A country torn by civil war can't be a power player on the international stage. Think about the countries in the last 50 years that have broken apart in that way. Their struggles might influence global policy and occupy the time of superpowers, but they themselves are not superpowers.
The term superpower was coined to describe the massive influence of the mightiest nuclear-armed nations in the second half of the 20th Century. America was the first, with its atomic bomb. As nuclear weapons technology spread, the Soviet Union became the opposing force. Alliances formed among the lesser nations to gain power by association with one superpower or the other.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States was left as the last remaining superpower. For a brief few years, we could believe that we stood unopposed. Of course the nuclear arsenal still sat in readiness in the remnants of the USSR. They were no longer under a central command, but enough of them were still in Russia's hands to make a nice armageddon. Good thing no one was in the mood at the time.
Russia reconstituted its power gradually. It was never going to lie there and give up its global ambitions. The ambitions live in the minds of human leaders, but the culture of imperialism -- no matter how re-labeled -- has centuries of heritage there.
China emerged as a power player more gradually. Its role in an actual armed conflict would probably be doggedly defensive rather than as an initial aggressor, but it can't be dismissed. Its leaders would enjoy global power as would any ambitious person. And unambitious people don't seek positions of leadership. Policy is made by dominant people.
If America gives way to its temptation to fight it out internally -- literally, with gunfire and explosions and factional killing -- China and Russia would fund and arm both sides and just sit back. America has conducted itself internationally with more pride than humility since it took its place as a real global power in the 1890s by beating up on Spain. The rest of the world might feel some sorrow at our dissolution, but also a bit of schadenfreude at the toppling of our self-constructed pedestal.
Would American business leaders really let the civil war happen? Civil wars in other countries are profitable. Let the smaller nations go up in flames and down in rubble. Good businessmen will talk about how it's in our national interest to be involved a little bit, but hold back from the wasteful extravagance of either global war or a real armed conflict on American streets. We can send a few thousand troops, and arm the combatants in these endless lesser conflicts as a way to affirm that the human species will never be peaceful and unified, while still keeping the golf courses, yacht clubs, and estates safely distant from the battle zones. But what if they can't maintain control? Lots of people are getting disgusted with the rule of the corporate elite. Who knows for sure how the official military forces might divide? Once an uprising is declared an insurrection, not just a criminal act, US armed forces can be used on home soil. Troops would have to decide where their loyalty lies.
Civil war would be a supremely bad idea. Since when has that ever stopped a determined bunch of people from marching off on a grand campaign? And on a higher level, maybe the destruction of the United States is just the next phase in evolution. It wouldn't be a failure of the principles on which the republic claimed to be founded. Those are universally available to any interested humans. If nations really are obsolete, the obliteration of this one would be merely another chapter in humanity's quarrelsome history. The principles of individual liberty and shared responsibility could still underlie any future regime more generally applied to human well-being across the planet.
I'm not saying that they would. But they could.
We are free to prevent our dissolution by growing up a little and facing the reality of the damage our species has done to the planet and each other. We can choose to start to get along with each other and look more carefully at the interdependence of all life, not just human life or of one sub-category of human life. I'm not saying that we will. But we should. We can confound our enemies by refusing to destroy ourselves at the same time that we decline to engage in direct hostilities with them. Such a course would depend on an unprecedented level of wisdom. The only other option is to continue our uneasy paranoia for as long as we manage to keep from destroying ourselves outright. Aggressive leaders can always find recruits. Even if a majority of people don't want to be hostile to each other, a minority of motivated aggressors can always force the issue to bloodshed. That then has to be resolved before any progress can resume.
Sunday, October 06, 2019
Tuesday, October 01, 2019
The human hand on the landscape
Thirty years ago, the mountain slope behind my house was covered with mature forest. Mixed hardwood and pine covered the whole little mountain range from end to end. The climb to the nearest summit was an easy bushwhack with little understory. No one seemed to go out there except during deer hunting season. Even then, it was only a few hunters. For almost ten years, I could traverse the entire range to the highest point at the far end without seeing many signs of human activity.
Like most of the eastern United States, this area was pretty well deforested by the late 19th Century. But old rock walls and cairns, and the occasional cellar hole, don't seem intrusive. They did foreshadow the possibility that humans could develop an interest in the land again at any time.
