A "Carelessness Preserve"

If you have any doubt that environmentalism is an anti-reason movement, an ibroglio in Laredo, Texas should remove it.

In the impassioned fight to save a wetland here from a developer's ambitious blueprints, the contenders agree on little except for how the piece of land was formed: carelessness.

More than 10 years ago, the growing city built a retention pond at Laredo International Airport as part of its drainage infrastructure. But the man-made pond was not properly maintained, and over the years it evolved into a lush habitat nearly indistinguishable from a naturally occurring one at neighboring Lake Casa Blanca State Park.

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[Some] defenders of the project say the critics are confusing the public to make them erroneously think that the nearby state park will be built on. [bold added]

Chalk up a first for the annals of environmentalism! As one "secular conservative" might put it, the "good news" is that the environmentalists have stopped damning everything man does for a moment. The bad news is that the essential characteristic of this action is that it did not involve the use of that species' natural means of survival, reason, or promote its survival.

The environmental movement ignores the fact that change occurs constantly in nature whenever it damns man for changing his environment to further his own survival. The environmental movement furthermore treats as sacrosanct every other change wrought by living beings as they try to survive -- except when man makes changes as he tries to survive. And the environmental movement exempts from moral evaluation the means by which every species survives -- except Homo sapiens, for whom the exercise of reason is (at best) the new Original Sin.

The fight to save this "wetland" -- this man-made swamp -- strips bare the absurd notion that the environmentalists are sincerely interested in "preserving" nature. If they were, they'd have tried to make the City of Laredo "remediate" the erroneously-created swamp long ago.

This fight also exposes as fraudulent the oft-repeated claim that environmentalism is a crusade to keep the earth habitable by humans. Otherwise, why would some moist piece of ground be treated as more sacred than even a single one of the 1300 life-giving jobs the development that would replace it would create?

So man changing nature isn't bad, after all, so long as it isn't done on purpose. If you, gentle reader (and fellow human being), appreciate the fact that your own happy life is your only purpose, and that you must use your mind actively to achieve it, you will appreciate that it is not damage to nature, but precisely your mind and your life that the environmentalists are warring against.

This piece of land, if "saved", will be neither a nature preserve nor a park. It will be a "carelessness preserve", a monument to the utter contempt for human life that provides the animus for the environmental movement. A monument to how little they care about us.

-- CAV