[PEN-L:516] Re: Nature bites back

[boddhisatva <kbevans@xxxxxxxxx>]

		To whom...,



	There are dumber passages in dumber books, certainly, but this
little gem from Mike Davis is safely on the big list of the dumb.  The
combination of high rainfall, more suburban encroachment with less
damaging land practices and a *better* environment are the obvious causes
of better predator populations in Southern California.  Snakes on the
beach is a tremendously good sign as snake populations in Southern
California have been threatened for a long time.  Hopefully the Central
Valley is seeing the same kind of abundance and endangered King snakes
will regain a toe-hold.


	That the author could cite animist omens over ecology is
symptomatic of the crippling intellectual hangover from hippiedom that is
"new age" thinking.  While fools posture revolutionary and Green with
their bourgeois trappings of "Non-western" medicine, rare plants and
animals are destroyed to support this hocus-pocus.  So much of the
traditional East Asian sucking down of herbs and animal glands is so
foolish, environmentally destructive anti-intellectual and medically
bogus - even dangerous - that any educated person should condemn it and
the non-thinking behind it.  However, since the self-involvement of the
Baby boom generation knows no limits they, who have actual health care to
fall back on, have indulged themselves in Fung Shue fantasies.  Meanwhile,
a few decades of intimate contact between East Asia and the rest of the
developed world has been squandered in terms of forwarding science AND
ecology by ridding people of these nonsensical superstitions.


	Furthermore, I suggest to you all that the present fascination
with indigenous peoples, while based on legitimate and compassionate
impulses, serves the role in liberating the masses of people of a canard.
I don't think it is heartless or genocidal (as will be the inevitable
charge) to look at such things as the absolute numbers of indigenous
people and what kind of quality of life traditional economies can effect -
and with how many resources - and compare that to the needs of the
swelling ranks of the billions now in the industrial proletariat.  When
looked at from that perspective, I suggest that the fight for indigenous
rights is well-intentioned; it is a stand against capitalist
rapaciousness; but it does little or nothing to forward the interests of
the masses of people against those who enslave them through capitalism.


	I further suggest that this fight, beneath the surface, is part of
a psychology of abandoning the legitimate struggles of working people in
search of a purer, more wretched, more grievously and "unjustly" injured
victim than the typical working stiff.  That psychology is a psychology of
capitulation.  It is a psychology fostered in a movement unwilling to
change its thinking.  It is a doomed psychology.



	peace