The BBC wishes to warn us that "Nature Loss" (whatever the hell that is) may hurt the world's poorest folks; those people struggling along in various corners of the planet where they have to pipe in the daylight and which are so far removed from current events that by the time news reaches them, it's already gone bad and turned into history. There are two big problems with this hand-wringing paean to pity, however...
First, who do you think is doing most of the nature destroying? I'll give you a hint: Percy T. Moneybags hasn't grabbed a chainsaw and slash cut the old-growth maples out of the back yard of his summer cottage in the Hamptons so he could grow more yams. If it comes to a choice between more room for the village pigs or placating Gaia worshippers, I'm pretty sure I know which direction a New Guinea hill dweller's tree is going to fall.
The second is that, while the "pity Gaia and her suffering poor" angle plays well to the Benetton crowd, it's hard to sell the glories of nature to a guy who spends all day up to his knees in the stuff while staring at the south end of a northbound water buffalo. Mr. Qixlia!a doesn't care about "Nature Loss". Hell, he has to beat nature back with a rake every morning to get from his hut to his outhouse. Losing nature is what he'd do for a living, if he could ever get enough time off from subsistence farming to take up doing something for a living.
It's times like this that it would be nice if I could have three wishes. The first wish would be to give every poor schlub in the worst corner of the planet internet access for one day. The second wish would be to give them all perfect reading comprehension of English. The third wish would be to give each and every sweaty, toiling subsistence farmer on the planet that has just read that patronizing piece of head-patting twaddle a plane ticket to London and the reporter's home address. I suspect they might like to talk with him about "Nature Loss".
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The entire history of man has been the infliction of "nature loss" and its replacement by human agriculture and housing.
But not just man- the buffalo would replace all the trees with grass if they could. And then replace the grass with mud and buffalo crap.
When Bambi crops grass, isn't there a little nature loss with each delicate mouthful? There certainly is plenty of nature destroyed when ten thousand wildebeest plow across the savanna, or when ten million locusts get hungry.
It's not as dramatic, but how much "nature loss" do predators, blights, and plant parasites inflict, one destruction at a time?
Is it "nature loss" when a flood bulldozes a forest, or a volcano paves one?
No- only man destroys nature by growing, eating, and excreting plants and animals.
To be fair, most of the still tribal folks are quite familiar with European civilization. Many have decided to partake (and quite honestly, not done very well), others have stuck with their traditional ways. Projecting European civilization on them and expecting they'll thrive (or at the very least not be bottom feeders) isn't much better than the Noble Savage bullshit the press and the dirt worshipers like to heap their way...and hooking them up to the internet might very well do nothing but confirm their views on European civilization. Believe it or not, there are those that look upon us, and our society, with absolute horror (what with family and community being so important to many of them, to say nothing of morals that don't change as convenience dictates). Now if you're talkin' 'bout Clem still plowin' with a mule in the Ozarks...
And would someone explain to me how there can be any 'Nature Loss' if we're all nothing but hopped-up monkeys? Is it 'Nature Loss' when elephants level forests? I don't get this vacillation between the dehumanizing "we're nothing but animals" and the Enlightened Bright Greenie "we're nature's custodian", which is oddly straight from the Bible. If we're animals then cities are, by extension, also part of nature as they're nothing but habitat constructed of redirected and refined 'nature' that we use as we see fit, like an orangutan stripping some vegetation for a shelter. Isn't that what's really at the core of evolution? Advance and thrive or wither and die. It sounds all good and huggy to pull the "we're the most advanced, we have a duty" card, but the problem is that at the moment we really aren't as advanced as we'd like to think we are and conservation is damned expensive. I don't think most people even remotely realize what the opportunity cost is with 'conservation' and how much of that cost kicks them straight in the checking account. Easier to blame Bush and the Rags though, I reckon.
You are superb, Tam.
The enviro-weenies go even farther than wringing their hands, when a chance comes along for some of those poor to raise their standard of living and do without outhouses, the intelligencia comes all over against the changes.
Take a look at Mine Your Own Business
And don't expect the ivory-tower or London newsroom set to ever do anything like give up their lifestyle.
That would be like asking Al Gore to give up private jets.
Fourth wish: Give our mud-farmer Banya Bannerjee a *real* vote in OUR upcoming election(s), so that the near-permanent stasis inflicted on him by traditionalzed and localized Euro-style government can be mobilized from leathargy into some action, and he can stop with the foot-pump irrigation that keeps him from tending his rice plantings.
His exposure to Euro-Government has been filtered by a home-grown layer of institutionalized sloth, greed and traditional indolence that the local electricity only works part-time because diesel resources keep being "diverted" along "traditional routes" (following ancient laws of graft and corruption) - so that the water only pumps quarter-time and his field only gets water one eighth time...
this seems apropos:
http://wondermark.com/d/404.html
Art
Rather than sending the subsistence farmers to London, I think we may be much better served by having them each instantly trade places with all of the spoiled intelligentsia that insist on the idea that their comfort and the natives pain is somehow "natural" and necessary.
Let the soft handed twits live by the efforts of their toils, it will be good for their karma...
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