I'm positively anti-human

precept:

"but with those caveats I admit that I read him daily because he seems to me--more even than your lib columnists at WaPo and the Times--to represent the unthinking, consensus imperialism of the fatty center of American politics: that sea of unexamined assumptions, exceptionalism, and bad history, tempered by a vaguely tolerant social semi-philosophy, dedicated to legacy entitlements, fond of public education, with poor taste in literature and an undue fondness for television, easily convinced by colorful graphs and charts, dismissive of the "anecdotal," enamored of gadgetry, giddily ecumenical, disturbed by George W. Bush, but unconcerned with his ancestors and antecedents."

Mr. Fundamental was at a work related conference recently on the new and improved stormwater BMP manual for the great Commonwealth he resides in.  did you know that there are over 86,000 miles of stream in the great state or whatever of Pennsyltucky?  there are around 44,000 miles of interstate highway in the United States.  now of those 86,000 stream miles, 2,700 of them are considered "impacted" envirrunmentally: that means they're "fucked up."  and of those: 35% are effed due to AMD, 32% are effed due to agricultural practices, and 21% are impacted due to urbanized runoff.  the other percentages are due to your mom or something.  so that makes 567 miles of urbanized streams in good ole pee-ay.  and that makes approximately 0.6% of streams adversely affected by urbanization.  that's it.

the manual we are receiving is "not regulation," it is not statute, it is a "guidance document," or "executive statement."  oh holy one bequeath me with your knowledge and annoint me with your holy document.  it is a narrative, rather than a numeric, approach to controlling water pollution.  the goal, the mission, is to mimic the predeveloped, "natural" condition, because when we urbanize, we fail to let the stormwater that once infiltrated to subterraineous baseflow return and instead flush it straight into the stream, where it goes quickly and with some dirt and oil and shit to the ocean. 

we need to come to some new conclusions about living on this planet and our interaction and place in or on it.  envirrunmentalism is like christianity to me: a nice idea, but man the precepts and underlying philosophical assumptions and justifications smell like something recently exhumed; unexamined and way beyond rescusitation.  the underlying breathe beneath the "conference" was of course "this is the new manual with which we will beat you, your budget, your client and the price of new homes about the head. so buck up fuckers.  because that's the way it is.  because how else are we going to get you to do what we want unless we spell it out so vaguely."  it's all "show them the worst case and take the best and least feasible" solution and apply it everywhere, whether appropriate or not.  and the joke is: haha, you the engineer get to bill more because of the new hoops we make you jump through.  winkwink.  what pals.  what relavant information do I get to take back to my office?  we'll be billing 8-16 more hours now thanks to this.  winkwink.  well, it's the cost of doing business.  winkwink.

I wonder what it is like living in a thoroughly propagated lie.  wait, I'm a fake mexican wrestler on a blog on the internet.

it is also not hard to see why, despite 0.6% of all impacted streams, the government strenuously goes after developers and the like: they're the ones with the money.  this is also why I am anti-gentrification: because the people moving in will eventually get fucked with the most taxes, etc. 

envirrunmentalism will never win when it values inanimate objects and barely sentient critters over what humans value most: money and themselves.  money being time and sweat and sacrifice, themselves being the all-dancing crap of the earth.  that "respect all-life" thing envirrunmentalists got going on?  remember lions, or e.coli, or perhaps even influeza?  sting rays?  the world is not harmonic:  it is a struggle for life as we wrestle with death.  the world, or my cat for that matter, does not care one bit whether I am here tomorrow or not, so long as some jackass opens a packet of food for him tomorrow after I'm gone.

I'm anti-human because envirrunmentalists have taken a weed and dressed it up like a rose:  the idea that we have an impact on the planet we live on.  they took Ayn Rand to heart, and instead of being inspired or rendered imaginative, they asked: ought we?  ought we?  ought we what?  that question is of no consequence.  we could all gather on one side of the planet, hold hands rocking back and forth and in perfect harmonic unision singing kumbayyahmylawd, and neither the rotation or tilt of this rock would skew a centimeter.  impact.  take your fucking impact and shove it up your silly fucking fearful ass. 

what a blight we are on this planet, what with our roads and our nuclear power plants and our fossil fuels and volatilized carbon atoms.  567 miles of impacted streams of a possible 86,000.  fuck you.  take a look at google earth man, there is a lot of good shit that we're not even appreciating.  why do you gotta focus on the negative, man?  what a downer you are.  I'm definitely not doing drugs with you.

so we need to take a look in the mirror, a look at our hands, a whiff of our shit and do some serious self-reflecting.  the going assumption envirrunmentally is we're bad bad things that need punishment and control. 

what does happen to a stream when we develop around it?  how do we live on this planet?  what is our purpose here?  what is development?  what is impact?  how is what we are doing bad, immoral or against nature?  how can we be in nature, part of an ecosystem and against them both at the same time?  how can you ignore the mud and shit on your shoes and point them out on mine?  whose fault is all of this: our way of living, our seeming and willful ignorance to it all?  how can we know so much yet so obviously be so oblivious as to what we cause and effect?   what is our true nature?   

