The Politics of Enchantment

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• Reader Comments (4)

  Page 1 of 1 pages

  Fairytale thinking on a myopic scale!  All the people coming out of the suburbs to worship a tree?  Hmm I wonder what was there before the suburbs came along?  I don’t see any low income folks worshipping trees?  Jee I wonder what my computer is made of?  How did I get to work yesterday?  How did Al Gore get to that city to give that “be green” speech?  Lets see: wind turbine, chops up birds, takes tonnes of iron ore, coal, oil and gas to produce the turbine itself, covers a huge amount of ground, once “pristine” and beautiful… need one go on?  Its all fine and dandy sitting in your ivory tower man made university office (where beautiful trees once stood, before we had to bulldoze them to accommodate you) and type on your plastic oil and gas made computer, burning electricity coming from (coal?, or even bird killing prairie ruining wind turbines maybe) and pontificate on our destruction of nature and how now we cling to whats left.  Sad to say its not terribly realistic.  Its hypocritical.  The reality is, everything has a cost.  With 6 billion people and climbing, the cost will be greater and greater.  EVERYONE has a right to live in a house and that means GOOD BYE open land and 400 year old trees.  And by the way, I’d like to eat too, so hello farm plow and fertilizer!
  The tree made a noble sacrifice, its life for a decent life for however many were in that suburb.  I might even be writing on that tree for all I know, or even carrying my groceries in it??  You get my point.  Be realistic!

  Posted by caribou steaks on Oct 7, 2009 at 12:39 PM

  Caribou steaks you make very cogent observations…There is just one problem…Human beings need to BREATH, preferrably clear, clean oxygen ; for some odd reason nature made us that way….Trees have something to do with making this stuff called oxygen, and gee-wizz , if we don’t get this stuff we sufficate…Not a very pretty thing to go thru , kindof uncomfortable…Ya know…
  Now human beings have been on this here planet for let’s just give a roundabout number of say 1 milloin years, without any real damage to the enviroment..Ya know, living life , make love to your woman, having babies , raising them to adulthood , basic stuff, the things we all like and love to do. Building civilizations, creating shit, advancing humanity, basic….You understand; I know you understand, because thats what you state in your post, cool…
  But the paradox is that in the last , again a roundabout number , 150 years ; western industrial imperialism has created this problem of massive pollutionism…I call it a ism , because to the industrialist pollution is just the cost of doing business…
  We can’t go back to the so-called good ‘ol day; but hey chief,we got to change the way we live , or we won’t be livin’...dig…
  Now poor folks may not be seen visiting the trees ; but thats a economic restaint based on…hey ; being poor, little or no money…But Blackhorse is pretty sure ;if they could , they would, “go hug some trees “..Cool
  By the way…I love fresh deer meat, especially off the grill..
  Dig….......Peace and God Luck

  Posted by blackhorse on Oct 8, 2009 at 8:36 PM

  I was very low income for most of my 40 some years (now I’m an RN and am middle class). Please don’t make the mistake of assuming that the poor only care about jobs and putting food on the table. I would have rather gone hungry than see yet another developer raze the trees to create more houses that I could never afford. Just because a person is poor doesn’t mean he or she can’t think ethically and morally.

  It’s possible to create jobs that are sustainable and housing that is comfortable without being outrageously consumptive, so why not place your energy there instead of trying to simplify everything into a black and white model? It isn’t true that if we use any of the Earth’s resources we might as well open things up to use all of them. What kind of logic is that? That’s like saying you might as well cook all the food in your house, even if you have to waste a bunch of it, simply because it’s there and you have to eat.

  Posted by Jana Rossier on Oct 9, 2009 at 2:43 PM

  See…Blackhorse was sure reasonable minds exists out there in the cyber-world ; Jana Rossier kills 3 falsehoods with one stone..
  That’s some mighty fine shoot’in gal…......

  Thank ya…...

  Posted by blackhorse on Oct 11, 2009 at 2:11 AM

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Also by James William Gibson

• The Politics of Enchantment
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