The point I want to make here is: Liberal solutions do not come from intensive, exhaustive, well-researched and well thought-out determinations of the most effective way to solve a problem or achieve a goal. Liberal solutions are dictated by the limitations of liberalism itself. I’ve already identified one of those limitations — the real reason liberals are always telling us that we need to use less, produce less, and reproduce less, and, if we don’t, we’re going to run out of everything and be bad people and destroy the planet, yadda, yadda, yadda. The real reason they keep telling us this is: they have no hope of outcompeting free-market capitalism in producing more. 

That’s why they work so hard to peddle global warming/climate change, the end of oil. It’s also why they’re constantly villainizing the U. S. for its excesses. Since they have nothing else to sell but less, they have to give us some reason to want less rather than more and since that decision is so counter to our natural inclinations — Who want less rather than more of anything? — it has to be a very good reason.

IF ALL YOU HAVE IS A HAMMER

Here’s another way (actually there are quire a few of these) in which the nature of liberalism dictates the problems they identify and the solutions they propose: liberals are limited by the nature of the tools in their toolbox. 

The main tools in the liberal toolbox are regulation, legislation, investigation, litigation, income redistribution, taxation, and confiscation — the taking of property rights including the direct taking of property itself (Which is what taxation is.).  

The reason liberals are always claiming that we’re threatened by energy shortages, overpopulation, global warming, the death of the oceans, poverty, racism, and on and on is because these crises provide excuses for more regulation, more legislation,  more villainization of the producers of more, etc.. If you’ve got an energy shortage, what do you do? You either produce more (Which liberals can’t do.) or you enact regulations to require rationing, institute huge government programs to create “alternatives” (which are really ways to create less and call it more), and raise taxes to fund all of the above. 

TOOLS THAT CAUSE PROBLEMS RATHER THAN SOLVE THEM

The most convenient part of all this, for liberals, is that the tools they tell us we absolutely have to use to solve these crises actually make them worse. This creates the opportunity for them to tell us we must submit to even more government control. For instance…

Regulations that prevent us from drilling for more oil or producing more electricity cause the energy shortages that require rationing techniques like cap and trade and alternative energy programs, which don’t work and deepen the shortage. 

Regulations that raise the cost of health insurance decrease the availability and quality of health care, which in turn creates the opportunity to socialize medicine and make things even worse. Villainization of the producers of more, such as when we call them the destroyers of the planet or vilify them for the money they make, discourages our most creative innovators from producing us out of these shortages (and, worse yet, recruits them to the cause of creating less). And, while we’re at it, there is no more effective way to create less of everything than by increasing taxes, the liberal’s piece de resistance.

HOW LIBERALISM WORKS

This is how liberalism works: Liberals can’t produce more so they exaggerate or even dream up crises which at least seem to require that we tighten our belts, reduce our footprint, “Live simply that others may simply live.” This provides the campaign “pitch” for them to convince us we should vote them into office so they can use the tools in the liberal toolbox to force us to do the above (for our own good of course). Once applied, the liberal tools then deepen the very crisis they are supposed to solve and create the twisted logic that we should keep voting liberals into office, ideally forever. 

It’s sort of like bailing water into (rather than out of) the lifeboat.

This spotlights yet another way in which the actions of liberals are dictated by the limitations of liberalism itself. The only way the tools in the liberal toolbox can be applied is via government. In order to regulate, legislate, levy taxes, dismantle rights, confiscate property, etc. you have to be in control of the government. For that reason, if liberals don’t control the government, they’re out of the game, they don’t exist. To liberals, politics is blood sport, a life or death activity. If they don’t win this time, they have to win next time.

WHY LIBERALS ARE BETTER AT POLITICS 

That’s why liberals are so much better at campaigning than conservatives (think Clinton vs Dole and Obama vs McCain), and why their campaigns are so much more vicious. It’s also why liberals are campaigning 24/7/365. For them, politics is the only sea in which they swim. It is the air they breathe.

Conservatives, on the other hand, are usually people who achieve their success in a sphere different from politics. They produce more — more oil, more cars, more food, more whatever. They see the role of government, as did the people who founded this country, as limited to apprehending and punishing those who commit crimes and defending us from outside enemies. They become involved in government in order to do their part in performing those functions but also in order to keep government out of our way, because they believe that people being free to exercise their creativity is what brought us to the greatness we now enjoy. And it is the only hope we have of solving whatever problems do crop up, including whatever the ever-changing climate of this planet throws at us, or whatever shortages we encounter as we try to create an ever-growing abundance in this finite ecosphere. For conservatives, politics is a necessary evil to keep government out of our way and off our backs. That is why they aren’t very good at it.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LIBERALISM AND CONSERVATISM

What I’ve just told you is a very important difference between liberalism and conservatism. That’s what I’m developing here: a more complete and useable description of the difference between liberalism and conservatism than you’ll read anywhere and, along the way, a list of the elements of the true nature of liberalism. Now you’ll know why liberals do what they do and why it so frequently doesn’t work.

