Extirpation and Extinction.

I used to know a lot of people who hunted. When I was a kid I would go small game hunting from time to time with my dad. Rabbits, quail, that type of thing. I stopped when I was 13 years old, no longer able to kill birds and mammals. My choice, no wish here to dictate that to others.

Up until a few years ago I would still hang out and talk to hunters sometimes. Some people hunt for what they call sport. Others hunt because they enjoy eating wild game and consuming what they kill. Truth to tell, one of my favorite things to eat is venison. So I am making no judgment call here. I have friends who hunt deer and other game to put protein in their freezers which helps them to cut down on the expense of feeding themselves and their families; it also stops them from consuming meat produced on factory farms. This is a good thing.

However, in my conversations with my friends who are hunters, and with strangers I meet who hunt, the talk almost always ends up with a mention of predators. Hunters hate predators. They hate any animal that also eats the deer, elk, moose, grouse, quail, etc. that people like to hunt and kill. At first I just assumed that this rabid hatred of predators was due to a sense of competition that they felt. But I never heard any of these hunters verbally savage or complain about other human hunters. Their rage and hatred was only for Grizzly bears, mountain lions, bobcats, coyotes, lynxes, and other such animals.

But they reserved a very special species of hatred for one particular animal: the Timber wolf.

If the conversation ever turned to wolves, I would watch my hunter friends start to slobber at the mouth like rabid dogs. Their eyes would go crazy. They would begin to rant and rave, talking about how the entire species should be exterminated and how any liberal college-educated moron who advocates for the defense of wolves should be jailed or killed. And, no, I am not exaggerating. I have seen otherwise calm, normal men start yelling for the extinction of an entire species and the deaths of educated biologists over this topic. They almost always referred to those with college educations as scum of the Earth.

I mainly would just squint at these people and wonder what the fuck was wrong with them and look at them as if they were a kind of specimen wriggling on a microscope slide or some cocktail of infection culturing in a petri dish.

Later, I would sit and try to figure it out, putting together what I knew about the activity of hunting and the people I knew who engaged in it.

Almost every hunter I knew (or know) is a white adult male. Nearly all of them are not just avid gun owners, but also are right wing types who--in addition to hating wolves--also don't care for people of other cultures, nor for people who have different skin pigmentation. Most of them are members of the National Rifle Association. Most of them are registered Republicans. Most of them hate the environmental movement.

Also, most of the hunters I have known subscribe to one or more sportsman's magazines. I am quite familiar with these publications because when I was a kid and thirsting for information about wildlife I was drawn to them since they had garish covers with photos and paintings of wild animals on them. And I had an endless supply of back issues of such magazines because my parents owned used bookstores and had stacks and stacks of them in the shops. I was allowed to take home as many as I wanted to read.

One thing that I learned very early on from reading these magazines is that there was an editorial thirst to promote the hatred of all predatory mammals that are not humans. It doesn't matter what kind of carnivorous animal they chose to target, these creatures were presented in a light that was as negative as could possibly be conveyed in words and pictures. Grizzly bears were monsters that should be avoided at all cost except to shoot or poison. Mountain lions were killers of deer and elk that should all be tracked down with dogs and shot on sight. Coyotes and bobcats are worthless vermin that need to be completely obliterated for reducing the rabbit population.

But paramount in their hatred and propaganda was, and is, the Timber wolf. When you read these magazine articles there is nothing whatsoever good about wolves. They are a toxin on the forest landscape that must be expunged. No mercy for any wolf. No quarter to be given. Just kill them all down to the smallest pup.

As I grew older I also noticed that most of these magazines look toward the environmental movement in a similarly negative light. They didn't call for the murder of activists who are out to create wilderness and National Parks, but they did blanket them with disdain and advocate for legislation against them, and to fight any rule such people support or pass.

And there it was. These magazines are distributed to people who, ironically, depend on open, relatively wild spaces where they can engage in their pastime of hunting. But these articles attack mainly two bits of legislation--the Endangered Species Act, and the Wilderness Act. To this end these magazines lobby endlessly, rabidly, and ceaselessly to overturn these protections for wild places and the animals who inhabit them. Who would profit from this? Hunters? Not really. But the folk who do profit from the reversal of these laws need hunters to act as triggers to remove these Acts. Therefore, have those hunters advocate obliquely for the call to remove such protections.

The folk who would ultimately have the most to gain from destroying the laws that preserve the last bits of wild spaces that we have are mining outfits, timber companies, energy corporations, and real estate concerns. If only there were no wilderness protections they could lay waste to the forests and gouge out the minerals. If only there was no Endangered Species Act they could wade into our National Parks to do as they please.

And there I realized that all of these hideous little magazines were nothing but propaganda material for the worst of what my country has created: fossil fuel companies, timber barons, real estate moguls. These are the scumbags directing their poison through hunters, targeting our wild forests to scour out the things that keep those greedy bastards from taking possession of what little wilderness that remains.

I don't read those magazines anymore. I used to pick one up now and again in shops or libraries just to see if things had changed. They have not. The scumbags who write for them still sell their souls for a few dollars to malign wolves and mountain lions. My hope is that these pernicious bastards who work for the worst of the worst will all die choking on their own guts.

To look for evil, follow the trail of profit.

The eastern Timber wolf.

What hunting magazines tell you Grizzly bears do.

What grizzly bears really do 99.999999999% of the time.

