As an anthropologist, I distinguish between (mostly) sustainable subsistence activities on a small scale and the fly-in hunting you describe. I take that to be professional hunters who can afford the bush pilots and gear and all else.
I also distinguish between primary subsistence hunting and gathering, on one hand, and oil drilling, on the other. For me, there isn't really much of a slippery slope here. Each practice needs to analyzed independently from the other because they are not comparable in their societal organization, scale of needs, and effects. That's why I went to lengths to argue the point about religion: religion in service of state politics and multinational corporations is highly problematic. The Hindu calendars and temples in Bali have created a stable ecosystem, albeit one that is not like Bali's ecosystem of 1500 years ago. (It also emerged over several centuries, more time than our dependence on oil.)
After reading "The Wild Trees" by Preston, I better appreciated the Coast Redwood ecosystems. They need preservation. For us here in Iowa, "preservation" means reestablishing topsoil that has thinned by 50% in the last hundred years, cleaning up the waterways/groundwater/aquifers, and so on. At the same time, we have to learn ways of treading much more lightly on the same ecosystems.
I'd like to think that we could accomplish what we need to with a world population around 7 billion (but not 9 or 12), about where it is now, but I am also very familiar with biological instances of species die-off. And the social examples from Diamond's book are also telling. Easter Island's competitive lineages apparently would not stop cutting trees even when the damage was clear. Our own dependencies may be similar in that they are runaway systems with very few chances of control.
Politically the future appears to me to hold either rampant social regulation to stave off disaster or a bloody, disaster-filled flight from the coasts and droughts and all else. Probably some of each. The survives may be the hardcore crust punk kids who go to their survival teach-ins and learn how to start fire with a drill and fireboard. I do policy work in air quality because I have some tiny fragment of hope that it might make a difference somehow.
Ever read Rebecca Solnit's book, "Hope in the Darkness"?
Lee Searles
________________________________
From: Iowa Discussion, Alerts and Announcements on behalf of Phyllis Mains
Sent: Fri 7/22/2011 4:51 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Sierra Club Alert-Glacier Bay
Wally's remarks on Iowa's habitat are excellent for already developed Iowa, but the issues is allowing human exploitation of already protected National Parks. But according to your argument of human need at the moment and population as a justification to allowing human hunting or gathering in permanently protected wilderness areas opens the door to where will we stop with that. There is already intense pressure for uranium mining affecting the Grand Canyon and drilling right next to sensitive arches in Arches National Park. We've heard enough from oil companies claiming they can drill using "sustainable practices". The issue is keeping hard fought for permanent protection for National Parks and other protected places. Having experience on what it took to protect the roadless Wild Sky Wilderness in WA State that would protect old growth along salmon streams and not allow roads was an education in how hard people try to stop protection so they can exploit. We simply do not agree on religion nor the need to keep hunting activities out of National Parks. Hunting, trapping and fishing is allowed in every National Wildlife Refuge and we see damage from local Alaska planes landing in the Arctic Refuge for hunting. I expect Sierra Club to continue to keep protected land free from human development of any kind and that's why I'm an activist member working on wilderness issues. It's OK to disagree and this discussion raised some points to consider. Thank you. Phyllis
See my reply to Wally, which addresses some of your points. As far as religion having no place in environmental concerns, I take strong issue with that. I suggest that you read Stephen Lansing's work on the millennium-old rice irrigation system on the island of Bali, which is managed mostly through a well-established Hindu temple system. The entire, elaborate, religiously managed system nearly collapsed in the 1980s when scientific principles (the Green Revolution) were introduced (hybrid rice, mechanized ag, pesticides) to try to increase production for an export economy. Fortunately Lansing and others saw what was happening and mitigated a lot of the damage.
There are any of a number of studies by my colleagues that show how local communities, informed strongly by religious values, have engaged in sustainable practices. Some of the studies come from the Amazon basin. Walter Goldschmidt did such a study in California in the 1940s, called "As You Sow." One town was fairly cohesive and locally oriented, while the other was influenced by the "religion" of the dollar. Granted that most of the studies I have in mind are not "world" religions - Christianity, Islam, and others that have fueled colonial doctrines.
I also don't want to paint "native peoples" as some kind of "original environmentalists." Humans in almost all places and in almost all times, at least since the invention of the city-state, have overused their ecosystems: Maya, Zapotec, Aztec (Aztec society's collapse was speeded by the encounter with the Spanish), Easter Island, the Norse in Greenway.... Jared Diamond's book, "Collapse," is an interesting presentation of numerous well-studied examples.
I'm saying that Sierra's response appears to make unsupported assumptions. You offer some of the additional information that I would require before signing onto an action alert like the one where this all started. No fan of world religions myself, I also can present counter-evidence that religious values can inform environmentally friendly practices. This really isn't a debate about "religion" as such, and if religion enters at all, it's because certain religious tenets and practices encourage environmental destruction. But not all.
Leland Searles
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