You know what the most frustrating thing about the vegans throwing a fit over my âHumans arenât Parasitesâ post is? I really wasnât trying to make a point about animal agriculture. Honestly, the example about subsistence hunting isnât the main point. That post was actually inspired by thoughts Iâve been having about the National Park system and environmentalist groups.
See, I LOVE the National Parks. I always have a pass. I got to multiple parks a year. I LOVE them, and always viewed them as this unambiguously GOOD thing. Like, the best thing America has done.Â
BUT, I just finished reading this book called âI am the Grand Canyonâ all about the native Havasupai people and their fight to gain back their rights to the lands above the canyon rim. Historically, they spent the summer months farming in the canyon, and then the winter months hunter-gathering up above the rim. When their reservation was made though, they lost basically all rights to the rim land (They had limited grazing rights to some of it, but it was renewed year to year and always threatened, and it was a whole thing), leading to a century long fight to get it back.Â
And in that book there are a couple of really poignant anecdotes- one man talks about how park rangers would come harass them if they tried to collect pinon nuts too close to park land- worried that they would take too many pinon nuts that the squirrels wanted. Despite the fact that the Havasupai had harvested pinon nuts for thousands and thousands of years without everâŠlikeâŠstarving the squirrels.Â
Thereâs another anecdote of them seeing the park rangers hauling away the bodies of dozens of deer- killed in the park because of overpopulation- while the Havasupai had been banned from hunting. (Making them more and more reliant on government aid just to survive the winter months.)Â
They talk about how they would traditionally carve out these natural cisterns above the rim to catch rainwater, and how all the animals benefitted from this, but it was difficult to maintain those cisterns when their âownershipâ of the land was so disputed.Â
So here you have examples of when people are forcibly separated from their ecosystem and how it hurts both those people and the ecosystem.Â
And then when the Havasupai finally got legislation before Congress to give them ownership of the rim land back- their biggest opponent was the Parks system and the Sierra Club. The Sierra Club (a big conservation group here in the US) ran a huge smear campaign against these people on the belief that any humans owning this land other than the park system (which aims at conservation, even while developing for recreation) was unacceptable.Â
And it all got me thinking about how, as much as I love the National Parks, there are times when its insistence that nature be left âuntouchedâ (except, ya know, for recreation) can actually harm both the native people who have traditionally been part of those ecosystems AND potentially the ecosystems themselves. And I just think thereâs a lot of nuance there about recognizing that there are ways for us to be in balance with nature, and that our environmentalism should respect that and push for sustainability over preserving âpristineâ human-less landscapes. Removing ourselves from nature isnât the answer.Â
But apparently the idea that subsistence hunting might actually not be a moral catastrophe really set the vegans off. Woopie.Â
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