At this point I should probably revisit why I’m doing this and where I get the credentials to do it. For me delving into the difference between liberalism and conservatism is not just an academic exercise. Nor is it an effort to decide who to vote for. It is a completely practical matter.

My interest in this topic came as the result of my efforts to change the nature of environmental issues from confrontative to collaborative. What could be more liberal, more Kumbaya, than that? How could this set me to deconstructing liberalism to see how it works, and why it doesn’t work? That is the topic of the next post.

In spite of all of the above, I warned at the end of the previous post that conservatives couldn’t just sit back and wait for Liberals to remove themselves from the scene via this self-inflicted suicide. The reason? Unlike the Shakers (the old time religious group that renounced reproduction and died out because they couldn’t convince enough newbies to become Shakers) Liberals are unsurpassed recruiters.

How do they do it? By achieving what appears, on the surface, to be impossible. They recruit us supposedly greedy, gluttonous Americans by promising us less…. less food, less comfort, less abundance, and, in the end, less independence and freedom. 

Liberals have mastered the ability to sell Less to a culture that is universally considered to be totally obsessed with More—the U. S., Americans, us.

I’ve puzzled and puzzled at why Liberals have chosen this apparently impossible course. And, of course, I’ve puzzled at how they have made it work so well. The obvious answer to the first question is that they have chosen it because it works very, very well. But they couldn’t have known it was going to work so effectively because they were certainly aware of American’s reputation for being obsessed with More. At some point it had to be a leap of faith for them, an immense leap. Why did they take what was apparently a suicidal leap?

I’m convinced that Liberals got in the business of selling less for the simple reason that they had no choice. They had nothing else to sell. 

Liberalism is doomed to selling less because “more” is already taken. Nothing produces “more” better than free enterprise capitalism, the economic system that has been the basis for our economy here in the U. S. for as long as our nation has existed. Capitalism, operating within a high degree of individual freedom, has been the most productive economic system humans have ever devised. Here in the U. S. it has enabled us to achieve a greater and broader prosperity than any other system in human history.

Faced with serving as perpetual also-rans if they tried to compete directly with the unsurpassed producers of more, Liberals had to find an alternative that they could tout as, in some way, better than more. For better or worse, they chose less. 

This may sound like a sure ticket to the graveyard of failed political movements. Instead it has served as a spectacular windfall. In fact, it ranks as one of the greatest political discoveries of all time. Selling Less, especially to Americans, is actually a whole lot easier than selling More.

For one thing anyone can do it. Selling less is a wide open field. Anyone of any age, sex, ability, or appearance can do it without any qualifications, training, education, or experience. 

Selling more is not so easy If you’re selling more, you have to produce something: more food, more cars, more TVs, more energy, more something. That usually means you have to have skills, training, experience, and know-how. Most likely it also means you have to work within an organization set up to produce whatever you’re selling more of. That means you’ll have to pick up more skills, higher levels of training and accumulate experience if you wish to excel and move up the ranks.

Producing Less involves no such requirements. You can go as far as your persistence, hard work, creativity, energy, etc., will take you. To get started all you have to do is say, “We have to use less,” and you are automatically brilliant, a realist, a prophet, a hero. Even a child can become an unimpeachable authority just by saying this, and children are used to make these pronouncements for this very reason.  

If someone engages you in a debate the only argument you need to win is, “You mean to tell me you think we can keep consuming this much stuff and not wreck the planet?” Never mind that this is a recognized logical fallacy named the Argument From Ignorance. If you use the above in any argument against any authority, you will be declared the victor, even by logicians. If your opponent persists, all you have to do is say he or she is probably a pawn of the capitalists and Rush Limbaugh, and they will be hooted down by your supporters.  

Here are some more reasons that Selling Less is an unsurpassed recruiter. 

When I was a math major at Ohio State, on “Career Day” I learned that the major opportunities available to me were: I could become an actuarian for an insurance company and calculate the rate at which people died or had car wrecks so my employer could better calculate insurance rates; Or I could become a math teacher.

I found all this much less than exciting, but then I learned about a much better offer. In this alternative, I could start right out arguing as an equal, eyeball to eyeball with governors and congressmen, even the president. I could immediately be considered as much an authority on a variety of topics as my old college professors, even more of an authority if they were proponents of More. All I had to do was say those magic words—”We have to use less.” If I was good, I could start chocking up victories that would make the newspapers and even go down in history. 

The appeal of this alternative offer is so obvious it is painful: Instead of working on what I considered to be an inconsequential, unfulfilling job trying to produce a profit for some soulless corporation, I would be saving the planet, mountain lions, butterflies, rare plants, even the human race. 

Which offer would you take? Needless to say, I took the latter. 

That’s not all. There are still more advantages to selling less over welling more. If you’re selling less, you don’t have to prove that what you’re doing won’t harm the planet or that it won’t cause us to run out of something, or that it won’t cause too much pollution, or even that it won’t make the rich richer and the poor poorer. What you’re doing is reducing our human impact, our carbon footprint. You’re living simply that others may simply live…..

All of those who oppose you are fossils, soon to be dead old white men or their allies merely to make a profit. You are doing what you do to save the planet. You are selfless, the wave of the future, the great bright hope.