How the (Liberal) Media Got Us Mountaintop Removal

When I was in high school I recall the corporate move to deregulate coal mining. All of the network news stations were in on the propaganda push to change the rules that resulted in the ecological rape we know as mountaintop removal. One particular slant they'd take was to show poor little wildcat coal miners. These were small operators--sometimes one guy--who owned maybe a front end loader, a bulldozer, and a pair of overalls. They'd trot one of these pathetic bastards out and he'd say:

"If'n I could grade away a few feet o' that thar hill I could git at that dab o' coal in thar and feed mah fambly."

Then everyone watching would feel really sorry for the hayseed workin' hard to feed his chirren.

Occasionally they'd have maybe a five-second sound bit of an ecologist warning that big operators would take those changes and tear down entire mountain ranges to get at the coal. After which the reporter would roll his eyes, or they'd have a coal company mouthpiece exclaiming how that would NEVER happen.

Well, it did happen.

People should be shot. Especially the bought and paid for "journalists" who supplied the lying propaganda.

SURFACE MINING AND CONTROL RECLAMATION ACT OF 1977. (The billionaires were drooling and Jimmy Carter signed it into law.)

People should be strung up and hanged by the neck for these kinds of ecological crimes. One of the most horrible things about all this is the language energy corporations use to describe the operations. In their terminology, mountains are called "overburden".

The End is Near!

I hate to sound like one of those old religious fanatics that the media used to parody back in the 50s and 60s. But the end really is near.

Humans have been rending the ecosystems that birthed us for a long time. Our presence here wasn't a problem for Mother Earth until we developed technology. And it wasn't terribly complicated technology that started our rapacious destruction. Something as simple as stone spearheads and fire and organized hunting led to the first mass extinctions at our hands. You can track megafauna destruction across all of the continents (except for Africa) by following the spread of Homo sapiens sapiens as we moved into new territories outside of our native continent (the aforementioned Africa).

The removal of major species is bad enough, but since the 1800s we've been tearing at the actual fabric of the planet and the situation has reached a point where the systems just can't take any more abuse. We're now eating the crust of the planet and vomiting hundreds of millions of years worth of sequestered carbon into the atmosphere. If you think we're going to just walk away from this crime with no penalty, you are mistaken.

These days it's not just a situation of us taking down the animal companions with whom we've shared the planet for the past 100,000 or so years. We continued to multiply and spread long after we'd exterminated the Mammoths, the Wooly rhinos, the Glyptodonts, the Megatherium, the saber-toothed cats, Diprotodon, Aepyornis, the Marsupial lion...I could draw up a list that would run into the thousands. The problem now is that we've passed a threshold and it's not just that we're killing everything that is wild and dependent upon untouched ecosystems. We've hit the point where the planet has changed and it's not just ceasing to support the animals--It's going to stop supporting us, too.

I keep reading about pipe dreams idiots have of going to Mars and terraforming it. Hell...we can't even care for the planet for which we evolved to live. What makes anyone think that we can take an already poisonous place completely inimical to life and exist there? The idea is insane, and part of the constant misdirection we have to suffer while Earth is ravaged and depleted for the benefit of such a few at the expense of so many.

I keep repeating this answer when people ask me (and a lot of people do ask me), why I spend so much time hiking and backpacking into wilderness areas. And it's because I want to see these places while they're still relatively intact. I don't mean to imply that I am going to live to see them all collapse around us, but they are going, and they are going quickly. If you haven't seen a truly wild place and the plants and animals that exist in them, then I suggest that you do so. Because they're coming apart at the seams. Everything that men do is destructive and if you wish to see it before it's too late...time is short.

Will your children or your grandchildren live to see a planet with no elephants, no tigers, no wolves, no butterflies, no bees, no redwood trees? Probably. And what then?

Briefly: We were warned. And quite frankly there's nothing to be done about it, now. Of course I've known this for many years, and it's why I will continue to do my best to see what's left before it's all gone.

As for your grandchildren...they're screwed. Remember to thank one of our energy corporations. But what you really need to do is drag those board members and executives out of their homes and hang them from the nearest power line.

The end isn't "near". It's already here.

Going...going...

The boundaries of parks and wilderness give a false sense of silence

So that the constant whine of the saw can continue unabated.

Closing in like a tightening noose.

Until everything that was ever worth saving is dead and gone.

Our National Parks...our wilderness areas....temporary holdings for the timber companies and mining corporations and land barons who will eventually rape them all.

 

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.

Conservation

For years, one thing about conservation efforts that has bothered me is the ephemeral nature of artificial borders and the bedrock upon which such efforts are constructed. Governments change and entire nations can (and do) dissolve. What is the fate of "protected" lands when such things occur? I saw what happened when Rwanda degenerated into an orgy of mass murder--human refugees descended on local National Parks killing and consuming wildlife for food and fouling waterways, felling trees, burning grasslands. I've seen pro-corporate Republicans follow on the heels of regulation-minded Democrats, erasing environmental safeguards. So much for "parks" and "laws".

On the way to extinction.

Ideas about the overriding problems of modern human influence on the ecosystems have consumed me for years. Without having ever had a formal education I flounder around wondering about an answer to such a dilemma. Unarmed with the necessary scientific and philosophical discipline, these concerns dog me even into my sleep.

This morning I awoke from a very vivid dream with the following words foremost in my waking mind:

'The boundaries of parks and wilderness give a false sense of silence
So that the constant whine of the saw can continue unabated.'

I guess snippets of poetry or prose are the best I can do.

Motherfucking gun-humpers.

Snippet word cloud via Ed Frank.