I leave us right now with an excerpt from a great article by our spiritual leader:

The forward-thinking artist of the next century will make works too
complicated to be grasped in a visual or auditory act. The machine
will grow ever smaller and ever larger until we are hooked into huge
communication systems all the time through tiny devices on or in our
person. Institutions and governments will seek to control the Net and
us through processes of simplification, screening, and monitoring, but
will find that surveillance is impossible in the beautiful mess; the
whole concept of power will have to be radically reconceived as
communicative and pseudo-organic rather than ideological. The
classical machine will play for the twenty-first century the role that
nature played for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: it will be
the object of longing and nostalgia. We will wish for industrial
production in the way that Thoreau wished for oneness with nature. The
industrial worker will take on the iconographic status of the cowboy.
Paintings by Charles Sheeler will appear on posters in hotel rooms.
People will design useless pseudoclassical machines, or they will make
postclassical processors that look like classical machines.
Self-perpetuating and self-annihilating technologies will make art a
branch of horticulture. New and inconceivable hatreds will spring up
and yield beautiful things. Beauty will be viral: impossibly profuse
and self-replicating and arbitrary and infectious and lethal. And
finally, beauty will once and for all detach itself from pleasure, so
that there is no reason for anything to be beautiful or not: no goal,
no justification, only an inconceivably huge communication system
awash in an arbitrary syntax of electronic impulses imploding into a
beautiful death, as when you look at the remanufactured corpse in the
funeral home and all you can say is, "Doesn't he look natural?"

oh, well.

Comments

[Comandante Agi]

We’re in need of a paradigm shift, indeed.

Here’s a passage from William Cronon’s Nature's Metropolis that is quite apropos to your discussion. (It’s from the introduction – the book is a history of Chicago during the mid to late 1800s).

On the other hand, our nostalgia for the more “natural” world of an earlier time when we were not so powerful, when the human landscape did not seem so omnipresent, encourages us to seek refuge in pastoral or wilderness landscapes that seem as yet unscarred by human action. Convinced of our human omnipotence, we can imagine nature retreating to small islands—“preserves”—in the midst of a landscape which otherwise belongs to us. And therein lies our dilemma: however we may feel about the urban world which is the most visible symbol of our human power—whether we celebrate the city or revile it, whether we wish to “control” nature or “preserve” it—we unconsciously affirm our belief that we ourselves are unnatural. Nature is the place we are not.

[Monkey]

Hey Mr Fundamental,

If all those thousands of miles of streams are so pristine, what do you think about bellying up and taking a tall drink out of them?

Just wondering is all.

[Crusader AXE]

Actually, my long silent now energized and excellent brother meant "piss-stream..." We're defeatists, not idiots. Well, that may not be mutually exclusive.

[mr. fun]

oh oh teachable moment!...monkey (who probably would fling poo at me if we met) is on to something. heh. I got a friend in (surface) water treatment who is always hounding me about dirty runoff costing him and his clients more money. so really if you're going to tax for the water protection or whatever then that money should go to help actual people affected by it. but instead we get blanket taxation and people with too much time and information on their hands to know what to do with any of it trying to preserve wilderness or whatever their ideal world is. heck I wouldn't drink from a 'clean' stream anyway - there might be a dead animal upstream I'm not aware of oozing into it. clean is an illusion. you should talk to my microbial ecologist friend. you'd have to scrub yourself right off the planet to get rid of all the dirt and organisms on your person. as for fairness to all life on the planet: whatever, I've seen a coyote in NYC. and even my version of perfect still includes you, monkey. for whatever that is worth.

[mr. fun]

and thanks Agi - I think our planet is a lot more flexible and tolerant of us than we are of it (and ourselves).

aXe to the rescue!

[Scruggs]

Mr. Fun, you may be (mildly) pleased to learn that a serious reevaluation of many of the concerns you've raised is an ongoing practice in environmental circles. The best example I've seen so far is the No Hair Shirts effort. There are also some goodwill efforts to close gaps between people of apparently irreconcilable differences. Will any of it be widely adopted? No, of course not. The very worst solutions, such as the already failed carbon-trading corporate welfare scheme, and the punitive liberalism of personal carbon allowances will be put in place.