That’s not to say that selling less is not hard work. Those who are best at it work very, very hard. Many are incredibly creative, inventive and persistent. Ironically, many of those who are best at selling us less today are the entrepreneurs, the venture capitalists, the pioneers who would normally be selling us more. In truth they are selling us more… more of less. Lots more of it. How they’re doing it is extremely revealing. That is the subject of the next post.

As happens frequently in situations that make me uncomfortable, I couldn’t think of a clever and appropriately devastating rejoinder to make on the spot, so I just grunted and acted disinterested and hoped he would change the subject.

Later on it occurred to me that I should have called him on what was a totally cruel, tasteless, stupid, and completely empty comment—I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t want to be responsible (by wishing it) for the death of a couple of billion people, but when it comes to liberals, I’m not so sure anymore. 

A good retort to his comment, it occurred to me,  would have been to say, “Knowing how you feel about peace and love and all that I’m sure you would never condemn anyone else to be nuked or plagued or committ suicide, or even ask them to do it in your stead. So, I assume what you just said means you, and the other people who think like you, are volunteering to remove yourselves from the planet in order to save it from overpopulation. That is so courageous and self sacrificing, I’m totally in awe. When do you plan for this to happen, and is there anything you’d like me to do for you after you’re gone?”

While I was kicking myself for not having said the above, another thought came to mind that was much more of an awakening and absolutely chilling. It occurred to me that liberals really are removing themselves from the earth, and that they really are committing mass suicide, and they are doing it at a really startling rate. Shades of Hale-Bopp and Jonestown!

At that point I remembered a couple of environmentalists I knew, and a couple more I’m aware of, who killed themselves because they thought they were “part of the problem.” I thought of a woman in England whom I had heard had herself sterilized so she couldn’t increase her carbon footprint by producing other humans. I thought of myself and my wife who had essentially done the same thing—We didn’t have kids at least partially because we swallowed the “Earth is overpopulated” propaganda, too.

I also thought of an article by Mark Steyn called “It’s the Demography, Stupid”). In this article Steyn pointed out that in the U. S. there are only 2.07 births per woman. In Ireland 1.87. In New Zealand 1.79, Australia 1.76, and in Canada 1.5, which is well below replacement rate. Germany and Austria come in at 1.3. Russia and Italy at 1.2; and Spain is at 1.1, which is only about half replacement rate. This means, Steyn points out, that “Spain’s population is halving every generation. By 2050, Italy’s population will have fallen by 22%, Bulgaria’s by 36%, Estonia’s by 52%.” 

In America, demographic trends suggest that the majority of this attrition by far is happening among liberals. Steyn notes that, “In the 2004 election, John Kerry won the 16 states with the lowest birthrates; George W. Bush took 25 of the 26 states with the highest.” By 2050, the 100 million more Americans who will be alive will be mostly red-staters.

The next time you talk to a liberal tell him or her goodbye, thank them for their sacrifice, and ask them if you can have their Prius or, better yet, their wine collection.

Ed Abbey, guru of modern radical environmentalism, promised his followers that they would live to “piss on the graves of their enemies.” It appears that he may have had it backwards.

But before you start thinking that liberalism and liberal environmentalism contain the seeds of their own suicide, you should consider the fact that this movement is a very, very good recruiter.

That is the real issue here, and it is the subject of the next and most important post of this blog yet.

In spite of these core differences,  and in spite of the fact that, under Obama, net income for Berkshire Hathaway, the company Buffet heads, has plummeted to 4% of what they were under Bush, Buffet says he voted for Obama, still supports him, and believes Republicans have an obligation not to oppose him.

Huh?

Buffet voted for someone whose policies he opposes? And then he’s surprised when, after being elected, that politician works to implement those policies? 

That’s stupid.

And then Buffet tells the rest of us we shouldn’t oppose this politician and his policies?

That’s crazy.

It is also exactly what I mean when I say Obama is not going to be held accountable for the results of his policies even when those policies go very sour and cause great harm.

And Warren Buffet isn’t the only big-time capitalist helping me make this point.

Jack Welch, who took GE from a value of $14 billion to $410 billion and authored the books Straight From the Gut and Winning, takes issue with Obama “throwing all these initiatives (Cap and Trade, etc.) into this game in the middle of a crisis.” he even calls Obama “crazy” for doing so and says he’s “lost in another world,” and then he gushes,

 “I love the guy. I think he’s great.” Welch says this even though GE’s stock has plummeted from more than $42 under Bush to less than $6 under Obama—a drop of more than 86%.

Hedge fund cofounder Barton Bigg objects to Obama’s intent to raise capital gains and other taxes targeting “the real entrepreneurial, long-term investment part of the economy” and says this and other elements of the redistributionist part of Obama’s social agenda “has bothered the market a lot,” On the basis of this he says, he’d like to see Obama “back off.” Then he adds,

“I voted for Obama.  I’m a fan of Obama.”

