Waiting for Photosynthesis

"In the strict scientific sense we all feed on death---even vegetarians."
Mr. Spock, Star Trek, "Wolf in the Fold."



It's common for us carnivores to stereotype vegetarians either as sissified, ineffectual wimps or self-righteous Puritans trying to impose their abstemious ideology on the rest of society. I did, too, when I was young and ignorant. Being no longer young and slightly less ignorant, I now know better. My vegetarian friends are of several sorts, from strict vegans to those who'll also eat cheese and eggs, and none of them is either sissified or self-righteous. Just the opposite, in fact. Their reasons for vegetable diets range from simple preference to the deeply personal to the religious; what they have in common, though, is respect for other people's choices. I'd no more think of parodying them than I would my Orthodox  friends, who go to considerable effort following the letter of Jewish dietary law. I admire all of them for living their convictions, even if I don't share those convictions.

But there are exceptions to my embrace of dietary diversity. The PETA types, ("A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.") for instance. These militant vegans would rather millions die of disease than have doctors experiment with animals, however humanely. They're just bad people.

Then there are the plain silly ones, the self-proclaimed "bioethicists" who devote volumes of exquisitely convoluted reasoning to the question of which plants we might in good conscience consume. One of these is Michael Marder, research professor of philosophy, who (in the New York Times, of course) discusses the ethical implications of recent research showing that pea plants exposed to drought chemically communicate their distress to other pea plants. These plants, "forewarned," adapt better to stress. In other words, there is communication and planning in plants. Another is Natalie Angier, a science reporter (also of the Times, also of course) who wrote in 2009 of plants that emit chemical "cries for help" when attacked by caterpillars. These chemicals attract dragonflies and other insects which then eat the caterpillars. Who knew plants could call in air strikes? Special-ops teams?

Research in plant communication is not the issue. None of this is really new. I recall learning in the 80's that insect-infested trees chemically signalled others in their grove, which enabled those others to better resist the bugs' invasion. In other words, plants "talk," albeit on a level we can't detect, and act on what they "hear." Can they also communicate joy, or anxiety, or lust, or philosophy, at some level we can't comprehend? Maybe. 

However, some people take this to ridiculous extremes. If plants communicate like people, say these philosophers, what right do we have to take their lives just to prolong our own? Marder, Angier, et al., worry about finding an ethical way to kill and consume our distant vegetable cousins. Even the Swiss, who I always thought were practical, no-nonsense folks, have incorporated "plant dignity" into their Federal constitution.

Enacting these sentiments into law means that we're not simply having one of those quasi-intellectual discussions you might hear in a liberal-arts college dorm. Is every harvest a massacre? Do potatoes scream as they're ripped from the warm, comforting earth, bagged, sold, and thrown alive into vats of boiling water? Do oaks and pines cry as they're brutally mutilated into planks? Is a dandelion the moral equivalent of a rose in its right to live and reproduce? Does it gasp, choke and shudder when doused with herbicide? Scream like a potato when the gardener tears it from the soil?

Of course not, one might say.* Plants don't think, don't decide, aren't rational like humans are. Well, maybe, but then there are those who claim that despite all our chattering, people have no more free will than, say, oysters, which are almost plants. 

You don't need to claim that humans are exceptions to the rest of the natural world to avoid this silliness. Just the opposite. Consider natural selection, the driver of evolution. Natural selection works by competition; the winners get to live and reproduce, while the losers become food and, eventually, compost. That's the circle of life. You may not like the game but it's the only one in the universe. Plants compete just as animals do, albeit more slowly.  Vines climbing that oak we can't ethically use for 2"x4"s will kill it as surely as a pack of hyenas brings down a baby zebra. Plants steal each other's water, nutrients and sunlight, the vegetable equivalent of chimps killing each other over territory. Why, then, should we ponder the ethical implications of a baguette, or wonder if cracking walnuts is equivalent to making an omelet? 

That doesn't mean I disrespect other people's choices, as long as they respect mine. It doesn't mean I tolerate cruelty to animals or people, or the senseless destruction of plant life, for that matter. Some things are just evil, and I'll fight them. If some philosopher tells me my standards are arbitrary, culture-bound, and emotional, my response is, "So? Everybody's are; these are mine. Don't mess with them." That, remember, is how natural selection works.

