Organic farmer? Yes. Nature lover? Yes. Environmentalist? Never!!
by Kelly Reynolds
At first glance, you might think I was one of those hippie folks. I raise organic vegetables in the backyard for home use and for sale at the local farmers' market. I wear my baby in a Guatemalan sling, and breastfeed for what most would call a ridiculous length of time. I don’t wear makeup most of the time. I shop at the health food store and try to limit my use of modern medicine to serious illness and emergencies. I avoid processed foods. I homebirth and will homeschool. I read "Mother Earth News," "Backwoods Home Magazine," and "Organic Gardening." My dream is to one day live on a big piece of land with a few rational friends, raise livestock and veggies, bring up healthy children, and grow to be one of those old ladies with long gray hair, who is fit, tanned, and holding a basket of herbs in her hands. You might think with this crunchy resume that I would fit right in with environmentalists, Luddites, and tree huggin’ nuttos everywhere. But you would be wrong.
The point of this article is not to talk about myself, although that is my favorite subject. The point is to illustrate the real essence of environmentalism. Even though I have all these hippy traits and interests, my life is governed by rationality, and at the base, by a respect for human life. I have chosen my life’s goals and my values based on the facts about the world and about my own personality and interests. I love gardens and forests, not because they are intrinsically good, but because they serve my life and my values. I wouldn’t cut down the old oak trees on my land, but will always defend your right to cut down yours. I love technology (when it actually makes my life better). The bottom line is that I respect the work of the human mind.
There is where I differ from the environmentalists. Essentially, they are people-haters, not nature-lovers. To really love anything, you have to know that it contributes to your life and values. We love the things that lift our spirits and make our lives meaningful and rich. Environmentalists are not looking for ways nature and animals can benefit humans. They want to preserve them at the expense of human values. They think that trees, owls, and fountain grass are more important, more valuable, and more sacred than human life.
If environmentalists want to preserve nature to enjoy it themselves, let them get together, buy up some land, and not develop it. But they don’t want to do that. They want to stop other people’s developments. If they want to avoid the food grown by agribusiness, let them buy food from small, local farmers the way I do. But that’s not what they want either. They want to stop agribusiness altogether. They don’t want to have their own parade; they want to rain on everybody else’s.
On the surface, I may look like them, eat like them, farm like them (but never smell like them), but we are not the same. No matter how much I love a beautiful meadow full of wildflowers or the sound of bullfrogs croaking in a pond or the smell of freshly turned earth, I love your property rights more. And so, when a bunch of granola-munchers want to turn your drainage ditch into a nature preserve for endangered crawfish, I’ll be right by your side, defending your right to boil up those crustaceans for dinner. Maybe I’ll even bring along an organic side-dish or two.
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