Jim Cramer, host of the TV show “Mad Money” added himself to this list. On an interview on NBC’s “Today” TV show, Cramer said,” Obama is causing the greatest destruction of wealth I have ever seen by a president,” After enjoying a few days of celebrity on conservative talk shows because of his comment, Cramer hedged it with this statement: “But the truth is I actually agree with almost all of Obama’s agenda right down to having the rich pay more taxes.  I just think it’s the wrong time.”

Marxists call people like this “useful idiots.” Many of the rest of us might want to ask them “If you’re so rich why aren’t you smart?” But before the rest of us start thinking of ourselves as superior to these ultra-rich icons, we should know that plenty of the rest of us are  just as guilty of the same idiocy.

A recent Rasmussen poll reveals that 53% of the American people say it is likely we are headed toward a depression similar to the thirties while 56% of us approve of Obama and the policies he is enacting that  will create that depression.

What does this have to do with the environment? Plenty. First, it gives all of us a more clear idea of how someone who helps create policies that exterminate populations of endangered species such as the spikedace, or desertifies pieces of rangeland such as the Drake Exclosure can call themselves an environmentalist. They can do it in the same way that the people I have just mentioned can support policies that are aimed at destroying capitalism and still be absolutely convinced they are good capitalists.

And maybe they are. 

Most of the people I know who support the policies that have exterminated the Verde River Spikedace and desertified the Drake exclosure and tens of millions of acres like it consider themselves good environmentalists. 

And maybe they are.

They love wildlife, undeveloped land, beautiful scenery, uncut forests, and undammed rivers. They hug trees and rescue prairie dogs and try to get obscure species of fish and bugs protected as endangered.

However, the actions of Warren Buffet, Jack Welch, Barton Bigg, Jim Cramer, and plenty of the rest of us show how people who consider themselves to be totally, spiritually, cellularly committed to the cause of environmentalism, who even consider environmentalism the most important cause in their lives, can be presented with examples of how their actions have caused the extermination of populations of endangered species, caused nonnative species to invade and replace native species, and desertified tens of millions of acres of land across the West, as I have done time and time again, and say, “I voted for those policies.  I’m a fan of those policies. I support those policies,” 

And how they can tell those of us who see that this emperor has no clothes that, when we oppose these policies, we are the problem.

(For specific examples see “Seeing is Believing” and previous posts)

What is unique about Ms. Martin’s approach became apparent whenever one of us said something like: “I want all the cows off public lands.”  or ” I want higher grazing fees,” or when a rancher said, “I want fewer regulations and fewer meetings like this to go to.” Whenever a demand like this was made, Tommie would ask the demander what he or she hoped to achieve by such an action. How we would expect the land to change as a result? How would it look? How would it make us feel? What would we want to change? And she would keep asking questions like this until we answered in terms of real world results: that we wanted less bare dirt. More plants. Healthier populations of wildlife, and so forth. 

The result was that, whenever Tommie used this technique, in almost every case, ranchers and environmentalists ended up affirming that they wanted the same results. Everyone wanted green mountainsides and more vital plant communities and populations of wildlife appropriate for the type of land it was. 

Realizing that we wanted so many of the same things made a huge change in the tone of the meeting. We had started the meeting by making the same demands ranchers and environmentalists always made in situations like this, and the mood had been typically confrontational. Each side cheered for their side and hooted at the demands made by the other side. But, the first time Tommie Martin’s facilitation led one of the ranchers to say he wanted something that was considered “environmental,” I remember that we all sat in stunned silence. At least I know I did. And as this happened a second and third time the meeting became more friendly. We joked. We laughed. Some people even hugged.

I remember being extremely impressed by what had happened, and very puzzled. After I thought about it, I decided that Tommie’s facilitation had revealed that there are two kinds of goals, and I labeled them: “Goals that Incite” and “Goals that Unite.” I also labeled these different kinds of goals “prescriptive” and “descriptive.” 

Prescriptive goals involve prescribing (or demanding) that a certain process or policy be adopted —”Get the cows off.” or (getting back to Obama) forcing energy companies to use wind power and solar rather than drill for more oil or develop cleaner ways to burn coal. 

Descriptive goals involve achieving certain results—greener rangelands, less dependence on foreign oil, or greater prosperity.

Prescriptive goals are “Goals that Incite” because no one, not even a two-year-old likes to be told what to do. 

Descriptive goals are more likely to be Goals that Unite, as they were at the meeting I described above, because, when you get right down to it, most of us really do want the same things. This is especially true with regard to the environment. Who doesn’t want clean air and clean water and healthy ecosystems? 

So, why do people who want the same things fight?

The best way to answer that question was given to me at a small get-together with a couple of friends at which I was showing my slides and talking about what I had discovered at that facilitated meeting.

When I pointed out that the ranchers and environmentalists at that meeting had discovered that they had the same goals, one of my friends, an ecologist and activist, was so offended she positively fumed.

“We have no right to set goals for nature.” she spat. “We need to do the right thing and whatever happens is what’s supposed to happen.

That explained to me better than anything else I have encountered why so few environmentalists were interested in the message that they could achieve what they wanted more effectively by working with ranchers (and other people they saw as environmental adversaries) than by fighting with them. I had made the mistake of believing that, for the people within the mainstream (liberal) environmental movement, environmental goals, such as healthy rangelands, functional watersheds, and healthy wildlife are primary, while, in truth, they are not. 