Other parts of the mountain range got logged. Some of the cuts were large and drastic. One cut even came up the far side of the ridge behind my house. That one wasn't a total shave. When it was over, regrowth began. Any cuts provided a bit of open skiing for a couple of years until saplings grew in densely.
The first incursion into the happy playground of my home mountain arrived in 1997, when a neighboring property was sold. The new owner had it logged. The logger was one of those people who could be stupid or could be a criminal or could be a stupid criminal. His first move was to ignore the boundaries of the lot he was supposed to cut, because the terrain was easier and the trees were more valuable lower down. He mowed a large swath across my immediate neighbor's land -- not the one who had hired him -- and was starting in on my oak trees when I caught him. It still took several days to get him to stop and relocate to the parcel he was supposed to be logging. Then he did a rather ugly job, driving his skidder right up to my property line to leave his mark. But then he was gone, and the open area made an interesting place to practice telemark turns on an easy slope. The landowner never went out on the land. This continued through subsequent owners as well. I poked around out there and never saw anyone I hadn't brought with me.
At the start of the 21st Century, the timber industry began to work on my end of the mountain. A couple of large tracts abut each other, and each property owner at some point decided to harvest some trees. They were large cuts, but not large clearings. I'm always disturbed by motors and machinery in wild land, but when the cutting ended it was not followed by more motorized activity. I resumed my bushwhack visits, remaining unseen as much as possible, and leaving no trace.
The owners of a cabin in a hollow decided to replace it with a chalet on a knoll, but it is amazingly well concealed. During its construction I literally almost walked into the wall of it, covered in gray Tyvek, as I traversed the slope in a zigzag course of exploration. They had seldom been around. I'd grown accustomed to having the freedom of the hill. After they built their bigger house, I retreated. I only end up over there by accident, usually when descending in snow. The structure is still quite invisible. I thank them for that. There was still plenty of mountain left to play on.
Large cuts began to occur more frequently on what had been reassuringly covered with trees. Sometimes I would see that someone with a motorized vehicle had made one scouting foray and found it uninteresting. I know that in a human-controlled world everything has to earn its keep monetarily. Every tree is on borrowed time. Every undisturbed landscape has to pass an audit to show that it has more economic value in its natural state.
Most recently, the big parcel more or less directly uphill from me was drastically cut. The owner had died and his widow had sold the land to a logger and developer. The cut went on for months, including the operation of a large chipper at the landing on the road frontage, operating for six or eight hours a day. This is how it is when you have a home in timber country. Heavy machinery churned the mountainside. I finally went out to look at it at the first snowfall, when the action had shifted further away from my end of the lot. It was startling. Further exploration through the winter confirmed that the cleared area was huge compared to anything that had preceded it. I knew it would be a beacon to people who can't do anything without a motorized vehicle. The blaze of the snowfield would attract "sledders." The wide open spaces would attract wheeled vehicles. And so it was. Late-season surveys showed knobby tire tracks up the deeply gashed skidder swaths. Most recently, I had heard a motor vehicle cruising up there in the quiet of evening, its low mutter coming through with the annoying persistence of a dog licking its private parts next to your bed at 3 a.m. I fear that this is the total end of the peaceful escapes I once enjoyed up there. The neighbors with the chalet have been patrolling their land on a tracked vehicle, and now the other piece has become a playground for polluters as well.
The motorists will say all the usual things: "It's just me! I'm not hurting anything. I'm just having fun."
Brock Turner was just having fun. Lynch mobs were just having fun. The Mongol Horde was just having fun.
Don't try to create a false equivalency between my footsteps and ski tracks, and someone else's carbon footprint, noise pollution, and tire gouges on a landscape already slashed and gashed by the heavy hand of industrial timber removal. There are cuts and there are cuts. There's good management and there's fast work that maximizes profit at the cost of things like drainage and topsoil. I've seen the aftermath of every cut out there since 1989, and the latest is by far the worst. The fact that it attracted motor vehicles like flies to a corpse is an added strike against it.