Meanwhile, for those upset at the thought of consuming any other living thing, here's my suggestion: Dig a hole. Take off all your clothes. Step in and cover your feet with soil--the composted remains of once-living things. Next, spread your arms to the sky and wait for photosynthesis. 

Good luck with that. 


* See Wesley Smith's essay, from which I borrowed references. I owe him one. 

The Rat Model of Terrorism

"By gnawing through a dike, even a rat may drown a nation."
  Edmund Burke


Consider the rat. Honed by natural selection, it is superbly adapted to its environment. It prospers in sewers, woods, deserts, plains, jungles (concrete or vegetable) and just about everywhere else.  Its senses guide it through dark, narrow places. It gnaws or wriggles through most barriers. It eats anything and everything. It breeds prodigiously. It learns quickly, from experience and observation. It fights viciously, against other animals and its own kind. Yes, rats die a lot, but that doesn't matter because there are always more rats.

People don't like rats. They carry filth and disease into our homes. They damage our infrastructure, even the most secure. They consume and worse, contaminate, our food.

Now consider the terrorist. Except for their conscious malevolence, what's the difference?
They prosper in environments from mountains to deserts to jungles to cities. They learn, they adapt, they use our technology against us, infesting the Internet just as rats scurry along the girders of our skyscrapers. They breed, in both the biological and the psychological senses. They constantly seek to penetrate the barriers we erect against them, to avoid the traps we design. Yes, they die a lot, but others learn from each failure. There are always more.

Rats are decentralized. There may be many in one nest, but the nests are independent. Destroying one doesn't affect the others; it gives them an opportunity to expand into new territory, bringing their filth, disease and viciousness with them. As Darwin and Nietzsche would predict, whatever doesn't kill them makes them stronger, more adaptable, more vicious. And we can never kill them all.

Like rats, terrorists are decentralized. There is no central command, no secret headquarters. There are nests of violent people in every corner of the world. Wiping out one creates only a temporary respite and, ironically, the opportunity for another nest to expand.

How do people deal with a rat infestation? They protect their food supplies, barricade their buildings, set poison and traps. A farmer or rural homeowner might sit in wait with a rifle, killing as many as become visible, which isn't many. In a city that option isn't available. All of this takes time and resources, and both are limited. Rats have unlimited time and use our resources.

All the options have downsides, too. Traps and poisons kill other, innocuous creatures. Children and the foolish need to be protected from them. Barricades need maintainence. Shooting creates its own problems. Not every bullet goes where intended and in any case the shooter has other things to do. Rats don't. And, of course, in the modern world there are the soft-hearted, who lobby for and legislate the "humane" removal of creatures who would happily eat the soft-hearteds' childrens' faces.

The world's governments are in the position of the farmer or the homeowner. Each tries to buttress their homes, barns, and silos against the infestation. Sometimes they share information and advice, sometimes not, believing that if their neighbor suffers they'll gain a competitive advantage. Some, like the United States, attempt a humane policy. Others (think Russia and China), traditionally and historically brutal, don't mind inflicting collateral suffering and damage. Neither policy is successful.

Ask yourself a question: Given all the rat's evolutionary advantages, why aren't we hip-deep in them? There's an easy answer. Predators. Hawks, owls, foxes, wolves, coyotes, cats large and small, and so forth. As the rats evolved so did the predators. The same eons of natural selection have equipped predators to hunt and kill. It's how they live. Like rats, the predators are decentralized, hunting as individuals or small independent groups. Like rats, they learn quickly and well. And, very importantly, like rats they have nothing else to do.

It would be a mistake to think of predators as our friends. They prey on whatever they can catch most easily. They can be just as dangerous to us as to the rats---more so, if we're easier prey. You can't just drop a predator into an ecosystem, or you're likely to get what happened in Hawaii, where the mongoose was introduced as a way to control the rats infesting sugar cane fields. In another irony, rats were also brought by people, though inadvertently. It's a tossup as to which is now the bigger problem.

The principle applies, though. To control terrorists we need independently operating predators with nothing else to do but kill them. The challenge is predator control. How do you keep the feral cats from eating your free-range chickens, so much tastier and easier to catch than rats?

