Have you ever noticed how a subject that catches your attention suddenly seems to be everywhere? Once you see one of something it seems that every rock you turn over has another specimen. Today I found a hybrid of two of the beasties I've been seeing everywhere for some time.

One of the beasts is the convert, like the American ex-communists from the Bernard DeVoto essay referenced in an update to Actively Stupid. The landscape seems littered with shrill evangelists of various stripes who have been born again... and again and again as they crash and burn in one frenetic but ill-conceived enthusiasm after another.

The other beast is the nativist, those who see humans as unusual animals that are necessary parts of ecologies rather than alien invaders. Wes Jackson in his book Becoming Native to This Place is an example but one I have quoted repeatedly is Wendell Berry's mudge about land use from Private Property and the Common Wealth, repeated here again.

The answer is obvious: you cannot get good care in the use of the land by demanding it from public officials. That you have the legal right to demand it does not at all improve the case. If one out of every two of us should become a public official, we would be no nearer to good land stewardship than we are now. The idea that a displaced people might take appropriate care of places is merely absurd: there is no sense in it and no hope. Our present ideas of conservation and of public stewardship are not enough. Duty is not enough. Sentiment is not enough. No mere law, divine or human, could conceivably be enough to protect the land while we are using it.

If we want the land to be cared for, then we must have people living on and from the land who are able and willing to care for it. If-as the idea of commonwealth clearly implies-landowners and land users are accountable to their fellow citizens for their work, their products, and their stewardship, then these landowners and land users must be granted an equitable membership in the economy.

The hybrid is Dan Daggett.

[ Former Earth First! activist Dan] Dagget has been causing people discomfort ever since the early 1970s when he fought strip mines in his native southeastern Ohio. Over the years, he has become something of a professional provocateur, tilting at sacred windmills right and left.

His Pulitzer Prize-nominated book "Beyond the Rangeland Conflict" (1995), for example, challenged the long-standing idea that environmentalists and ranchers in the American West held incompatible goals, earning him a great deal of teeth-gnashing from all sides of the grazing debate as a result.

The reaction to his latest book "The Gardeners of Eden: Rediscovering Our Importance To Nature" (2005) will likely be no different.

In it, Dagget argues that we have become aliens on our own planet. . .

we "get our food, fiber, and other products from nature via a system of extractive technologies more characteristic of aliens than of a mutually interdependent community of natives." . .

more and more of us live in cities, surrounded by what Dagget calls an "exploitosphere" where we extract everything from food to recreation.

"We have created ever larger preserves and protected areas, and removed ourselves and our impacts from them. Acting as if we're trying to fool nature into thinking that we're not here, we have behaved as aliens would. We treat this land outside our exploitosphere as if it were a combination art exhibit, zoo, cathedral, and adventure park. There we limit ourselves to roles as sightseers, worshippers, caretakers, and joy riders."

A former Earth First! activist who finally grokked that ranchers were pretty good environmentalists rather than devil spawned rural demons with their "slow elk" familiars, who now sees the idea of depeopled nature preserves as an element of the urban "exploitosphere". The story of his conversion is interesting.

He believed in the mantra of the era, that human use was tantamount to abuse, including livestock grazing, which he assumed to be part of the "exploitosphere" as well.

To his surprise, however, he began to notice significant amounts of healthy land that were also being grazed by cattle under the care of environmentally concerned ranchers. While this challenged his environmental paradigm (it's hard to have your own windmills tilted at), what changed Dagget's mind for good was not just the ecological health he saw on well-managed ranches, but the dogmatism of the Leave-It-Alone philosophy of his fellow activists.

His epiphany happened one day during a meeting of a group called ‘6-6' (six of us, six of them) near Tucson, Ariz., when a rancher said to the group "Tell me what you'd like this place to look like, and I'll make that my goal and work toward it and that way we can be allies instead of adversaries."

"There's only one thing you can do to make this place better," an environmental activist responded. "You can leave. Because if you stay, no matter what you do to the land, no matter how good you make it look, it will be unnatural and therefore bad. And if you leave, whatever happens to this place, even if it becomes as bare as a parking lot, it will be natural and therefore good."

This was the critical "ah-ha" moment for Dagget. . .

The absurdity became painful to Dagget as he began to study places where "no use" (read: no ecological disturbance) intersected with declining land health, such as the famous Drake Exclosure, in central Arizona, which had been excluded from livestock use for forty years. The land inside the fence had become a biological wasteland – a condition that was unacceptable to the now-awakened environmentalist. Dagget knew something was very wrong with this picture.

