urbanized southern California. This phenomenon, along with wildfires in the Sierra Nevada, has been familiar for centuries. To mitigate the damage, American Indians cleared brush and cut fire-breaks in the forests to lessen the amount of fuel when a wildfire broke out. That’s genuine conservation, not the nature fakery that wants dense forests like the “forest primeval” for aesthetic reasons.
But that’s not all the Pacific Palisades fire should have taught us. Firefighters ran out of water because reservoirs and fire hydrants went dry due to bureaucratic incompetence and much worse––idiotic policies that let trillions of acre-feet of California’s bounty of water drain into the Pacific, in order to rescue an “endangered” two-inch bait-fish. This obsession with endangered species at the expense of human well-being is another example of feckless nature fakery.
Indeed, the enormity of this antihumanist policy is astonishing: As Victor Joecks of the Las Vegas Review Journal reported, “To help the fish, California scaled back how much water it sent to Southern California. ‘Since 2008, 1.4 trillion gallons of water has been flushed into the San Francisco Bay to protect the Delta smelt, an endangered species of fish, from water pumps,’ the San Diego Union-Tribune wrote in 2015. Further, environmental uses of water accounted for more than 50 percent of the state’s flows.”
Moreover, Joecks continues, “That waste has continued. In January 2023, massive storms hit the state. They dumped trillions of gallons of water, but 94% of it drained into the ocean. Part of the problem was that California didn’t have the infrastructure to capture more of it. But officials also turned down those pumps to protect the Delta smelt.”
But all that astonishing stupidity is nothing compared to the mother of all feckless and dangerous nature fakery. Anthropogenic, Catastrophic Global Warming is based on the dubious hypothesis that human-caused increases in atmospheric CO2 emissions will soon heat our atmosphere enough to destroy our civilization and return us to the Stone Age.
The daffy solution to this ginned-up crisis is to eliminate the cheap and abundant fossil fuels that created and powers the modern world, and replace it with “green” energy like solar panels and wind turbines––the energy of which is intermittent, difficult to store, and still requires fossil fuels. Yet the West, the richest and supposedly most advanced nations in the world, are spending billions and billions of dollars on grants, tax breaks, and subsidies for net-zero carbon policies and promoting EVs, even though the infrastructure necessary to make electric powered vehicles viable is many decades away, assuming it’s even possible.
How is it that these environmental “crises” and their multiple-trillion-dollar solutions gain so much political traction? Money and politics, of course, are important factors. Government funding for “global warming” research, and subsidies for “alternative energy” are powerful inducements for lupine corporations and politicians to promulgate climate change alarmism and policies, while taxpayers foot the bill.
A more insidious factor, however, are the wish-fulfilling myths that routinely replace science in modern environmentalism. Much of the rhetoric that characterizes its arguments indulges two powerful ancient myths in particular, the Noble Savage and the Golden Age. Since the dawn of civilization, these ancient stories have spoken to humanity’s anxieties about living in the complex human world of language, law, culture, government, cities, trade, technology, agriculture, crime, war, and private property––evils absent from both the Golden Age and the lives of Noble Savages. Moreover, both populations live in harmony with nature, which like a nurturing mother provides everything needed for not just for survival, but also health, leisure, and happiness––all without much effort by people.
Another feature of these myths is the absence and denigration of technology, a motif that the Romantic Age popularized during the advent of the Industrial Age with its “Satanic mills,” as William Blake described that new era, and also birthed capitalism that trapped people in “cash nexus,” Thomas Carlyle’s expression popularized by Karl Marx.
And here we see another influence that accounts for the default self-loathing, if not hatred, of the modern West––especially America, its richest, most powerful state. During the Industrial Revolution, this civilizational self-hatred was turbo-charged by Romantic poet, artists, and intellectuals, who regarded capitalism as a philistine obsession with infra dig money-grubbing harmful to culture and nature alike, as William Wordsworth said in his famous admonition, “getting and spending we lay waste our powers/ Little we see in Nature that is ours.”
This anxiety and demonizing of the industrialize West were given a patina of “science” by Sigmund Freud, who in Civilization and its Discontents (1929) speculated that civilization itself was the cause of our repression and neuroses: “This contention holds that what we call our civilization is largely responsible for our misery, and that we should be much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions.”