I wish I had an easy answer. I wish I had any answer. Our current policies are not only ineffective but foolish, the product of self-delusion and wishful thinking. We're not asking the right questions, because we're thinking in terms of either warfare or criminal justice, neither of which applies. We need to ask the questions an ecological model demands or we'll be living with a plague of rats for a very long time.

Thoughts About Boston

                                                                    Winning and Losing


"Another such victory, and we are undone."
Pyrrhus


Almost as soon as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was taken into custody, Bostonians celebrated. It was a muted celebration, to be sure, remembering the four dead and some one hundred and seventy* maimed, some horribly so. But it was a celebration nevertheless, as if a victory had been won.

In fact, nothing was won. The Boston bombing was a defeat inflicted by an implacable enemy. Not as terrible as 9/11 by any stretch of the imagination, but consider:
At a cost of two casualties, one dead and one captured, and a few thousand dollars at most, a major city was shut down for days. A massive manhunt took place, involving thousands of police. The news media of the entire country was dominated for most of a week.  Charges and counter-charges are flying between Federal agencies, prompting massive bureaucratic ass-covering. By some reckoning the incident cost a billion dollars or more, directly and indirectly. I'd be surprised if as much again wasn't spent on subsequent investigations and Tsarnaev's trial.

We can't afford it. Local, state and Federal budgets are already overstretched. Cries for more security will stretch them further. Something has to give, and I guarantee it won't be entitlements. More taxes? Fine, and watch what happens to business, then jobs, then government revenues. Welcome to Detroit, with cameras and drones. There's no good answer.

The Boston bombing was a classic cheap shot: underhanded, despicable, and effective.

* Most recent estimate: 260+


                                                              Culture Matters

"What multiculturalism boils down to is that you can praise any culture in the world except Western culture - and you cannot blame any culture in the world except Western culture."
Thomas Sowell


Progressive philosophy is sort of schizophrenic. On one hand, progressives love to separate people into groups and celebrate their diversity. We're asked---or ordered---to attend to cultural differences, to be "sensitive," to be guilty about "majority" status and privilege. All cultures (except that of the American South) are said to have value and deserve respect. On the other hand, when member(s) of some pet culture commit a heinous act perfectly consistent with their cultural values, norms and history, we hear about individual differences. The perpetrators are aberrations, exceptions---unless, of course, driven to savagery by their majority oppressors. Only Southern white males, especially religious combat veterans, commit atrocities because of their culture. To progressives, culture matters more than the person, except when it doesn't.

No. Culture is real in the same way that individual differences are real, and both matter. Culture is associated with, among other things, differing distributions of individual attributes that render certain dispositions more likely than others. To argue otherwise is to ignore evolution, something progressives are happy to do when it suits their purposes even if they otherwise sanctify the concept.

Islam isn't a culture, of course. Saudis are not Afghans are not Indonesians are not Persians are not Chechens, ad infinitum. But might there not be some common thread that makes at least some of these people more likely to become terrorists than, say, Scottish Presbyterians are? Chechens, in particular, are some of the most vicious people on the planet.  Maybe it's because they've fought the Russians for so long. Maybe they've fought so long because they're so damn mean. Or maybe they started mean and have gotten meaner the longer they've fought. Right now it doesn't matter.

I suspect that most Chechens, like most of everyone else, just want to be left alone to live their lives. But if there's even a 5% difference between them and, say, Lebanese Muslims in the frequency of violently motivated people, that's a hell of a lot of Chechens ready to be radicalized. There's a truism in psychology, supported by a library's worth of data, that it's easier to push someone in the direction they're already leaning than in the opposite direction. Call it "psychological judo."  

Expect to see more Chechens in the news.

Torches and Pitchforks

My plainness of speech makes them hate me,
and what is their hatred, if not proof that I am
speaking the truth?
Socrates


It's been a while. I haven't written because, frankly, I didn't feel that I had anything to say about current issues that someone else hadn't said first and maybe better than I could have.
There's no point in adding to the general clamor. But it's about time I provoked somebody, so here goes:

Barack Obama is pushing his gun control agenda using the parents of the murdered children of Sandy Hook as props. The parents are complicit in this charade, and that's shameful. Shameful for Obama, to be sure, and he already has much to be ashamed of. Shameful for the parents, who are allowing themselves to be the eager tools of a crass political manipulator.