The rest of that article is fun to read too, Dagget is interesting and I may even buy his books. It may also be worth mentioning a couple of other specimens of converts encountered recently though they haven't gone native. One is this Spiked! article about UK conservative green aristocrats.

it should come as no surprise that conservationists are at heart conservatives. Despite shifting over to the anti-capitalist ground in recent years, the long-term meaning of conservationism has always been a hostility to change. . .

Much of the movement was 'reds, pretending to be greens, pretending to be reds', one Trotskyist ruefully admitted to me.

Contemporary green activists have complex attitudes to the movement against capitalism represented by the old left. The rebranding of the anti-globalisation movement as an anti-capitalist movement means taking on some of the rhetorical force of the socialist slogans. Tony Juniper, executive director of Friends of the Earth, explains the evolution in their thinking:

'For the past 10 years we've been locating ourselves more in the bigger economic debate and less in the "save the whales" type debate. Talking about rainforests led us into talking about Third World debt. Talking about climate change led us to talk about transnational corporations. The more you talk about these things, the more you realise the subject isn't the environment any more, it's the economy and the pressures on countries to do things that undercut any efforts they make to deal with environmental issues.' (5)

But just as the anti-globalisation movement reached its apex, it disintegrated. An anti-capitalist demonstration planned for the weekend after 11 September 2001 was cancelled. The left moved on from anti-globalisation to campaigning against the war in Iraq. Recent anti-debt protests in July 2005 were organised at a discrete distance by UK chancellor Gordon Brown and prime minister Tony Blair, working through their 'youth' frontmen Bono and Bob Geldof. But despite the hype, the Edinburgh protests were a damp squib.

The conservationist ethos has not exhausted itself; far from it. The value of moderation and parsimony are universally upheld - ideally, anyway, since they generally coincide with increased consumerism. But the anti-capitalist strand of environmentalism is giving way to its underlying conservative ethos, and finding a home in the Conservative Party.

Are they neo-Luddites, culture warriors, socialists or what? Heartfield, the author, may be right that they are merely grumps who oppose change of any sort without considering the merits. Perhaps their flip-flopping conceals a basic consistency though not one with intellectual content.

The last of the conversos I encountered this morning is the common Dr. Patrick Moore. Sightings of this species are not at all unusual but it seems that there is now a blog too, though the posts are from Jerremy Twig and are reprints of old Moore articles and essays.

I am often asked why I broke ranks with Greenpeace after fifteen years as a founder and full-time environmental activist. . .

Beginning in the mid-1980s, the environmental movement made a sharp turn to the political left and began adopting extreme agendas that abandoned science and logic in favor of emotion and sensationalism. I became aware of the emerging concept of sustainable development—the idea that environmental, social, and economic priorities could be balanced. I became a convert to the idea that win-win solutions could be found by bringing all interests together around the same table. I made the move from confrontation to consensus.

While there is some truth to Moore's claims I think the problems began a couple of decades earlier, which finally brings this post back around to the DeVoto essay. While we can feel some compassion for the personal disruption these serial converts have experienced, and find some useful ideas in their current writings, we really do have to question the quality of their intelligence. Though intelligent compared perhaps to the norm, they weren't intelligent enough to avoid mistaken adventures in eschatology and millennial faith. They didn't draw reasonable conclusions from evidence, indeed they often ignored vast amounts of evidence or were unaware that there was real evidence. And that should give us pause when reading their new works. They may now have some bit of wisdom from their experiences, but bear in mind that they weren't bright enough to avoid learning these lessons the hard way while doing harm to society.

Worse, they are still activists, still evangelists but with different faiths than before. They are still on the dark side seeking to persuade rather than reasoning in good faith from good evidence as part of the social mind deliberating its issues. Whatever they say that we may find agreeable, or not, needs to be skeptically examined since we know that they reason poorly, and have ethical problems that enable them to conceal evidence to be persuasive. Anyone can be mistaken, but these are known intellectual criminals who lie to the infidel while seeking victory, and feel no shame unless and until they have another lapse of faith and undergo another conversion.

I still may buy Dagget's book though. Blurb:

Dan Dagget's "Gardeners of Eden" has been called the most important conservation manifesto since Aldo Leopold's "Land Ethic."

Quote:

"The Leave-It-Alone assumption has brought us to the absurdity that the actual condition of a piece of land is irrelevant to determining if it is healthy or not." – Dan Dagget, Author, "Gardeners of Eden"