The Environmental Movement Goes Corporate - Radicalize An Issue And Make Big Money

A few years ago I was skimming through an issue of the Sierra Club’s magazine and came across an insert regarding the Lewis and Clark expedition.

The insert dealt, among other things, with the wildlife seen by Lewis and Clark as they traversed relatively unknown trans-Mississippi Western portions of what would become the United States.

Bison depicted by an artist on the Pacific Railway Expedition in 1853

Particularly striking were a number of calculations done as part of the piece regarding animals living on the Great Plains, between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains.

Prairie Dogs, the piece proclaimed, may have numbered 5 billion while buffalo may have numbered 60 million.  For context, according to inventories taken at the University of Missouri there are about 91 million cows in the entire United States in 2012.

On a trip taken about the same time the Lewis and Clark piece came out I stopped off at the National Grasslands Visitors Center in Wall, South Dakota.  I picked up some material regarding Prairie Dogs and, later, called and interviewed some experts on the critters regarding their lives, habits and so on.

Long story short, it appears the Sierra Club numbers regarding the animals are likely to be vastly overstated.  Taking the average space occupied by the critters, subtracting unsuitable habitat and so on, and doing the math leads to a conclusion the range occupied by the animals would have had to be larger by hundreds of thousands of square miles than it actually is to have allowed for the numbers of animals said to have existed to have actually existed.

The same kind of exaggeration takes place whenever an issue dear to the hearts of the pop-environmental movement is discussed. 

As discussed in an earlier blog, the forests found by early explorers are very different from the forests extent in much of the Western United States today yet some will go to the wall to prevent remedial harvests designed to bring the forests back to more original conditions.

To listen to the environmental movement one would think fish, particularly salmon, were so thick in the oceans, rivers and streams of pre-history that one had only to roll out of bed in the morning, stumble down to the river, reach down and snag breakfast.  In truth, tribal history is full of tales about starvation and the generally constant difficulty early Americans had finding an adequate food supply.

So, why does all that matter?

It gets back to one of the themes running through this series of blogs; much of the pop-environmental movement is dedicated to recreating a past that never existed and in insisting that past be constructed, as often as not ends up creating a future more blighted than it has to be.

The actual condidition of the origianl forest is well documented.  The photos were taken and included in a several volume report by the U.S. Geological Survey of the nations forest reserves in the late 1890s.  Modern day pictures taken from the same spot would show hundreds of smaller trees surrounding the older trees and forming a fire ladder into the crowns of the older trees.  In many areas, removal of the understory can restore the forest to its original condition.

The big question of the day is, “Why?”

There are two or three possible answers.  One of them has been regularly pointed to by Dr. Patrick Moore over the past two or three decades of his career. 

Patrick Moore was a co-founder of Greenpeace, the well known pop-environmental organization.  I first heard him speak at a logging conference about 20 years ago. 

Paraphrased, Moore told conference attendees that his movement had begun with the best of intentions and had grown in power and financial clout because he and his fellows were fighting the good fight.  But then, he said, industry began to listen to the group’s complaints and began to act in important ways to resolve the problems Greenpeace was pointing to.  That, Moore said, was eventually seen as a disaster because, when the problem goes away, the enthusiasm for providing funds go away so, Moore said, the group had to get more and more extreme to keep the funding coming.  Eventually, funding became more important than the cause and no extreme was seen as too extreme.

Today, environmental groups raise and spend massive sums of money, sums exceeding those spent on elections and other expensive endeavors.  Groups like the Sierra Club, and many others, are major corporations with incredible access to cash.

Moore, as quoted on the web site Climate Depot last year addressed just one aspect of the pop-environmental movements recent focus areas; climate change.  Asked what is driving the discussion of climate change in today’s world Moore said, "A powerful convergent of interests. Scientists seeking grant money, media seeking headlines, universities seeking huge grants from major institutions, foundations, environmental groups, politicians wanting to make it look like they are saving future generations. And all of these people have converged on this issue"

In short, the environmental movement has gone corporate.  It no longer matters what truth might be; what matters is the development of a spin on this issue or that capable of keeping the funding coming in.

So the true answer to the question, “How many prairie dogs, or buffalo, were there when Lewis and Clark passed through,” is, “How many do you need there to have been?”