My friend, the ecologist/activist, and all the others who have no interest whatsoever in working with their adversaries to achieve Goals That Unite, made it very clear that for them and many other mainstream environmental activists, what is primary is getting other people to do what they (the environmentalists) think is “the right thing” regarding the environment, and that protecting endangered species, reducing the human “footprint” on the land, fighting global warming, and the whole list of environmental causes are the excuses they use to impose the regulations, elect the politicians, and win the lawsuits that enable them to dictate people’s actions vis a vis the environment, which means vis a vis everything.

And if the threatened fish disappears, the endangered bird nests somewhere else, and the rangeland turns into desert; that is what’s supposed to happen. You can’t blame them, and you can’t blame the policies they promote. 

My friend took issue with my “manage for common goals” solution to rangeland conflict because, to her, the question of how to manage the environment is a matter of moral judgement—and as with all moral matters, outcomes are irrelevant. How’s that? When we are exhorted to be honest or to follow the golden rule we are told that we must do so whatever the outcome. Whether it benefits us or not. The problem is, how we manage the environment has a practical as well as a moral side. Although the people who forced the removal of cattle from along the Verde River did it because they considered it the right thing to do (See earlier post). They also did it to save a “threatened” fish, and when their action exterminated the fish they and their method deserve to be held accountable.

What does this have to do with Barak Obama? The policies he has promised to bring to government, and is now in the process of enacting, have been sold on the basis of their morality. We’re supposed to abandon the most successful energy source humans have ever devised (fossil fuels) for a bunch of 1960s pipe dreams: windmills, biofuels, solar, and cogeneration (whatever that is), which are technologies into which we’ve poured billions for almost half a century and still they haven’t performed, because “it’s the right thing to do.” We’re supposed to negotiate without preconditions with enemies who place plenty of preconditions on us; turn loose murderers who can’t wait to murder more of us, kill ourselves via increased abortions and euthanasia disguised as restricting treatment to elders and others who are “low priorities” because a socialist economy won’t support as many of us. And last, but certainly not least, we’re supposed to scrap the most effective economy humans have ever devised—free market capitalism—for the real “failed policies of the past”—socialism. 

We’re supposed to do all of this for the flimsy reason that a lot of liberals think it is “the right thing to do.”

As for accountability: When the “chickens” of this transformation come home to roost, you know what’s going to happen. When the economy tanks, when our enemies gain strength and we weaken, when our freedoms disappear and government control is extended into every aspect of our lives, the proponents of these policies are going to tell us that this is “what’s supposed to happen.” They’re going to tell us that it’s is the best we can hope for. It’s what we have to do to live within our means—to keep from destroying the planet. They’re going to give us all these excuses when the real reason is these disasters are the best a socialist economy and policial system can produce.

When that happens will the fact that in a socialist society the people who live highest on the hog are the political leaders be any solace?

Recently, I visited my old home town, Flagstaff, which has changed from an old logging, ranching, and railroad town, to one of the most liberal places I know of. On the streets of Flagstaff I saw a higher percentage of Obama bumper stickers than even in liberal Santa Barbara. Everywhere I went I heard my friends gush about Obama. That he is going to change the world was taken as a given. That I shared in this belief was taken as a given, too. I even heard people refer to him as a “Christ.” I didn’t have the heart to tell these people that I am an unbeliever. I think it would have been too ugly.

All this got me to wondering. Why are so many people, including so many conservatives, so euphoric about this relatively inexperienced and unaccomplished politician? Why do they think of him literally as a messiah? And then the thought came to me, that, in a liberal frame of reference, Obama is a messiah. A messiah is someone who absolves us of our sins. Because Obama is African-American, a vote for him absolves the voter of any guilt as a racist. Because Obama has promised to end the war in Iraq, meet with our enemies as equals, and change the image of the U. S. from a nation of war to one of peace, voting for Obama establishes the voter as a person of peace and absolves him or her of any guilt in the war against the Islamists or against anybody, anyplace, anytime. 

Because Obama has vowed to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor and have the government provide health care for all, a vote for him absolves the voter of economic guilt. too. (That means you can keep flying first class and not feel guilty about it.) 

Because Obama has stated that the U. S. can’t continue to usurp 25% of the world’s wealth for a mere 3% of the people without being held accountable, and because he has promised to work to end global warming, a vote for Obama absolves the voter of green guilt as well.

Imagine, ABSOLVING YOURSELF OF ALL GUILT merely by voting for a presidential candidate. No wonder Obama’s true believers are euphoric!!

This euphoria is one of the reasons that, when Rush Limbaugh was asked what will wake people up to the fact that Obama can’t deliver on all that he has promised, Limbaugh answered that they’re never going to wake up.

Another way to say that is: virtually everyone who voted for Obama, and many of the people who voted for McCain and now support Obama (even McCain supports Obama), aren’t even considering the possibility that Obama’s policies can fail. 