Freud anticipated the radical, antihumanist environmentalism of extremists––“deep ecologists” like Bill Deval, who rejected any understanding of environmentalism that includes calculations of benefits for humans. Instead, we should follow “ecocentrism,” which means “rejecting the position that some life forms have greater worth than other life forms.” The implications of this antihumanist creed opened the door to the ecoterrorists like the murderous Unabomber. Moreover, it is redolent of the logic of the Nazis’ “final solution,” and the specious moral equivalence that those destroying the environment and nature should be destroyed.
Deval explicitly makes this link in his preposterous analogy that “students in the natural resources sciences and management . . . are much like the guards in Nazi death camps,” and he compared the cost efficacy of the timber industry to the “cost-effective means the Nazis used to murder large numbers of people.” Ironically, as philosopher Luc Ferry points out, it is radical environmentalism that echoes Nazism: “In both cases we are dealing with the same romantic and/or sentimental representation of the relationship between nature and culture” that prioritizes the primitive over the civilized––just what Freud considered a good thing.
Finally, this long tradition of idealizing nature and hating the modern world and capitalism has given communism, a kindred antihumanist ideology, powerful wish-fulfilling tropes that can be leveraged by leftists. As Cultural Marxist and Frankfurt School critics Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno put it in their very influential expression of this prejudice against industrial capitalism, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), “Industrialism makes souls into things. . . The countless agencies of mass production and its culture impress standardized behavior on the individual as the only natural, decent, and rational one. Individuals define themselves now only as things, statistical elements, successes or failures.” Arguments such as this is how we’ve ended up with Green partis or “Watermelons” ––Green on the outside, Red on the inside.
Doug Burgum and others in the Trump administration are working to restore common sense environmental polices that prioritize improving human life instead of succumbing to capitalist-hating, Disneyfied and romanticized juvenile clichés. Rather than pleasing myths and nature fakery, we need what environmental writer Gregg Easterbrook calls “ecorealism,” the sober conviction “that logic, not sentiment, is the best tool for safeguarding nature,” and “that accurate understanding of the actual state of the environment will serve the Earth better than expressions of panic.” Ecorealist policies for managing our nation’s bounty of resource is how we make conservation and America great again.
Their always telling us that The Earth is Fragile and The Delicate Balance of Nature now some Crack-Pot claims that Men Cars and Re Meat causes or contributes to Global Warming/Climate Change. Who ever came up with that stupid Study must have Sawdust for Brains
au contraire.. I hold strongly that the root cause of this, and the daily fodder to perpetuate it, are not sawdust=for-brains phenomena at all. You are far too kind and gracious.
Those actively and strongly promoting it are mainly encouraged by the jingling sound they hear, faintly, down the road., certain to line their own pockets as their false theories are swallowed by the ignorati and become the law of the land.
Gates, Schwab, and their kind, most of whom, interestingly enough, have acquired large properties on or very close to the world’s oceans, proving false their claims the sea levels will rise sharply in the near future.
“A more insidious factor, however, are the wish-fulfilling myths that routinely replace science in modern environmentalism. Much of the rhetoric that characterizes its arguments indulges two powerful ancient myths in particular, the Noble Savage and the Golden Age.”
The myth of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden comes to mind. Two noble savages living in an effortless, utopian, magical, wonderland, Golden Age.
“Thinking your dog “loves” you, for example, is wish-fulfillment, not a statement of reality. Stop feeding it and see how much it loves you.”
No love can be unconditional, we are spiritual creatures in a material world, we are soul and body united, neither can exist without the other. Both soul and body must be fed on a continual basis. The “Soul-Body Dichotomy” is a religious myth just as unconditional love is a religious myth. Both life and love are fundamentally conditional, take away the conditions necessary to sustain life and you die. Betray the values that sustain love and you cease to love.
“The fact is, nature is literally inhuman.”
Nature is not literally inhuman, you’re anthropomorphizing nature just like the environmentalists do. Nature is neither human nor inhuman, it’s neutral, it just is.
“This is the idealization of nature by attributing to it and animals the conduct and emotions of human beings.”
Just as Jews, Christians, and Muslims attribute to some imaginary supernatural sky-spirit the conduct and emotions of human beings. The totally primitive savages totally anthropomorphized every aspect of nature finding spirits even in rocks and trees. When the primitives got a little less primitive, but not much less primitive, they gave up worshipping rock and tree spirits and invented the sky-spirits of Yahweh and Allah.
I suggest you try this exercise for your self-improvement: say to yourself, “I am not better than other people because they believe in God while I, in my superior intelligence and advanced thinking, do not.”
It will do you a world of good to repeat that exercise until it sinks in.
There’s only so much pseudo-intellectual pablum I can stomach in any given day. ThanX to THX I can always count on getting more than my fill.