Understand this: I grieve for the children, as much as anyone can who was a stranger to them. I imagine the sorrow and the rage I would feel if the victims had been my children or grandchildren, a rage that would vent itself on whatever target was handy.

But.

That's wrong. It's wrong because that venting does no good, enhancing rather than reducing the grief one feels. It's wrong because such venting increases the sadness, the hostility, the misery in the world. It's wrong because it's yet another example of rationalizing actions driven by emotion, undermining the single aspect of humanity--our capacity for reason--that separates us from, say, chimpanzees.

That last is, of course, exactly what Obama and his co-conspirators depend on, and what they've been so successful at since 2008.

The Sandy Hook parents who appear with Obama, giving emotional cover to yet another attack on the Constitution, are the moral and intellectual equivalent of the mob in Frankenstein, identifying guns and gun owners as the monsters who murdered their children.
No, there are no real torches or pitchforks, just the much scarier weapons of the State. The real monster, Adam Lanza, is dead already, but the mob needs a villain to vent its rage on. Who better than anyone who tries to bring reason to bear on the issue? They must be monsters because they're not carrying torches and shouting.

This, too, is what Obama, his minions and his camp-followers want. "Never let a good crisis go to waste," indeed. The corollary to that is:  "When you don't have a crisis, manufacture one." That's what Obama and his sorrowful props are doing. 

For shame.

Teens and Guns

"It ain't so much the things you don't know that get you in trouble. It's the things you know that just ain't so."

Artimus Ward

I'm a strong supporter of gun-rights initiatives, and adamantly opposed to restrictions. Imposing background checks on private sales, for instance, is a step toward enforced registration, which is a step toward confiscation.* Even if the current administration were trustworthy (a big stretch of the imagination) there's no guarantee a future one would be. 

I also favor nationwide recognition of carry permits, just as there is nationwide recognition of state-issued driver's licenses. I support concealed carry on all school campuses. You get the picture.

There's one pro-carry initiative I can't support, though: extending carry permits to 18-20 year olds. Proposed by Georgia State Senator Judson Hill, who says it was inspired by young people's military service, it would give the right to carry to kids who've taken a day's worth of training and passed an unspecified test.

This is another of those "If they're old enough to risk their lives in combat they're old enough to..." arguments.  The "old enough" criterion has been applied to voting, drinking, making contracts, and it's as foolish in those cases as it is in this one. Adolescents as a group simply do not have the intellectual or emotional maturity to make sound judgements, even when those involve deliberation (e.g. in voting) let alone in the daily handling and possible use of deadly weapons.

Let's get the military argument out of the way first. Adolescent soldiers may well be capable of high-level physical competence and astonishing courage, but they don't act alone. In the military they're told when to go to bed and when to wake up; what to wear and how to wear it;

how their hair should be worn; when and what to eat; what to do each day, and precisely how, when and where to do it.  In combat they act on someone's command, operating under strict rules of engagement. Their weapons training is designed first and foremost to avoid training accidents; they're forbidden loaded weapons under most circumstances except actual combat.  In short, even combat experience doesn't teach these kids how to carry a concealed, loaded weapon among unarmed people and be prepared to make sudden, life-or-death decisions on their own responsibility.

The large majority of 18-20 year olds will not have even this level of training, nor will they have been taught by competent parents. They'll get their concepts and their habits from movies and video games, or maybe from paintball. Does it seem even remotely possible that four hours of lecture and four hours of range instruction followed by a DMV-level test can create the necessary level of personal responsibility, skill and knowledge?

In fact, it's questionable whether adolescents as a group are capable of learning the judgement and self-control skills necessary to be a responsible armed citizen. A good many of these skills aren't even cognitive. Yes, kids can reason. They often have better information about risks than their elders, or overestimate risk. They do stupid, risky things regardless. What research shows they lack is the emotional development necessary to avoid doing those stupid things. They don't get the queasy feeling that tells an adult some action is foolish or wrong, and that's what gets them in trouble.