Because flying blind in times as hazardous as these is so very, very dangerous, this inability (or unwillingness) to hold Obama accountable could get us so deep into trouble before we even realize it, that it will be very difficult for us to claw our way out of that trouble, if we can do it at all.

I’m sure there are plenty of Obama-ites who would tell me I’m totally delusional about this. That if Obama’s policies were beginning to fail, he would realize it and change. Hasn’t Obama said recently that if someone shows him a way to do anything that works better than his way he would change? And if he didn’t live up to this wouldn’t his supporters realize it and pressure him to change, and then, surely, he would do it.

One service this blog can provide is to equip its readers to help Obama keep this promise. To do that, I believe most of us need help because for some time now we have been failing to hold our politicians, bureaucrats, and other supposed leaders accountable while they were claiming to be saving the planet but really doing just the opposite—making the world and our lives worse. We hope to provide this help by equipping Obama’s supporters and his detractors with the skills to cut through the euphoria and recognize when his policies are producing the opposite of what he has promised. If “The Right Way to be Green” can provide this service, it might just play a role in saving his administration.

What this blog is about, after all, is making liberalism more accountable by pointing out that, in many cases, the policies of liberal environmentalism — environmental protection, preservation, reducing the “human footprint” — don’t make the environment better, they make it worse. In many cases they exterminate the endangered species they purport to protect, hasten the desertification they claim to reverse, and make us all worse rather than better off. Just like Obama, they do all this without being held accountable. In fact they get credit for doing just the opposite.

Here’s how: (These have all been mentioned in earlier posts).

When liberal environmentalists apparently were responsible for causing the demise of a population of a threatened fish in the Upper Verde River in Arizona, no Environmental Impact Statement was required even after government scientists had cited the policy two environmental groups had compelled the U. S. Forest Service to adopt via a threatened lawsuit (see Seeing is Believing and other previous posts) as the cause of the spikedace’s disappearance. Nor were any of the environmental groups or any of their members charged with a “taking” (killing) of a listed species, which, according to the Endangered Species Act is a federal offense that can be punished by a significant fine.

In spite of this failure, the environmental groups who were apparently responsible for the disappearance of the Verde River spikedace are still looked upon as its protectors and the policy that exterminated the little fish is still looked upon as its greatest hope of survival. In the meantime, the scientists who have said otherwise have been silenced. As for the press, if it reports anything, it reports the opposite of what has happened. And when I tell members of the environmental movement what their policies have done, as I have many times, they scoff and call me a pawn of the ranching industry and discount what I have told them or promptly forget it. 

There are plenty of other instances of this phenomenon (again, which I have reported in other places in this blog). For instance, I’ve told you how the policies of liberal environmentalism have: 

• Accelerated desertification of extensive areas of the American West.

• Created a preserve for an endangered bird which the bird avoids, preferring to live on a nearby cattle ranch. To add insult to injury liberal environmentalists then tried to remove the rancher from the ranch the bird preferred ostensibly in order to “protect” the bird.

• Caused the deterioration of California native grasslands by making those grasslands more vulnerable to invasive nonnatives.

• Caused the demise of unique habitats called vernal pools, which have been called the densest concentrations of threatened and endangered species on the planet.

• Caused the deterioration and near demise of native bird habitat on the Island of Kauai in the state of Hawaii.

• Caused the deterioration and near demise of one of the most valuable wetland habitats in India and resulted in the killing of nine villagers in the process.

Why would an environmental group whose primary mission is to protect endangered species end up causing the extermination of a population of one of those species and not even say “Oops,” or admit their mistake, or try to correct it? And why are they still pressing to expand the policy that caused the demise of a fish they say their mission is to protect?

After more than thirty years of experience as an environmental activist, including several years with the Sierra Club, Audubon and Earth First!, examples such as these have convinced me that the collection of activities we call “environmentalism” may appear to be about birds and fishes and ecosystems, and many of those involved in it may sincerely feel that they are personally dedicated to things that are green and growing and wild, but in the end, environmentalism is about politics, which in the end is about control. 

One sure way to confirm this is to recognize the way in which environmentalists measure success. Environmental groups measure success in the number of green laws passed, regulations created, acres brought under “protective” management (administered by the government and directed by them), and in the election of politicians committed to increasing all of the above (like Barak Obama). On the Verde, for the environmental groups directly involved and those cheering from the sidelines, success was identified as removing private management from the lands along the river and placing control of those lands more securely in the hands of the government, which environmentalists are more adept at controlling than they are at controlling individual ranchers or private corporations.

All this has happened under cover of a smokescreen which protects the process from accountability and anoints it as the “right” thing to do. That smokescreen is provided by the bedrock assumption of contemporary liberal environmentalism (which most of us subscribe to): that all environmental problems are the result of human impact — more specifically the impact of human productive activity, and the only way to solve any and all of those problems is to reduce that impact, ideally to zero. Removing cattle from along the Verde reduced human productive activity on those lands and therefore returned them to “nature.” When the Verde River spikedace disappeared as a result, the enviros blamed nature, and washed their hands of the matter.

