Dear HCN,
One gets the impression
that Andy Kerr would like us all to join him in his fundamentalism
(HCN, 6/13/94). He tells us the world is divided into discrete
units for us to hold in contempt: New Yuppie Scum, Elite Welfare
Ranchers, and Old Land Abusers. He tells us they are bad, we are
good. Then he gives us six commandments about what we must do about
them. And he gives us a gospel as well: “Environmentalists must be
both fierce and compassionate.” But where’s the compassion in his
environmental polemic?
His finger-pointing leaves
him neither the time nor the desire to try to understand who the
them we must incinerate are.
The mess in the West
is mostly the result of failed and outdated government policies.
And certainly there are individuals who have taken unfair advantage
of those policies: the social detritis whose greedy, selfish
destruction of the West deserves our wrath.
But
there are also a great many folks who are just trying to live their
lives. Must we label them with some vile epithet and relegate them
to the human trash heap just because we disagree? Does Kerr’s bow
to compassion for the “rural poor” who are “just collateral damage
in the war” include those who also happen to graze some cattle? Can
he agree to disagree? Or must we hate them
too?
We are not, as Kerr states, in a battle for
the soul of the West. People, not geographies, have souls. Perhaps
he sees that the geographies of our souls are mirrored by the
geographies of the West. Regardless, we each have our own visions
thereof.
What we are in a battle for is
understanding: of our disparate selves, of our visions of what the
West might be, and of how we can all live here without compromising
our environmental principles while at the same time not destroying
each other.
John S.
Swift
Sacramento,
California
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Do we really need environmental fundamentalism?.
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