May 1997
T he 28th annual
Earth Day celebration came and went, 10 days after the close of the 14th
Summit for the Animals, a convocation of animal rights organization heads that
perennially does nothing. Chances are, most ANIMAL PEOPLE readers were
as unaffected by either as the organizers were by one another, despite the
stated intent of Earth Day organizers to spotlight the Endangered Species Act,
and of the Summit organizers to court the thoroughly indifferent environmental
movement, whatever is left of it.
Better potty training might have
prevented this sibling schism, along with air and water pollution, before the
popular concept of the environmental cause came to be eliminating waste. In a
time when “environmentalist” is misleadingly synonymous to much of the
public with Big Brother, as much due to onerously mandated recycling as to
wise-use wiseguy machinations, and when some leading “environmental”
organizations such as The Nature Conservancy as aggressively extirpate nature
and wildlife as any commercial developer, it is worthwhile to recall that the
first Earth Day, which the ANIMAL PEOPLE editor helped publicize as a
cub reporter in Berkeley, California, offered the notion of an ecology-centered
approach to living as a direct challenge to the environmental establishment as
much as to Washington D.C. and Wall Street.
Participants in the Berkeley
march, which was miniscule compared to the anti-war marches of the era, were
forthrightly agreed that hunter/conservationism is inherently exploitive,
anti-ecological, and just plain wrong. There was near-universal concord that a
movement had to be built to oppose pandering to wealthy hunters in order to
raise enough money to preserve token green spaces within which rangers like
latter-day King Canutes would try to hold back the tides of climatic change. We
talked at teach-ins about acid rain and global warming, which were
scientifically predicted if not yet confirmed as upon us.
No one denigrated
the efforts of a John Muir to save Yosemite from development, Julia Butler
Hansen for her dedication to saving the Columbian whitetailed deer, or Velma
Johnston, better known as “Wild Horse Annie,” for fighting the
extirpation of mustangs. We honored their work––but the job ahead, we
saw, was to advance the notion of reverence for life beyond application to
signal species and singular beauty. The importance of saving the whales, someone
explained, was not that we would ever be able to go and see whales, since
commercial whale-watching was still an unrealized concept, but rather that
whales inhabit the whole globe. The oceans themselves are their critical
habitat, making them the appropriate signal species for a whole-earth movement.
The editor does not remember any dissent from three prescriptions for
basic lifestyle change to achieve a healthier planet: recycle, use renewable
energy, and become vegetarian. The object was not just to clean up air and
water, an immediate goal, but also to prevent pollution in the first place. The
editor was already vegetarian, as were the scientists who spoke, each of whom
made the point––emphasized memorably 18 years later by John Robbins in
Diet for a New America––that no action accessible to every individual
can do more to save water, fossil fuels, forest, and topsoil than abandoning
meat, nor does any action do more to show regard for fellow living beings than
ceasing to eat them.
There was no animal rights movement in 1970, nor talk
of one, but animal protection was central to the Berkeley Earth Day, with much
talk of the need for an Endangered Species Act and other legislation to protect
the existence of all creatures great and small, including coyotes, bats, and
spiders as well as bald eagles and bison. Representing the humane movement,
someone from the Berkeley SPCA brought a dog and a cat in wire carrying cages,
and spoke about neutering to prevent dog-and-cat overpopulation after a speaker
from Planned Parenthood addressed human overpopulation. She adopted out the dog
and cat on the spot. It never occurred to anyone that an ecology movement might
separate human concerns from those of the other animals on Spaceship Earth.
There was an antivivisection thread to the activity as well. Bruce Ames, of
the University of California at Berkeley, pointed out the failures of animal
testing to protect public health, arguing that vegetarianism would do far more
for public health than banning trace amounts of pesticides. Ames offended
disciples of Rachel Carson by denouncing the Delaney Clause, the 1959 law which
until repealed last year stood as both the bulwark of public protection from
cancer-causing food and drug ingredients, and the primary legal mandate for
animal testing. The editor found Ames’ arguments so uniquely compelling as
to interview Ames on Earth Day 1971 for the San Jose State University radio
station.
Of the three prescriptions for lifestyle change, recycling proved
the easiest sell, until the Arab oil embargo of 1974 briefly roused public
interest in renewable energy. When gas prices dropped, recycling regained the
spotlight. Practicing what ANIMAL PEOPLE now terms “potty
environmentalism,” the editor cofounded a recycling center at SJSU in 1970
that evolved into the first city-wide recycling program in the U.S., then spent
13 years exposing air and water pollution. The editor helped win construction of
14 sewage treatment plants in Quebec, and helped defeat proposals to site two
toxic waste dumps plus a nuclear waste repository in northern Vermont and New
Hampshire. Yet each victory brought a defeat: the public saw the need to keep
pig poop out of the rivers, but not the need to quit eating pork, so as to
eliminate not just the pig poop problem but also many other humane and
ecological abuses. Hunter/conservationists rallied against the dumps, which
might have fenced off deer habitat, but were oblivious to the greater harm done
to biodiversity by wildlife management policies holding abundant deer as the
highest value.
“Save the whales!” become the rallying cry for
the passage of the ESA and the creation of CITES, but along the way the
environmental establishment refashioned their purpose into a weapon used chiefly
to preserve scenic landscapes––and not incidentally, raise funds. The
anti-nuclear testing committee Don’t Make A Wave evolved into Greenpeace.
