The love & light crowd make a big deal of how we should return to harmony with nature in which we give up using out intellectual minds and our “selfish and greedy” desires to make the world a more fitting environment, and return back to minimal impact living which is what, they claim, is the lifestyle of indigenous, pre-agricultural and pre-industrialised peoples, who are held up as wiser than us and capable of existing without the need to impose their will on the landscape.
That dozy and self-hating attitude is meticulously exposed as purest bullshit in this article: How Aborigines could solve Australia’s bushfire problem.
To boil it down to the essentials, Aborigines have been using managed fires for probably millenia to keep the growth of trees that are most flammable under control, and when they stopped being able to do that, entire swathes of the continent became unmanageable death traps, with incredibly flammable species taking over - here’s a quote:
[i]"The most prolific tree in the Australian bush is the iconic eucalyptus, nicknamed the “gum tree” and described to me by one fireman as “a living firebomb”.
The bark of the tree falls away in thin flammable sheets - a touch paper to any passing spark - whilst the air in and around a eucalyptus forest hangs with the oil for which the tree is renowned. It creates an incendiary haze which sometimes causes the air to burn by itself."[/i]
The entire article’s worth reading because it’s a testimony to the fact humans everywhere have always used their will to control their environment, to the betterment of all, and that misguided attempts to take our hands off the steering wheel are likely to do more harm than good.
I think the environmental lobby does quite a lot of good when it comes to pollution, but the ethics behind it are deeply misguided when they’re coming from that self-hating kind of place.