More on Enviro-Hypocrite-Idiots

While talking about the absurdity of cutting down trees in order to feel a solar panel (see previous port), I started recalling a few other things that strike me as absurd in the enviro-mental group.

Now, don't get me wrong. I am not a slash-and-burn kind of guy, I do not advocate clear cutting, scorched earth, DDT, open pollution, or eating bald eagle eggs. I love the woods, and fishing, and the outdoors. I've cut down a few dead trees, and I've planted a bunch.

What I'm ranting about is the illogic of certain environmentalists -- the breakdown in their cognitive thinking. Let me provide a few examples by way of illustration.

Twenty or thirty some years ago, I was on a really great backpacking expedition in Colorado. We went to Durango, and climbed aboard the Silverton train. This old narrow-gauge coal-burning train takes you up the Animas River valley, into the heart of the Rocky Mountains, all the way to Silverton, which is a resurrected silver-mining town, turned tourist trap. Anyways, about halfway between Durango and Silverton is a place called Elk Park. Nothing there but a meadow, a creek, a trailhead, and **awesome** views of the Rockies. That's where we got off.

After hiking from Elk Park for a week, we made it to the Continental Divide, at about 13,000 feet. Snow piled up 50 foot deep, in June. Awesome. Then we hiked back.

We had to wait for a day back at Elk Park, for the train to come back. Of course, we had campfires -- it was chilly, and we were Boy Scouts, so we had campfires and cook fires. Here comes the train, so we hastened to get our stuff together, put out our fires, and remove evidence our fire had ever been there (it's called "leave no trace", we take that seriously). We had one small fire left, about to put it out, when here come a group of hippies getting off the train. They had backpacks, too, so they must be kindred spirits. As a nice gesture, I asked the Head Hippie if they would like to inherit our small campfire. The dude snarled at me, saying, "No! We don't believe in spoiling the natural world with smoke and pollution like that!". Ooo-kay, fine, no problem. Put the fire out, spread the ashes, all is well, get on then, tell the hippies hasta la vista.

As the train pulled out, the same train the hippies just climbed down from, it chugged and steamed and poofed, sending clouds of coal smoke billowing into the air, and putting tons of coal ash and cinder up that gently settled to the ground. It occurred to me then, "what was that dude smoking"? He was all bumming out on a small campfire, and preaching about not spoiling the natural world, when he and his commune just took a 40-mile trip in a smoke-spewing polluting fire-breathing fossil-fuel burning iron horse, which travels on iron tracks carved into the pristine rocks, leaving a scar on the land and soot wherever it goes!

That struck me then, back in the late seventies, as the thought process of a nutjob. And so it was.

Today, you can see the spirit children of this nutjob. They are the ones who drive their huge diesel-powered boats out to the oil rigs in the Gulf, to protest the pumping of oil in American waters. They'll burn 2000 gallons of diesel, doing 180's around the rig, waving their signs. Then they'll chug back to port, and climb into their personal cars, each of which burn gas, and go home, and cut the lights on and crank the heater up.

The amazing thing is, they don't even see how stupidly hypocritical they are. Now how hypocritically stupid.