Strangechord

I’m have so much schoolwork to do in the next three weeks, it makes my head spin. I need to vent and figure I’d do so here through some links that have outraged me in the past few days:

• Vrooming into Yellowstone (login: strangechord; password: readnyt) - There have been many op-eds by Kristof that I agree with; this is not one of them. He sides with the Bush administration here as far as letting snowmobiles tear all over Yellowstone National Park by using the oldest, most popular argument humans have ever constructed in order to exploit the world around them:

  Yet in the battle over snowmobiling in Yellowstone, it’s Mr. Bush who is right. And, to me at least, the dispute raises a larger philosophical question: should we be trying to save nature for its own sake or for human enjoyment? Forgive my anthropocentrism, but I think humans trump the bison and moose.
  
  […]
  
  The philosophical question is the purpose of conservation: Do we preserve nature for its sake, or ours? My bias is to put our interests on top. Thus I’m willing to encroach on wilderness to give Americans more of a chance to get into the wild.

  Repeat after me - WE ARE NATURE. By Kristof’s reasoning human beings are something separate from nature. This separation and thus objectification of “nature” is the very thinking that has spurred humans for thousands of years to plunge the biosphere into the deep doodoo it’s in. If we hadn’t been so willing throughout history to “encroach on wilderness” then we would have more freakin’ chances to enjoy the wild! Ugh, I so passionately disagree that the world around us is here purely for human enjoyment.

• Via Jack Bog: In the New Economics: Fast-Food Factories? (login: strangechord; password: readnyt) - Apparently, the new Economic Report of the President is questioning whether fast food jobs can begin to be counted in the manufacturing rather than the service sector. Wtf! “The White House drew a box around the section so it would stand out among the 417 pages of statistics.”

  David Huether, chief economist for the National Association of Manufacturers, said he had heard that some economists wanted to count hamburger flipping as manufacturing, which he noted would produce statistics showing more jobs in what has been a declining sector of the economy.

  Aha! That explains it then. Let’s just redefine the numbers rather than actually do something to improve the numbers!

• Nice to know the Healthy Forests Initiative is being used to justify old growth timber sales at the Grand Canyon. But are we really that surprised? This is taken from the Initiative’s press release at the White House’s site:

  On December 3, 2003, President Bush signed into law the Healthy Forests Restoration Act of 2003 to reduce the threat of destructive wildfires while upholding environmental standards and encouraging early public input during review and planning processes.

  Here’s from the article about the timber sale:

  Under the guise of increasing forest health and decreasing fire risk, the Forest Service proposal would permit the logging of at least 8 million board feet of timber –enough to fill 1,800 logging trucks– 48 miles from the nearest community, including tens of thousands of large, fire-resistant trees. The plan also includes extensive logging within popular camping and recreation sites overlooking Grand Canyon National Park

  […]
  
  “This timber sale shows the direction in which the Bush administration is taking America’s National Forests,” said Sharon Galbreath with the Sierra Club’s Grand Canyon Chapter. “There is a better way. The Bush administration should be funding projects that protect communities at risk from wildfires, not logging old growth trees in a remote area of the backcountry near the rim of the Grand Canyon.“

  Oh, but I guess protected communities don’t pour money into campaign coffers quite like timber companies do.