Moderate Clearcutter George Stump explains away global warming, Landscraping, acid rain and anything else in the environment of your mind.

POST-ENVIRONMENTALISM

by George Stump, Moderate Environmentalist
Former staffer with the Environmental Prevention Agency
Member of consulting group, Slash, Burn Cash and Carry

There's been a lot of people gettin' educated about the environment recently, so I think we're gonna see some cuts in the education budget, along with the ones in the forest. Although, with Mr. Gore and the whole owl-coddling crowd in power, you never know. These people are old-fashioned enviromentalists. I'm beyond that - I like to think of myself as a post-environmentalist. That may not make sense to you, but it makes a whole lot of dollars for me, and I'm sure you'll agree that's a hundred times more important.

AGRIBUSINESS
This might be new information for you, but agribusiness makes food. The stuff that comes in those cans you got there on your shelf so conveniently, that we have come to take for granted, actually is grown by corporations, and thank God for those folks gettin that food into those cans. And California is the Canned Food Basket of the nation. Now if you want to do without that, if you want to go out in your back yard and grow your own canned food, well, if you have the time for that, then you must be unemployed.

As for the pesticides, it's a free country and Agribusiness is a free enterprise, and if they feel like there's too many pests out there then they have the right to spray them, just like when we have too many pests in the cities and spray them with tear gas.

FORESTS
I have received many letters criticizin' the practice of clearcuttin'. Clearcuttin' is a misleading term. We're actually engaged in landscraping out there. And recycling: we're recycling the trees by making houses. And paper for you to write those letters on.

But we don't cut every tree. Some trees are so beautiful and rare that they should be put in a theme park, where people can find them more easily. Why should you have to walk all over creation huntin' for that one rare tree or bird or other theme species of your choice? You know, before modern forestry came on the scene the forest was actually quite a mess, and frankly, there was no place to live in this country. I don't know if you know this, but one of the reasons the Native American empires never got anywhere was that the trees were so tall that they could not see the way to the future. So we helped them out with that, harvestin' the forest so that the trees would no longer dominate the people. And they have thanked us ever since, from their own theme parks.

But let's be honest: If you ever take a walk in the forest you realize that people don't belong there. There's too many little critters bitin your legs and you get these diseases that remind you that people belong in cities. We must make a distinction between people areas and nature areas. But when you do interact with nature, you got to show it who's boss. Like when they had that fire in Oakland, what you had there was not a typical grassland or typical urban fire, you had an area where nature was encroachin' on an urban area. Just like that fire in New Jersey that was encroachin' on a nukular plant. That's nature movin' into an area that's not zoned for it. You got to put them in their place.

MINING
As Dan Quayle has said, a mine is a terrible thing to waste. If you got a mine there, you ought to use it, not let it get all rusty from disuse like an old automobile. There are exceptions, of course. There are some things that should be left in the ground, as God intended, like your mineral water, for example.

OVERPOPULATION
We here in North America constitute 5% of the world's population. Yet we are consumin' 50% of the world's resources, and that shows you how efficient we are. But we want to equalize that. At first we thought we would teach the other folks how to consume as well as we do, but on examinin' the figures more closely it turned out that there are only so many 50%'s to go around. So instead we're going to teach them to be a smaller percentage of the population. We're goin' to help them out with that. They're out there bein 30, 40% - we gotta teach them the skills of downsizin, just like we been doin here with the American worker.

OZONE
Ozone holes have got a bad rap. Those holes can be very useful. If you can maneuver them over some of your more polluted areas like Los Angeles and set up a battery of fans, just plug em in, and blow that global warmitude right up through the hole, clean that sucker right out. Technology is a wonderful thing. Course, it may come back down, but if you're lucky it'll come down through Mexico City's hole. We're workin on it.

In closin', do not be discouraged. It's a big environment, but by workin' together, we can make it human scale.

See also Stump's article The Moderate Environmentalist