Saturday, January 19, 2013

Endangered

Corporations hate the Endangered Species Act. They hate it because when an endangered species lives in an area that they want to exploit (environmentally rape), they are stymied by the law from pursuing the route of likely wealth. This they hate and this they do not tolerate.

Something I noticed early on in my awakening as an environmentalist was the hatred that hunters and off-road vehicle users have for endangered predators. They uniformly loathe all of the top predators in North America. Grizzly bears, Timber wolves, Mountain lions, Canadian lynx, Wolverines, and such are at the top of their hate lists. This is because such "sportsmen" are key tools in the corporate bag of dirty tricks that they can disgorge from time to time in their fight against wilderness bills and endangered species acts. For to preserve a top predator is to preserved the wilderness aspect of the land. And in preserving wilderness, the corporate hogs cannot feed at the trough they would like to make of our wild and rural lands.


A big bull bison I encountered in 2010 in Yellowstone National Park.


Take this case:

Wood Bison to Return to Alaska.


"Canadian officials have rebuilt their wild wood bison population to about 9,000, half of which are free from bovine diseases, the Fish and Wildlife Service said.

But reintroduction in Alaska has stalled over complaints that the animals' Endangered Species Act protections would limit oil and gas drilling, mining and other development, Vincent-Lang said. The new agreement addresses those concerns, he said."


The interests of the billionaires is in conflict here with the preservation of the land and of the species which depend upon that land. They don't care about restoring the Woods bison to part of its former range. They don't give a damn about the Woods bison, except as it relates to their inability to rape the land by drilling and mining and timbering it to death.

Enough of this shit. Corporate interests need to be tamed and brought to heel. The needs of us all outweigh the greed of the few who profit the most from the exploitation of our wilderness. We need fresh air and clean water and pure soil. Although you may not see the profit in it, we need our endangered companions who share this planet. We truly do live in a web of life, and as each strand is plucked out, the whole is made weaker. I cannot make it any plainer than that, and I cannot think of any more applicable way to explain it.

All of us need a world in which the range of the Woods bison is restored. We do not need a healthy energy corporation.

4 comments:

MarkGelbart said...

We do need healthy energy corporations, if we want to maintain our modern lifestyles. Without oil companies we wouldn't have affordable electrical power or modern transportation.

They can afford to shell out more money to protect our environment than they do, though. Their political influence is far greater than it should be.

James Robert Smith said...

I don't want to see our consumerist society continue. The end result is going to be mass extinction. We're in the tail-end of said mass-extinction right now.

I have no problem with the personal automobile being phased out in favor of mass transit. Power plants that use fossil fuels being shut down. Would it mean a pullback in personal luxuries and waste? Indeed, it would. Which I'd be more than willing to forgo in return for a cleaner world.

MarkGelbart said...

Most people wouldn't be willing to give up their modern lifestyle.

Our modern way of life will continue until the natural world itself puts a stop to it.

Some day it will. Probably not in our lifetimes, but some day humans are going to run out of fossil fuels.

Then what's going to happen?

James Robert Smith said...

If you haven't seen this, read it:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/9815862/Humans-are-plague-on-Earth-Attenborough.html

Sir David Attenborough puts voice to the problem perfectly.