They never seem to complain about vegetarians emitting more methane than meat eaters.
The west was rooted in a God that required our hearts and sought to turn us from idols. Today nature has become our idol and idols require sacrifice. Our treasure including our children must be offered. This is the cause many people fighting to cause the less productive among us to be given up to their pagan gods. You cannot talk them out of the death wish they are on. Their faith lies in their idol. Reason will not work. It is their religion. They will argue that it is not.
In a nutshell, environmentalists do not treat environmentalism as a science, with cool and careful scientific analysis of risks and benefits, probabilistic analysis of outcomes, and evidence based research, but as a religion, with heated fervor, prophecies of doom, and sacrifices.
One reason why is that when we, as a society, stop believing in God, by which I mean God in the Judeo-Christian faith tradition, that doesn’t mean we believe in nothing—it means we believe in anything.
Environmentalism is one of those things. It has the hallmarks of the pagan “strange gods” that the First Commandment warns us not to worship—worship of nature, false prophecies of doom, requirements for sacrifices of treasure and blood to appease angry gods, and so forth.
Yes, humanity must be good stewards of nature. But we must not worship it.
I don’t believe in your God but that doesn’t mean that I believe in anything, I believe in the facts of reality and the power of reason to discover the facts of reality.
If you teach a child to believe in the magical fairy tales of Christianity you have indoctrinated him into magical thinking. That magical thinking can be transferred to other areas of life as well.
Since consistency is a requirement of reason and not of magical thinking the child indoctrinated into magical thinking will believe in anything.
Magical thinking is believing that man’s interior thoughts and reason can provide an objective moral standard.
Magical thinking is believing that matter is eternal, or just exploded into being.
Magical thinking is setting up straw man arguments like “Christian faith is believing without evidence” and then trying to use that to mock Christianity.
Magical thinking is believing reality is limited to what can be perceived by the physical senses conveying information to the mind.
Kurt Vonnegut’s fiction is full of how soul crushing and conformity inforcing big business is. I stopped being impressed by that, the day I realized Dell paperbacks, which made possiblevthe mass marketing of his books, was big business.
Nature, like most ancient deities, is both wonderful and terrible–“awesome,” if you will. Like so many aspects of life, it is the paradox that Jung so often referred to. But we seem to want to sugar-coat things.
nature, an ancient deity?
What have you been smoking?
a “diety” has power, agency, authority. Power to cause the sun to stand still in the sky, to cause heavy rain to fall for forty days running, to raise a dead man, three days bound and buried, back to life.
Animals are not in the same category as inanimate nature. They have nervous systems, can feel pain and try to avoid it. Many animals have saved the lives of humans and other animals at the risk or loss of their own. Greater love hath no man. Or have fed or otherwise cared for them, even when not their own young.
We are animals. There is nothing which separates us from them. You might say we are higher animals, but since we are often cruel, sadistic, or callous, our brain capacity in itself does not elevate us. We claim to value the lives of those mentally disabled humans who do not share that capacity.
We are all subject to Nature’s whims and wrath. OK, to natural events and processes unfavorable to the comfortable continuance of the lives of those dependent on it. But the line must be drawn between those who can suffer and inert natural processes incapable of suffering.
Every animal and every human is an individual. Some individual animals, like the Golden Retriever, tend to be gentle creatures because they were bred by man to be generally gentle. Other animals like the Pitbull were bred by man to be generally aggressive.
Even each individual Golden Retriever and Pitbull can have a somewhat individual “personality”.
I tend to believe that a human being stands a better chance of surviving a close encounter with Ted Bundy than they do with Yogi the Grizzly Bear.
CIA – Any true lover of dogs and/or cats will know how tuned
in they are to our emotions and behaviors. I have been astounded
over a long lifetime at the many times I have seen this. They are
completely capable of forming strong bonds and attachments to us.
For anyone unable to grasp this, just remember what Shakespeare
wrote: There are more things in heaven and Earth. . . . than are
dreamt of in your philosophy.
A good compendium of the idiocy of the fake ecologists who are just bitter clingers to their failed ideologies and will justify their needs and desires no matter the expense and hardship they will bring to the majority of people. Of course, they hate people. They promise they love mankind but it is just for show. Of course, they hate themselves most of all. When one hates themself it is simplicity to carry it across the aboard to all.
People need to understand this phenomenon and know how to react to it. Not with violence but with pity and the intelligence to know when to ignore those who are obsessed with mythical dangers that do not exist and to remain aware of the real dangers. Life on Earth is dangerous but not for the reasons the eco-kooks proclaim.