Energized by the tactics of cofounder Paul Watson against whalers and sealers,
Greenpeace became the flagship cause of the Baby Boom generation, only to oust
Watson once it accumulated enough assets to have something to lose. Greenpeace
then abandoned the anti-sealing campaign along with an offshoot anti-fur
campaign in 1986, as a gesture toward making common cause with
hunter/conservationists against northern development. This was billed as seeking
solidarity with Native Americans, but the Native leaders we knew mostly wanted
economic development, if their people could own and control it, and had pointed
out for decades how the commercial fur trade brought the destruction of their
people by alcohol.
More recently, as ANIMAL PEOPLE exposed in June
1994, Greenpeace senior staff advised themselves in an internal memo that “Greenpeace
does not oppose whaling, in principle,” and “Greenpeace is neither for
nor against the killing of marine mammals.” Greenpeace took this position
to win the creation by the International Whaling Commission, on paper, of the
unenforced Southern Oceans Whale Sanctuary, at cost of accepting an agreement,
in principle, that commercial whaling shall resume, not just by renegades like
Norway and Iceland, but by other nations as well, with official approval. The
transformation of Greenpeace from voice of whole-earth consciousness to
traditional hunter/conservationist preservationism was complete. We discern
little if any practical or moral difference between protecting bison in
Yellowstone National Park, the signal accomplishment of hunter/conservationism,
only to kill them wholesale at the park boundary, and protecting whales in the
Antarctic only to eventually allow their massacre a few degrees north. Both
amount to “saving” species by replacing free-ranging behavior with
thinly disguised agriculture. Neither advances an ethic of respect for life and
nature.
ANIMAL
PEOPLE believes that authentic ecological conduct and humane consciousness
begin with doing by the animals around us, including other humans, as we would
be done by. This encompasses maintenance of healthy habitat. We believe it is
important that no creature be deprived of essential habitat. At the same time,
we believe it is absurd to think one is protecting biodiversity against ongoing
and eternal habitat transformation by cruelly mistreating members of one species
on purported behalf of another–– for instance, by trapping coyotes
ostensibly to prevent predation on endangered Columbian whitetailed deer at the
Julia Hansen Butler Refuge, who would be much less endangered if cattle were not
encouraged to eat and trample much of their habitat.
Nature allows no
viable niche to go unfilled. When a species is lost, for whatever reason, a
surviving species soon adapts and then evolves to fill the void, not necessarily
in the same way, continuing the very process that created biodiversity. If we
hold off the extinction of any species by heroic means, and ANIMAL PEOPLE
certainly encourages many efforts to do so, let us clearly understand that we
undertake heroic measures for our own reasons, much as we may have caused the
decline of that species, and let our conduct be governed by humane principles.
Nature holds no mandate against extinction. Most of us oppose extinction not for
intellectual reasons, though we have some, so much as because we feel that
causing an extinction is an act of criminal violence against nature.
Yet
nature has no intrinsic preference for kindness and tolerance. Our very concept
of “living in harmony” with nature is a construct adopted from the
humane movement by the ecology movement of circa 1970, as part of distinguishing
itself from hunter/conservationism, which professes a need to kill nature in
order to save trophy remnants.
The environmental organizations formed
around the first Earth Day forgot the humane component when they set aside
vegetarianism to seek popularity, sought political clout by courting
hunter/conservationists, and eventually allowed hunter/conservationists to set
the agenda. By the 10th Earth Day, 17 years ago, the environmental movement had
already been swallowed by the meat-chomping old guard it originally opposed.
The animal protection cause swirls down the same drain when it tries to
unite with either old guard hunter/conservation fronts such as the World
Wildlife Fund and National Wildlife Federation, or coopted environmental fronts
like Greenpeace. The national environmental groups, both “old” and “new,”
avidly court animal protection donors with appeals failing to mention, for
instance, that WWF was founded and has always been headed by trophy hunters,
while NWF is a federation of 49 state hunting clubs. Even Defenders of Wildlife,
founded as an anti-trapping group, years ago came around to endorsing Animal
Damage Control program wolf-killing in rural Minnesota as part of the price of
achieving wolf reintroduction in places where wolves are not wanted and will not
be treated kindly. Such organizations have made plain by their actions, if not
their words, that “be kind to animals” is neither in their vocabulary
nor among their goals.
Potty environmentalism, meanwhile, continues to
preoccupy the public. Believing that the national groups are looking after
wildlife, most average citizens loosely define themselves as environmentalists,
haphazardly recycle, struggle with local water and waste disposal issues, and
are unaware that whales and seals are not saved from cruel slaughter, Paul
Watson is in jail, half of our National Wildlife Refuges are now open to
hunters, and species conservation is advanced by both the Clinton/Gore
administration and leading environmental advocacy groups as a pretext for
leghold trapping.
It is incumbent upon the animal protection movement to realize that the
organized environmental groups and the wise-use wiseguys are dickering over
price, not the principle of prostituting ecology. The enviros put a nicer dress
on Mother Nature, but the individual animals who represent her still get the
shaft, whether loggers hack down old growth or the Nature Conservancy burns off
the second growth in Chicago-area forest preserves. Animal defenders must
present a cogent, conscientious, uncompromising opposition to both.