Today we start another Trojan Heron series called “Pure Imagination” about the environmental-ish ideas we confront daily in the San Juans. The series title comes from a famous song in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, and one of the stanzas could be the motto for the Friends and their friends.
We’ll beginWith a spinTraveling inThe world of my creationWhat we’ll seeWill defyExplanation
Books like Fast Food Nation exposed the dark side of the All-American Meal, and there is a dark side to environmental-ish ideas too … and oddly the two dark sides are linked. Like McDonalds, environmental-ish organizations spew images of wholesome goodness … but there is an underlying profit motive distorting the truth. The truth about environmental-ish organizations is that their “wilderness loving” policies and actions actually promote urbanism … by being against rural living. They even support and promote factory farming … by demanding Conditional Use Permits (CUPs) for new family farming and suing to shut down family-run aquaculture.
If the environmental-ish proponents of the Growth Management Act (GMA) were to get their way, there would be über-planned cities and nothing else. The illogical conclusion would be that we’d all have to live in one crammed city bounded by uninhabited nature. There would be no country lanes … no farm cottages … no one-lane bridges … no bucolic pastures. To feed people in the über city on the smallest possible land footprint, we would need planned factory farms, too … there’d be no free-range chickens in that world.
At the density of Seattle, the entire population of Washington State would fit into Mason County … with 50 square miles to spare. At the population density of Friday Harbor, the entire population of San Juan County would fit onto just two-thirds of Lopez. Do we really have a population and development problem, or do we have environmental-ish profit motives at work trying to separate people from nature and the land?
Watch the following entertaining video by (believe it or not) Chipotle, the Mexican natural (fast) food company. The images you’ll see about mass produced food also apply to our centrally-planned, mass-produced environmentalism. We’re not getting real environmentalism anymore … we’re getting “environmental-ish” ideas that people (especially city people) consume without thinking. And Crow Foods might as well be Friends Incorporated because both are only interested in money and image … most certainly they are not interested in you, local food, rural character, or the environment.
These days, as with food, we have to ask ourselves, where does our “environmentalism” come from? We’ll try to provide some answers in this series.