Even worse, adolescents don't know they're handicapped. It's not only that since the 60's they've been pandered to by marketers and politicians. It's not only that they've been victimized by a moronic "self-esteem" ideology that neither allows the self-discipline that comes from failure nor the satisfaction of real accomplishment.  It's simply a result of ignorance. If one is ignorant of some area of knowledge or skill, one has no basis for judging competence. Add to that the common motive to think well of oneself and you get a case of "unconscious incompetence", or even an illusion of high competence, that's very hard to overcome.

It's because I care about both the right to keep and bear arms and the welfare of innocent people that I oppose Hill's initiative. I believe bad things will happen to people if it's implemented, and these will be used by totalitarians as yet another excuse to deny the right of self-defense to everyone. 

We don't need to give them another excuse.

* Read history, or just take the word of someone who knows:

"A system of licensing and registration is the perfect device to deny gun ownership to the bourgeoisie."   -- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, "The Beginning of the Revolution in Russia", Selected Works, Vol. I

Droning on....

It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself—anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face ... was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime ...


George Orwell, 1984



So Rand Paul stayed on his feet for half a day and talked about the Constitution. What the filibuster came down to, minus the eloquence, was the statement that the President can't order an American citizen killed on American soil on a whim, or even a well-founded suspicion of terrorism or other homicidal crime. Failing an immediate threat of death or serious bodily harm to some innocent person, due process is obligatory. That Paul was talking about death by drone is irrelevant. Killing is killing, whether by drones, snipers, ninjas or CIA button-men. That's part of the Fifth Amendment:

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

So why are drones an issue? We've been finessing the Fifth Amendment for years, seizing property via civil forfeiture or eminent domain, always with some flimsy excuse about the "War on Drugs" or "urban renewal." In both cases it comes down to money and power, just like it always does. Eric Holder's shucking and jiving is just the latest in a long history of rationalizations, and they're all manure. Whether the source is a donkey or an elephant, the stink is the same. Oh, perhaps it's because we're now talking about killing people rather than just taking away their living. Way to stand on principle, Rand. Could it be that if someone had defended the rest of the Amendment we wouldn't now be debating assassination by remote-control airplane?

Another question: Why is getting a letter from Holder saying "Oh, no, of course we're not going to kill any Americans in America!" considered a victory? It's just a letter, dummy. It means nothing, just like Obama's promises about guns, health insurance, transparency and the rest meant nothing. They're all lies. Why do you think this is any different?
You'll notice that Brennan, like Hagel, was confirmed and they're both now free to ravage our intelligence and military services, respectively. So what did Rand Paul achieve? Some notoriety for himself and a little morale boost for Limbaugh, Hannity and other conservative pundits. (For another, less sanguine, conservative opinion, see here.)

What's the real issue with drones?  Why are we more afraid of them than other killing or spying machines? I think it's because they're easy. Very easy. Military snipers, for instance, are enormously skilled marksmen and have many other roles besides shooting. Only a small fraction of people can do the job, and they need extensive training. To kill they have to deploy within range and sight of the quarry. It's hard enough on a battlefield, let alone in the US, especially when you're trying to keep the whole thing secret. Too many people have to know. It's hard to argue that you're responding to "imminent danger." Drones are operated by anyone capable of playing a video game, sitting comfortably in an air-conditioned room*. They can patrol constantly; using satellite surveillance the operator, maybe a continent away, can locate the target and spit a missile before you can say "due process." Afterwards there's plenty of time for excuses and coverups.

"So what?" somebody might think. The drone strike took out a terrorist and his or her accomplices, right? Let's consider that. When you see "terrorist" most people think of a wild-eyed Muslim fanatic.  The DHS has a longer list, though, and while I wouldn't mind seeing a lot of the people on it take a Hellfire proctological exam I also know that in a just society the worst people are treated by the law exactly as are the most admired. Then, too, there's definition creep. The domestic terrorists have lots of guns and practice shooting, right? So if you have guns and practice shooting you must be one, too. There are pro-life fanatics who murder people and blow up buildings, so if you're pro-life, you're suspect.  Any veteran might be the next Timothy McVeigh. See? Sixty-odd years ago there were Communist witch-hunts. History repeats but the sides have switched and we haven't learned anything. Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover didn't have satellites or drones, though, nor a compliant media.

