Vacation

In June we spent several days in Grand Teton and Yellowstone national parks. We had a really good time. The weather, except for one day on the road to Beartooth Pass, was fine.  The scenery was spectacular as always. The hiking was good. The streams and rivers were full, and the animals were plentiful.  The only exception on the scenery was a result of the government’s burn-baby-burn policy on forest fires.  Trees have grown back in the areas damaged by the catastrophic fires of 1988, but several areas remain devastated from more recent fires. The excuse for the policy is that forest fires are natural. Well so are cholera, high infant mortality, smallpox, and recurring famines.  Sensible people realize that natural does not imply desirable.  (To the extent there are valid needs to manage  forests, there are less destructive ways of doing so.)  Yellowstone was created for the “benefit and enjoyment of the people”.  Few people enjoy or benefit from landscapes resembling parts of Flanders in 1917.  This is another example of the green obsession or religion making things worse.

Far less seriously, it also makes things annoying.  In the lodges, stores, and restaurants in both parks we were constantly hit with greeny directives, boasts, suggestions, propaganda, and simple inconveniences. The trash cans in the rooms had three bins – one for recycling, one for rotting stuff nominally to become compost, and a sinister one labelled “landfill” for plain old trash which will be thrown away.  The stores did not sell bottled water because virtuous people bring their own bottles and refill them from water fountains, though of course all sorts of other things were sold in bottles.  The lights in one room where we stayed  were purposely ridiculously dim.  Menus in the restaurants touted how sustainable and/or organic the ingredients in the mediocre, overpriced meals were. The kicker for me was a notice in our room in Yellowstone informing people that water is a precious resource in “dry Yellowstone” and asking them not to run the faucet while shaving.  Our room was a few hundred yards from the second largest alpine lake in the world, just down the road from a massive river, and within view of mountains still covered with the remains of huge winter snowfalls. That one was a hard sell.

It can be easy to laugh off that sort of nagging and posturing.  It would be a mistake to laugh off  the movement behind it. The faithful of the green religion are serious and fanatical. They mean us harm, and they are aided and supported by a lot of opportunistic, power hungry politicians and officials. It is something of a  jihad or crusade, and it is not hard to figure out who the infidels are.