In this same way, Barak Obama is absolved of any accountability for the failure of his policies. If his energy policies cause our economy and therefore our standard of living to shrink, even catastrophically, his supporters will tell us and themselves, he is doing the right thing by reducing the human footprint on the planet and reducing our dependency on foreign oil, and the standard of living we are left with as a result is natural and good and, therefore, we shouldn’t expect anything more.   

And if Obama’s plan to nationalize health care reduces the quality and availability of health care in America, as people who have lived under similar systems tell us it will, that failure, also, will be chocked up as a “success” because making health care available to all is the right thing to do, and for liberals success is a matter of installing the right (i. e. liberal) policies and whatever happens as a result is the best you have any right to expect.

If Obama’s foreign policies embolden our enemies and make us and our allies more vulnerable and more likely to be attacked, this new teflon president, who has sold himself as a “man of peace,” will not be held accountable for that either. Those unhappy consequences will be dismissed as a late payment for “the failed policies of the past” or the legacy of George Bush, or as Obama’s minister has described it, “America’s chickens coming home to roost,” and we will be told we’re getting what we deserve.

In short, Obama’s election has not only absolved us of all guilt, it has done the same for him. What that means is, most likely our circumstances will have to become very ugly to wake enough of us from our slumber to recognize that this emperor has no clothes and we have a right to try to achieve more than the sour fruit he is already trying to sell us. 

Stay tuned. We’re working to help wake you as early as possible.

Now, Santa Barbara is in the rear view mirror. Trish and I have put everything in storage, and we’re on the road. Considering the current state of the economy, we are up-to-date. Homeless! Unemployed! Foot loose and relatively fancy free (unless the banks tank and the dollar becomes toilet paper).

So, why haven’t I been posting? Since we left Santa Barbara, we have lived on the beach in Carpinteria (a small town south of S. B.), camped in a state part in San Clemente (beautiful and uncrowded) and spent a month on Mission Bay in San Diego walking along the bay, watching the winter arrival of various species of waterfowl, and rowing around the bay in our little red dory. At one point, after a day on the water, I thought “I’d better get back to work (blogging, trying to line up talks)!” The next thought was almost instantaneous: “What for? That would get in the way of doing what I’m doing—having fun! That was probably about a month ago.

Lately, however, I’ve been getting the itch again. Since we’ve moved to a private RV park in Gold Canyon, AZ. we haven’t had to move every few days, which was required while we were living in state parks and other gov. run campgrounds. So, I have more time, which means (I hope) I can write and have fun, too.

Since my last post, the liberal messiah BHO has been elected and is building his administration. That in itself provides an  unlimited amount of material vis a vis creating a conservative alternative to liberal environmentalism. And plenty of other things have been happening, too, some with regard to some of the issues I have been writing about, and some totally new. For instance, during my hiatus I have given a number of talks in small towns in Northern California (Placerville, Red Bluff, Sutter’s Creek, Woodland, and Nevada City). That always provides good material. And I have got a private park in Santa Barbara interested in using animals to restore health and function to some of the lands in their park. That’s a good topic, too. And, of course, George Yard is still struggling to save the spikedace only now he’ll have to deal with an even bigger army of liberal world savers drunk with the drug of victory.

In other words, posts are coming. I just wanted to let you know.

Presently I’m working on a post entitled: LIBERAL ENVIRONMENTALISM REALLY ISN’T ABOUT THE ENVIRONMENT. 

Stay tuned

The extirpation of a “Threatened Species” (the spikedace) from the Verde River by the Liberal Environmentalists’ cure for any and every thing that ails the environment—protection (see last post)—isn’t the only proof this approach doesn’t work. There are other instances in which protecting the environment has failed to restore balance, heal the land, bring back native plants and animals, and save endangered species. Here are some more:

DESERTIFICATION: On Wupatki National Monument, adjacent to former Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt’s family’s ranch in Northern Arizona, the amount of bare dirt (soil without plants on it) has more than doubled in 13 years of “protection.” In contrast, four trials of using cattle to encourage plant growth on a study plot on the Babbitt Ranch monitored by EcoResults (a not-for-profit I helped found) increased plant cover by native grasses by an average of 20% per trial.

ENDANGERED SPECIES: A ranch along the Gila River in New Mexico hosts one of the largest known populations of an endangered bird—the southwestern willow flycatcher. Two adjacent “protected” areas host none of those birds.

NATIVE PLANTS: On a preserve near Santa Barbara, California, where I live today, exclosures have been constructed to protect areas of native grasses from human impact on the theory that the current invasion of California grasslands by plants from other continents is caused by the damage done to those habitats by more than a century of human use. After 15 or so years of post-human management the exclosures have proven more hospitable to the invaders than the natives. The protected areas have become almost pure stands of invaders, while outside the fence, where the land continues to be grazed, and thus be used by humans, there are healthy stands of natives grasses right up to the fence.

VERNAL POOLS: In Central California, when cattle grazing was removed from seasonal wetlands called vernal pools, Nature Conservancy scientists found that post-human management made these concentrations of native diversity and endangered species vulnerable to invasion by nonnative plants. This invasion caused some of these seasonal wetlands to dry up before the rare plants and animals that inhabit them could spring to life and reproduce. In as few as 3 years of “protection” these areas, which have been called one of the highest concentrations of rare and endangered species on Earth, have literally disappeared.