“[Nature] has value such as beauty and awe only because it stirs in us pleasing and gratifying emotions.”
This is the thinking C.S. Lewis condemned in his Abolition of Man, and would inevitably lead to “men without chests.” Here is a quote from an article about the concept:
“If we teach the young, which is whom The Green Book is for, that there is no such thing as beauty or ugliness, or justice or injustice—that those are merely feelings inside of them and don’t correspond to anything real—then we have lost our way because we won’t have this ‘chest of high desire’ to lead us toward the right things and coordinate between our reason and our needs. Dr. Arnn observes that ‘if the waterfall is not sublime, then how can anything be good, because good is just a sentiment.’ ”
The short article in its entirety:
https://onlinecoursesblog.hillsdale.edu/men-without-chests/
mostly great stuff. my starving dog still loves me, however. he is just incredibly stressed and confused (and noisy). and he’d leave me for the first interloper with a beef stick. but that may have always been the case; doesn’t mean he stopped loving me,
to focus on faith in that which cannot be proven is to obscure the relaying of structure and morals that many religions can convey to our children. i won’t speak for mine, but as for myself my beliefs do nothing towards making me more susceptible to “believing anything.” quite the opposite, in fact.
Private property rights and capitalism are joined at the hip. They
are inseparable. If you don’t own the land or assets or even
intellectual rights – along with a free market right to do with them
what you want – who will own them? That’s right. The elitists.
The thugs. And guess what your life will be like? Something
along the lines of you will own nothing and you will be happy – or
else!
Nature fakery aka Global Warming is a tactic of the anti- American,
anti-capitalists. And here’s how those Communists will always lay
it on thick – in the manner of the late commie Pope Francis: By
saying 1) the earth and its resources are a gift to us from God and
shouldn’t be exploited by industrialists and we shouldn’t be so
concerned with consumerism. Would that mean relying more on
the State for sustenance? 2) As humans, we are also part of nature
and so the environment and all animal, plants, fish and insects
should be treated with equal respect. Would that mean saving a
two-inch fish used for bait by ultimately killing hundreds of humans
to do it?
Ecorealism is indeed the way to go to conserve and manage the
environment. And to defeat that global warming tactic of evil and
elitist communism.
Bruce, very well written philosophy piece on the Red-green menace. Few facts from a lowly digging-i-mud geologist.
Without massive subsidies from us, tax payers, the intermittently functional solar/wind contraptions wouldn’t mar the fruited plains & shores. The late drunk hypocrite & killer, Ted Kennedy, pushed this crap save in his fancy ‘hood. The main issue, however, is this. The monstrosities are non-recyclable & toxic.
There is only 0.04% CO2 in the air. It has near ZERO effect on the climate. When the sun goes down the trapped heat dissipates. The strongest greenhouse gas is water vapor. Let’s ban post haste clouds & fog, shall we?
The main goal of the Red-green fanatics is wealth redistribution & control. The lardy mega-grifter & hypocrite algore is laughing all the way to the bank. He got filthy rich w/ his agitprop. Not one of these goons predictions has come true since 1970.
I read a book about Dian Fossey the insane mountain gorilla lady, they say she stank so bad that the jungle dwelling bandits weren’t interested, but I digress. This Louis Leakey approved mad woman wanted the Rwandan government, to shoot the citizens cows, because the cows encroached, on her precious gorilla habitat. Now that is colonialism.
Well, yes and no.
On the “no” is “The fact is, nature is literally inhuman. It has value such as beauty and awe only because it stirs in us pleasing and gratifying emotions. ” Flowers are beautiful and they serve the same purpose in Nature as in Mankind – a sex attractant for females, as are bird songs and colors, by and large (it’s also “get away from my tree”)
On the “yes” side is climate change. We will get wilder weather and no one born in the twentieth century doesn’t kn0w it’s getting warmer – we can FEEL it!
BUT in the early Devonian Age, 400 million years ago, the CO2 level was ten times what it is today. Plants grew like crazy. They provided so much oxygen that it reached 30%, not the 21% of today. That oxygen enabled giant insects (they breathe only through holes in their body, called spiracles.) It will likely enable tremendous quantities of plants for our food. That is good, if we only reproduced enough to eat that food. Later in the Devonian, carbon dioxide levels went down, Plant matter got sequestered as coal and Earth’s weather became cooler.
The result? Climate Change is REAL, but it’s not a catastrophe. We will adapt, That, and the faculty of speech are the hallmarks of our species.