Yesterday I went to have a look because the persistent motor noises indicated regular use, not just a random foray. I found a bear baiting station with ATV tracks indicating that I have probably heard the baiter coming and going. The bait is a disgusting mass of old doughnuts, mashed into the bottom of a large plastic barrel. Because bait season ended two days ago in this wildlife management unit, it was no longer supposed to be there. Because the land is owned by a profit-driven company that cares nothing for it ecologically, I don't know if the baiter even sought the written permission required by the state. There is nothing to connect the bait station to an identifiable individual.
How did people ever kill bears before the invention of doughnut shops?
All this activity pretty well kills the place for me. I don't want to run into any motorheads when I'm out there. The sound of even a quiet motor carries way too well, grating on my nerves in my own back yard, let alone in closer proximity. I don't want them to see me, and I don't want to see them.
Hunters might claim that they depend on the meat and the sale of hides. The meat argument doesn't hold up to cost analysis when you figure out what they had to invest in guns, ammunition, dogs, dog food, ATVs, registration, fuel, and other expenses related to the modern hunt. Fashion yourself a spear out of a sapling, with a stone point on it, and then we'll talk about real cost savings compared to just buying some meat at the store. Then there's the "wildlife management" angle. It's been people versus nature from the beginning of time, or at least from the time at which humans evolved enough to separate themselves from nature. We control the balance by taking what we want and killing what we have to. We have believed that we could figure out how to maintain that balance by means that please us. These have to be adjusted as research indicates that the system isn't working to our long-term advantage. We're too slowly acknowledging that the overall natural mechanism that supports all life depends on leaving quite a bit of it alone. This would reduce the number of house lots that land pimps can profit from, and create by default a lot of undisturbed habitat in which the creatures that don't answer to us can do their thing. It's not just some animal rights story. It's an understanding of the complex relationships of all the parts. Any animals accidentally left alone are just collateral damage to the profit-driven enterprises that have to slow their pace of destruction.
Whoever builds a house up there will need to understand that the forest used to support all kinds of life. You can clear the vegetation and replace it with what pleases you, and eradicate the inconvenient animals, but that will have its price.
Like most of the eastern United States, this area was pretty well deforested by the late 19th Century. But old rock walls and cairns, and the occasional cellar hole, don't seem intrusive. They did foreshadow the possibility that humans could develop an interest in the land again at any time.
Other parts of the mountain range got logged. Some of the cuts were large and drastic. One cut even came up the far side of the ridge behind my house. That one wasn't a total shave. When it was over, regrowth began. Any cuts provided a bit of open skiing for a couple of years until saplings grew in densely.
The first incursion into the happy playground of my home mountain arrived in 1997, when a neighboring property was sold. The new owner had it logged. The logger was one of those people who could be stupid or could be a criminal or could be a stupid criminal. His first move was to ignore the boundaries of the lot he was supposed to cut, because the terrain was easier and the trees were more valuable lower down. He mowed a large swath across my immediate neighbor's land -- not the one who had hired him -- and was starting in on my oak trees when I caught him. It still took several days to get him to stop and relocate to the parcel he was supposed to be logging. Then he did a rather ugly job, driving his skidder right up to my property line to leave his mark. But then he was gone, and the open area made an interesting place to practice telemark turns on an easy slope. The landowner never went out on the land. This continued through subsequent owners as well. I poked around out there and never saw anyone I hadn't brought with me.
At the start of the 21st Century, the timber industry began to work on my end of the mountain. A couple of large tracts abut each other, and each property owner at some point decided to harvest some trees. They were large cuts, but not large clearings. I'm always disturbed by motors and machinery in wild land, but when the cutting ended it was not followed by more motorized activity. I resumed my bushwhack visits, remaining unseen as much as possible, and leaving no trace.
The owners of a cabin in a hollow decided to replace it with a chalet on a knoll, but it is amazingly well concealed. During its construction I literally almost walked into the wall of it, covered in gray Tyvek, as I traversed the slope in a zigzag course of exploration. They had seldom been around. I'd grown accustomed to having the freedom of the hill. After they built their bigger house, I retreated. I only end up over there by accident, usually when descending in snow. The structure is still quite invisible. I thank them for that. There was still plenty of mountain left to play on.
