Thursday, October 09, 2008

On priorities,

Environment, in the broadest sense of the word, tends to dominate my psyche. While this is perhaps a truism in that pertains to everyone with five functioning senses, my surroundings can hold sway over my mood and thoughts in a nearly Obsessive-Compulsive sort of way. My medium matters. Aesthetics, for me, has consequences. Not surprisingly, this has broad-ranging effects, from where I choose to study (window table in a coffee shop vs. the school library with its sterility and florescent lighting) to how I vote. One of the outworkings of this obsession is a sensitive appreciation for (infatuation with?) the natural environment, honed both by said psyche and growing up in a region that did not take much effort to love. And so it follows, of course, that my political priorities will be (admittedly, potentially unduly) dominated by questions of how best to preserve and protect what little pristine environment remains. It also means that there is a values disconnect between myself and those who do not share the same appreciation. It is one thing to talk about taking care of the environment from some detached, platonic, I-know-we-ought-to sort of standpoint. It is another to feel the value of wilderness in one's soul.

This is part of the reason why I do not trust those who say that drilling in ANWR will do little to harm that environment. I do not sense, in the pro-drilling articles I have read, that there is any sort of remorse or reluctance involved. There is no sign that those who wish to drill there wish that they did not have to. Rather, I get the distinct sense that there is little qualitative difference, for them, between wilderness and a thinned forest cut through with logging roads and torn up by bulldozers. That ANWR will be essentially unchanged in essence by the drilling process. Put simply, I believe that the issue here centers on a sharp disjunction in values rather than simply the means of attaining what are supposedly shared values.

For those who are interested, Patagonia's website has this helpful section to help with voting decisions. They also posted this video for thought:


And just for fun, also from Patagonia, here's Sonnie Trotter taking some fine whippers onto trad gear on Rhapsody, a 5.14c in Scotland (click on Begin, head into the Tin Shed, and then click on the climber photo).