To their credit a number of mainstream environmental groups, including The Nature Conservancy, Audubon, Defenders of Wildlife, and others have recognized this situation and have facilitated the return of grazing to these unique areas. Still, the other situations I described above, and plenty more like them, have experienced no such progress.

My experience and my examples come mainly from ranching and rangeland management in the American West, but the phenomenon I am describing occurs in other types of habitat with other kinds of management, too.

HAWAII: On the Hawaiian island of Kauai farming was removed from the Hanalei Valley to benefit native birds. When bird populations began to suffer, farming was restored, and the birds came back.

INDIA: In “Cattle and Conservation at Bharatpur: A Case Study in Science and Advocacy,” Michael Lewis describes a situation in Bharatpur, India, in which the grazing animals belonging to surrounding villagers were removed from an area of wetlands that had been created as a hunting reserve for the local maharaja and recently converted into a park. Nine villagers were shot to death achieve this removal. Since the villagers and their livestock were forcibly removed, the marshes, ponds, and canals have become clogged with plants the cattle used to eat. As a result, bird numbers have begun to drop as has the tiger population, which used to be one of the most dense in the world. As of 2003, the Indian Government was struggling to deal with this apparent anomaly in environmental theory: Removing the impacts of humans is not supposed to cause parks to deteriorate.

In all of these examples, and plenty more, the remedy mainstream liberal environmentalism or Big Green has identified as the only way to deal with our environmental problems—reducing human impact—has failed to achieve its goal. It has failed to save endangered species, improve habitat, and encourage the survival of native plant species. In every case I have listed it did the exact opposite of what it set out to do: it exterminated the endangered species it intended to protect, destroyed the habitat it was intended to restore, made areas more, rather than less, susceptible to invasion by nonnatives, and hastened the desertification of land it was supposed to preserve.

So, what does Liberal Environmentalism do? What is it for? Why are so many people committed to it? Rabid about it? Stay tuned.

A sedge meadow being “protected” from livestock (cattle) to eliminate the damage they allegedly cause to native fish habitat. As a result, trees have invaded the meadow and caused it to erode

The end results of protection

In the previous post (see Liberal Environmentalism’s Deepest, Darkest, Secret) I argued that Liberal Environmentalism’s claim that “protecting” nature, i. e. reducing the impacts of humans on forests, grasslands, deserts, meadows, mountains, etc. invariably makes those areas more natural, more healthy, better functioning, and a better home to their native plants, animals, and ecological functions is bogus.  

One example I offered to support that claim is that, when this remedy was applied to protect a native fish, the “threatened” spikedace in the Verde River in Central Arizona, the move that was intended to protect the fish—removing cattle grazing from along the river—seems to have extirpated it instead. How this happened, I explained, went like this: After grazing was removed, a large increase in trees and willows began to crowd the riverbanks, transforming the stream from wide, shallow, gravelly, and warm (ideal habitat for spikedace and other warm-water natives) to narrow, tree-shaded, mud-bottomed, deep, and cool, which is ideal for large, non-native Spikedace-eating predators such as smallmouth bass, which ate the native minnows.

But that’s just part of the story. Removing human impact (in the form of cattle grazing) created much more of an ecological disaster than just extirpating a native minnow. It drastically changed the course of the river, the shape of the riverbed, and the character of the riverside habitat. Here’s how:

Until recently, much of the riverside habitat of the Verde River consisted of sedge meadows. Sedges are grass-like, water-loving plants that are an irredescent green for much of the year. We call the meadows “sedge meadows” even though they also include rushes and grasses.  These meadows play an extremely valuable role in the ecological functioning of desert rivers like the Verde. When the river floods, the grass-like leaves of the sedge plants bend with the force of the water and form a thatch (like a thatched roof), which protects the meadow’s rich soils from erosion. The sedge leaves also filter sediment from the floodwaters, enriching and adding to the soils that support them. The roots of the sedges form a dense mat that helps hold the soil in place.

Sedge meadows thus create a habitat that is extremely rich and very stable even though it is frequently subjected to one of the most powerfully destructive forces on earth—fast-moving, sediment-laden floodwater.  Perhaps most important of the vital roles sedge meadows play in the life of the desert is as a water-storer. Their living community of grass-like plants, root mats, and deep, organic-rich soils acts as a living sponge, absorbing water when flows are high and releasing it slowly when times are dry.

These meadows thus even out the flash flood and deep drought water cycle characteristic of the desert and make water available for longer periods of time to larger numbers of living things—plants, animals, and humans—in a habitat where this is very, very important. When the cows were removed from the Verde they were no longer there to nip the occasional tree seedling that managed to sprout in the meadows. Relieved of this “predator” these seedlings grew into saplings whose stems stood up through the floodwaters creating turbulence that swirled and dug and eventually penetrated the protective sedge thatch and root mat at their base. Thus exposed, the meadows’ rich and vulnerable soils began to wash away. The results can be seen in the photo sequence shown at the beginning of this post.