Cafeoutdoors.com: Hellbender

and since the jackass never got the message before, here's an oldy but goody

"The Death of Neighborliness
October 2nd, 2007

We are bombarded every day with anti-humanity propaganda, in newspapers, TV, our schools, books, magazines, movies, you name it. The theme that Man Is Bad runs 24/7 in bulk.

We have screwed up Nature, the land, the water, and even the climate. People have wrecked the planet. There are too many people. We need to reduce our population, reduce the human footprint, or else the whole planetary ecosystem will collapse and we?ll all die, and everything will go extinct, except for rats and cockroaches, of course.

That last part makes it scientific. The Man Is Bad theme is big in Science. The Consensus of Scientists is that Man Is A Mistake. School teachers agree. Most school teachers deal with a crowd of little people every day. It?s obvious that there are too many of them. Everybody agrees, with a few exceptions, like the Pope, (what a maroon!).

The US Forest Service, the Nature Conservancy, the Wilderness Society, and many politicians, pundits, and plain folks are convinced that our national forest fire crisis is the fault of the neighbors, the human beings that reside on rural land within 30 miles of the Federal Estate. The reason our fire suppression costs are so large, so they say, is that the Feds are spending all the money protecting the neighbors.

Their solution? Why, ban all homes within 30 miles of USFS or BLM land. No homes, nothing to protect, no need for fire suppression, big cost savings.

The Feds have already abandoned our public lands to ?natural? catastrophic megafires. They can?t stop firestorms at the National Forest borders. Now, to ?fix? the problem, they wish to burn out the neighbors, too.

If No Touch, Let It Burn, Watch It Rot is a wonderful ecosystemic, heath-giving, natural way to manage public forests and ranges, then it must be good for private land as well, and maybe even more so.

Those are their stated excuses, anyway. As ridiculous and illogical as they are, the excuses mask the deeper motivation. The Environmental Movement and their government lackeys wish to drive Humanity off the land. Their unneighborliness is the core to their apple.

Humanity, however, is of the land. People have always lived on the land, since we evolved 150,000 years ago, or since Adam and Eve whenever, it doesn?t matter. People have always lived in largely un-built environments.

Only very recently have a large number of humans lived in synthetic environments of concrete, steel, asphalt, and glass, with artificial lighting, air, water, and food. Jamming scads of humans into plastic fantastic artificial environments is a brand new experiment.

The new social experiment strives for a dystopic vision of a de-humanized planet, except for dense artificial bubbles filled with sardine people, pock-marked here and there on the landscape, while Mother Nature operates with abandonment outside the walls of the cities.

In many ways that experiment is failing, and not the least of which is the Death of Neighborliness. Urbanites are adamant in their self-delusions and wish to impose their plastic abstractions on the rest of the planet. That means de-humanizing as much of the land as they can.

It also means a profound disregard for their fellow human beings. De-humanization, or pan-ethnic cleansing of the landscape, is the ultimate in unneighborliness.

In Oregon we are engaged in yet another land use planning battle, Measure 49 (yet another property rights grab). The war has been going on here for 30 years or more. Oregon ?leads? the Nation in land use planning. The issue is complex, but if you scratch away the crust, inside you will find the struggle is between people who wish to live on the land, and those who wish to take that right away from them.

To live on the land, to be resident in a non-urban setting, is the natural, historical state of the human species. We are highly evolved as a species, no doubt, and have developed the means to be excellent land stewards. Yes we have. Humanity has not wrecked the planet. We know how to be good stewards, and have been good stewards in many places.

Resident stewardship in a rural setting means to care for one?s land, but also to be a part of a larger landscape which also requires care, protection, and maintenance.

Resident stewardship is good for the land, good for the individual, good for society, and good for our species.

Property rights are human rights. Tenure (title) and tenancy (living on your land) are natural human rights. Humans are territorial by instinct. We need our space. We need to have exclusive control over our home territories: where we sleep at night, where we keep our stuff, where we gather and hunt our food, where we take shelter from the storm. Those are deep animal instincts that we cannot violate without social discord, strife, and upheaval.

Driving your neighbors from their homes, burning them out, or imposing insufferable regulations upon them, are not the right ways to treat your neighbor. A wise man once said that best course of action, for various reasons, would be to Love Thy Neighbor. Cleansing rural America of humanity is not a loving action. It is a hate-filled action, motivated by anti-humanity fear and loathing.

Our philosophically bankrupt Post Modern Age has lost the knack of neighborliness. We still have proximity; we didn?t lose that. Whatever is proximate to USFS land is in the Whooie, the Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) and therefore subject to draconian anti-home laws and megafires.

We get it that close to the Feds means close to disaster. We understand nearness or proximity to a huge hazard.

What we don?t get anymore is neighborliness. The Big Landowners (in particular) don?t know how to Love Thy Neighbor. It?s easier for the USFS and the Environmental Movement to hate the individuals who reside in proximity. It?s cheaper to burn out the residents than to put out the fires before they cross the line. It?s easier to steal the neighbors? human rights rights to tenure and tenancy. That fits their program of takeover.

The current trend of unneighborliness is rampant, epidemic, irrupting everywhere, globally. It is sickening, evil, and destructive. I have called it a war, and it is, because it is a takeover of territory, by force, by an organized militia. But it is also symptomatic of a decline in our very humanity, our quality of being humane.

De-humanizing the landscape does not solve the problem; it is the problem."

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