Ecological Ethics

If you know better, you should do better, right? Right???

The Three Hundred Year War started in a modest way, because only axe and gunpowder were available. The wilderness was leveled in part to obtain fields for planting and to build towns. It was also leveled to obtain the great riches that came from the conversion of the eastern hemlock and great white pine into dollars. A messianic zeal accompanied this leveling, for it was part of our heritage to consider the wilderness as dangerous, if not evil, as a place filled with great hazards, which must, therefore, be laid low. That zeal extended from Plymouth Bay clear across the nation. It operates today as a force that confronts conservationists and ecologists, making them often seem un-American because they are against “progress.”

-Associate Justice of the SCOTUS, William O. Douglas, The Three Hundred Year War, 1972

Asclepias tuberosa in the Big Thicket National Preserve

At what point do we start calling out these people who want to destroy lands, public or otherwise, as Bad People?

I’m struggling y’all.

How can we take seriously people like Tiger Woods and Jack Nicklaus and laud them for their golf abilities when they were willing to support destroying a beloved Florida state park and endangered habitat to build golf courses? What kind of narcissism are you enveloped in to consider being involved in a project like this? Are they Bad People?

On the other hand, we had a developer in Texas that was so willing to throw down everything he had to pillage another beloved state park, to even pretend to tout his environmental sensitivity for the project all the while to build “3rd and 4th homes” alongside a golf course, and did so with a straight, though often belligerent, face. How can he even be serious? Is he a Bad Person?

In California last week, the city of Jarupa Valley agreed to approve a plan that would allow development nearby the 13,000 year old Jarupa Oak, a clonal specimen of Quercus palmeri. The plan by the developer will be 1700 homes, a school, and light industrial development. Supposed mitigation measures will have 450’ and 550’ buffers around this rare and ancient tree, though conservationists argued fervently this wasn’t enough and will likely kill the tree. Are the city council members who voted for the development Bad People? The developer?

I’d argue yes for all of these people. Their morals and values are so broken by greed that they lack clarity to consider anything else beyond reaping monetary rewards, and some, notoriety beyond death. Gopher tortoises, scrub jays, or rare prairies and wetlands are certainly not on their minds. Or to the feat of longevity and biological history.

Me, Me, Me.

Money, Money, Money.

A veritable group of Scrooge McDuck’s swimming in their vats of gold coins.

So, what are we to do? We’re at the mercy of the culture we live in, one sucking dry the lifeblood of our natural world at every turn. At the heart of it we’re all consumers, pawns to capitalism.

Does that make the rest of us Bad People, too, when we’re forced to work for companies doing the clearing work for these developments because we live in a small town and the only good paying work is for a contractor? The only way to put food on the table and live a secure life is to work for the people wanting to destroy nature?

We put gas in our cars and drive across town, the state, the country, to see family, to travel, to work. Sometimes we get on planes for these things, too. How do we, the general population, fit into this narrative? Are these things even equal to the willing destruction of places that have significant ecological value? Who defines what is significant?

When does someone’s hobby/sport become a priority for consideration over conservation? I’ll be honest, sometimes I think about my own hobbies and consider the actual value and repercussions from them. Gardening requires inputs into the system to keep plants nourished and depending on the type of gardening you do you may be adding chemicals created by one of the big polluting companies, or you may be using materials like phosphates or even organic materials that were mined—effectively destroying habitat elsewhere to create your own little oasis at home. Art, writing, reading: all require paper to be created from tree plantations or clear cut, virgin timber lands to produce something to paint or print books on. Let’s not even talk about the same chemical issues required for the paints.

One could argue the town of Fairfield, Texas needed a jolt to the economy and this grand plan by the developer to ruin a state park in the name of commerce was a worthy project. And yet, there were/are alternatives. This wasn’t a benevolent move to provide affordable housing to a community in need. Or even to provide stable, long-term income for the local work force. It’s an insular project. Someone’s hobby.

Certainly trying to argue against someone building homes and a school and industrial development that will provide jobs for the local economy doesn’t look good on its face—are you really trying to tell people they can’t get an education and have a roof over their head? But, in reality we’re telling an organism that has lived 13,000 years that it is worthless, that we’re unwilling to hold space for something beyond ourselves and find an alternative that would be able to sustain the local human needs while also protecting something ancient, something that goes beyond our capacity to understand time.

I had to have some blood drawn yesterday and while the phlebotomist was getting my arm prepared she noticed the shirt I was wearing, a light blue shirt that says Protect the Nature of Texas and has a white outlined Texas horned lizard on it, aka: a horny toad. It’s from the Texas Land Conservancy and a shirt that frequents my rotation. I talked to her about the horned lizards and how their populations have suffered from red imported fire ants and development. Then somehow she switched to talking about snakes and how she had seen a lot of copperheads on her property this year and wished they would go away and jokingly said that it’s too bad there couldn’t be less snakes and more horny toads. I cringed internally because this is just a common thread with almost anyone: snakes are bad and they must be killed. I didn’t launch into a tirade but wanted to, though I did say that snakes had their place and ate rodents and kind of let it drift off from there because we were near the end of the blood draw.

This scenario and others is one I think about often. How we fail kids from the beginning and their ecological understanding is almost nil. They grow up to continue to perpetuate myths about nature they learned from parents or grandparents or to become people who only think of the monetary value they can extract from it. To think their pet projects are more important than gopher tortoises, public recreation, or 13,000 year old oak trees.

All of this is a Choice. You choose to think it is a good idea to destroy conservation lands, to threaten ancient trees. You choose to interact with your landscape around you in the manner that you do. And if you are informed and know the consequences and get upset when people are rightly angry with you? Come on. You had the choice to be a better human and didn’t take it. That’s on you.

But then again, maybe you have no ecological morals and ethics, and so that just makes you a Bad Person.

Misti writes regularly at Oceanic Wilderness and In the Weeds. She hosts one podcast, Orange Blaze: A Florida Trail Podcast, and recently retired The Garden Path Podcast.