The whole drone issue is just one more piece of evidence that the entire population of the United States is on double secret probation and has been for years. It didn't start with Obama, in all fairness, but his people are refining and escalating it. Governments always seize more power unless they're checked, but our checks and balances have been askew for generations. It's going to take more than thirteen hours of legislative theater to reset them.


* And Hegel proposed giving these twinks medals. What for? Carpal tunnel? Going without a Grande Latte?

Oy! Wilderness!!

"A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread--and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness--
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!"
The Rubaiyat of Omar Kayyam,
Quatrain XII: FitzGerald, 5th Edition


Sometimes ideas for these essays come from unexpected places. For instance, in the April Cycle World there is a paragraph in the "Roundup" section about the 1964 Wilderness Act. This law allows certain areas to be designated "Wilderness" and prohibits resource development (e.g. oil drilling, mining, logging) within them, as well as road construction and the use of any motor vehicles. There are now 759 of these areas totalling almost 110 million acres and located in all but five states. The topic of the Cycle World note is a study out of Utah State University showing that wilderness designation has a negative economic impact on local communities, including loss of tourism. Apparently people aren't flocking to enjoy the wonders of nature, especially if they have to walk to them.

I have to admit some internal conflict about the whole wilderness issue. On one hand there are real long-term benefits to preserving wild lands and subsequent biodiversity. This includes benefits we know nothing about because we don't know how to ask the questions yet. Anyone who thinks we understand ecosystems is simply foolish; there's a lot to learn from the forests, deserts and plains. We may not be able to imagine the benefits today, but that's been true in every era.What's also true is that there will be some benefit, because there has always been. Besides, on a purely emotional level, even a city boy like me appreciates the natural world for its own sake.

But there's another hand.

It's equally foolish to ignore the very real long and short term costs of wilderness preservation. Not only is there an immediate local cost--selling t-shirts and freeze-dried camping food to hikers doesn't pay what mining, logging and oil drilling do---there are long term costs as well. These include resource dependence on other countries not nearly so careful of their ecology nor the welfare of their native people as we are.

It doesn't help that wilderness preservation and expansion is promoted by people from the dark side of the environmental movement. "Earth First!", according to their website, wants to increase wilderness areas to seven times their present size. These are the people who, along with outfits like the Earth Liberation Front, promote eco-terrorism and sabotage. Agreeing with these sons (and daughters) of bitches about anything feels like saying "Well, yeah, but Hitler did get the trains running on time." 

So how can we maintain some of the benefits of wilderness preservation without giving more power to genuinely bad people? One clue comes from looking at their websites: the pictures they post of themselves reveal a bunch of white college and college-dropout types and their academic enablers. They're dressed in outdoor-chic products from companies like REI. I'm betting that few if any understand anything about real wilderness living despite their constant railing against modern industrial society. In fact their clothing, bicycles, tents and outdoor equipment couldn't exist without the industries and capitalist economy they love to hate. And that's the key.

What I'd like is not easier access to wilderness, but stricter regulation. Here's the rule: Anyone can enter a wilderness area at any time and stay there as long as they like. They can hunt, fish, forage, build dwellings, raise crops and so forth just as they please---but they can only use technology and materials that were available to the native people of that specific area prior to the year 1490. That means nothing after 1490: no medicine, eyeglasses, clothes made from fibers not grown locally, metal tools, magnesium fire starters, nylon rope, monofilament fishing line, compasses, GPS... Nothing. No horses, either. And once they're in the wilderness, they're on their own. No rescue helicopters, no EMTs, nothing.

How do they get clothes and equipment? They're bought or traded for locally from people who make them as they were in the 1400s, or they make them themselves the same way. No steel needles or factory made thread, no chemically-tanned leather, no timber cut by chainsaws. All natural and Neolithic. You can do pretty well with that technology if you work at it. Nevertheless, it'll be interesting to see how much more wilderness the Earth Firsters and other eco-bullies want under those conditions.

We shouldn't forget the eco-terrorists. Some at least will be caught, and when they are the appropriate punishment is to give them what they said they wanted: a natural life. Dress them in season-appropriate 1490-era clothes and shoes and drop them off by helicopter as close to the geographic center of a wilderness area as possible. That's it. They're free to live their lives in a state of nature. We know how that will turn out, too: poor, solitary, nasty, brutish and short.