Large cuts began to occur more frequently on what had been reassuringly covered with trees. Sometimes I would see that someone with a motorized vehicle had made one scouting foray and found it uninteresting. I know that in a human-controlled world everything has to earn its keep monetarily. Every tree is on borrowed time. Every undisturbed landscape has to pass an audit to show that it has more economic value in its natural state.
Most recently, the big parcel more or less directly uphill from me was drastically cut. The owner had died and his widow had sold the land to a logger and developer. The cut went on for months, including the operation of a large chipper at the landing on the road frontage, operating for six or eight hours a day. This is how it is when you have a home in timber country. Heavy machinery churned the mountainside. I finally went out to look at it at the first snowfall, when the action had shifted further away from my end of the lot. It was startling. Further exploration through the winter confirmed that the cleared area was huge compared to anything that had preceded it. I knew it would be a beacon to people who can't do anything without a motorized vehicle. The blaze of the snowfield would attract "sledders." The wide open spaces would attract wheeled vehicles. And so it was. Late-season surveys showed knobby tire tracks up the deeply gashed skidder swaths. Most recently, I had heard a motor vehicle cruising up there in the quiet of evening, its low mutter coming through with the annoying persistence of a dog licking its private parts next to your bed at 3 a.m. I fear that this is the total end of the peaceful escapes I once enjoyed up there. The neighbors with the chalet have been patrolling their land on a tracked vehicle, and now the other piece has become a playground for polluters as well.
The motorists will say all the usual things: "It's just me! I'm not hurting anything. I'm just having fun."
Brock Turner was just having fun. Lynch mobs were just having fun. The Mongol Horde was just having fun.
Don't try to create a false equivalency between my footsteps and ski tracks, and someone else's carbon footprint, noise pollution, and tire gouges on a landscape already slashed and gashed by the heavy hand of industrial timber removal. There are cuts and there are cuts. There's good management and there's fast work that maximizes profit at the cost of things like drainage and topsoil. I've seen the aftermath of every cut out there since 1989, and the latest is by far the worst. The fact that it attracted motor vehicles like flies to a corpse is an added strike against it.
Yesterday I went to have a look because the persistent motor noises indicated regular use, not just a random foray. I found a bear baiting station with ATV tracks indicating that I have probably heard the baiter coming and going. The bait is a disgusting mass of old doughnuts, mashed into the bottom of a large plastic barrel. Because bait season ended two days ago in this wildlife management unit, it was no longer supposed to be there. Because the land is owned by a profit-driven company that cares nothing for it ecologically, I don't know if the baiter even sought the written permission required by the state. There is nothing to connect the bait station to an identifiable individual.
How did people ever kill bears before the invention of doughnut shops?
All this activity pretty well kills the place for me. I don't want to run into any motorheads when I'm out there. The sound of even a quiet motor carries way too well, grating on my nerves in my own back yard, let alone in closer proximity. I don't want them to see me, and I don't want to see them.
Hunters might claim that they depend on the meat and the sale of hides. The meat argument doesn't hold up to cost analysis when you figure out what they had to invest in guns, ammunition, dogs, dog food, ATVs, registration, fuel, and other expenses related to the modern hunt. Fashion yourself a spear out of a sapling, with a stone point on it, and then we'll talk about real cost savings compared to just buying some meat at the store. Then there's the "wildlife management" angle. It's been people versus nature from the beginning of time, or at least from the time at which humans evolved enough to separate themselves from nature. We control the balance by taking what we want and killing what we have to. We have believed that we could figure out how to maintain that balance by means that please us. These have to be adjusted as research indicates that the system isn't working to our long-term advantage. We're too slowly acknowledging that the overall natural mechanism that supports all life depends on leaving quite a bit of it alone. This would reduce the number of house lots that land pimps can profit from, and create by default a lot of undisturbed habitat in which the creatures that don't answer to us can do their thing. It's not just some animal rights story. It's an understanding of the complex relationships of all the parts. Any animals accidentally left alone are just collateral damage to the profit-driven enterprises that have to slow their pace of destruction.
Whoever builds a house up there will need to understand that the forest used to support all kinds of life. You can clear the vegetation and replace it with what pleases you, and eradicate the inconvenient animals, but that will have its price.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)