Subsistence and the Wyoming Game & Fish. And more than that.

Wyoming elk hunter, back in the day.

This was an interesting news story, which started me to thinking, at first, "I'm glad that I'm not the only one who thinks this way".  That quickly changed to probably not quite the way they do, but I'm glad somebody is raising an issue.  Looking a little deeper, like a lot of outdoorsmen, I'm probably a lot less inclined to think that now, and a lot of hunters in the state likewise will probably feel the same, but I'll wade in and take it in a different direction than I suspect those who started this story off intend to.

What issue is that, you might ask? Well, it's the issue associated with Game & Fish Commissioner's licenses.  And the larger issue of balancing local subsistence hunters from high dollars. 

We expand on that below.

The Star Tribune ran an article this past week about a new organization I'd never heard of, Mountain Pursuit, which the Tribune defines as a "subsistence hunting advocacy organization".  Here's part of the Tribune's story:

JACKSON — A new subsistence-hunting advocacy organization with Jackson Hole roots is asking the Wyoming Game and Fish Department to put a stop to alleged abuses of its commissioners’ complimentary license program. 

The group, called Mountain Pursuit, recently unveiled a 16-page report about the fundraising program, which provides each of the Game and Fish Commission’s seven appointed members with eight complementary elk, deer or antelope licenses annually to donate to nonprofit charitable organizations, which then auction or sell them. Mountain Pursuit’s report shows that the program is being used as a platform for wealthy nonresident hunters to routinely acquire hard-to-draw licenses, in one case annually. The report also shows that the program is benefiting some poorly-rated nonprofit organizations and other groups that have little or nothing to do with Wyoming wildlife. 

“We don’t blame any of the nonprofits for asking for the tags, but we are concerned that the Game and Fish commissioners are giving them away to nonprofits that don’t have anything to do with conservation or wildlife,” Mountain Pursuit founder and board president Rob Shaul said. “There’s money that’s going to music festivals. One was donated for a Wyoming insurance agents association.”

Here's what the group's findings were:

Key Findings  

• Records on the tag species, and the dollar amount generated by the license auction or raffle are not complete.  

• The dollar amount raised by the auction/raffle of the Commissioner Licenses is significant. Based on the records available, the auction or raffle of Commissioner Licenses generated $7.3 million in funds for the beneficiary nonprofits from 2008-2018, and this total is not complete. Several tag auction/raffle dollar amounts are not reported. Our best estimate of how much revenue these licenses generated is more than $8 million in funds for recipient nonprofits from 2008-2018.  

• Elk tags are by far the bulk of the tags being donated by the Commissioners. Completed records from 2008-2018 indicate 474 elk, 103 deer and 5 antelope tags were donated. 125 tags did not have a species designated.  

• Nonresidents purchased 564 of the 701 Commission License offered from 2008-2018, or 80.5%.  

• At least 116 of the Commissioner Licenses sold/auctioned/raffled were donated to organizations without conservation, hunting, fishing, or wildlife missions, including agricultural organizations, industry groups, veterans groups, hockey and baseball groups, county and town government entities, churches, food banks, etc. This generated at least $1.25 million in total revenue for these non-hunting, non-conservation organizations.  

• Multiple Commissioner Licenses were donated to nonprofits located outside of Wyoming.  

• The Wyoming Wildlife Federation, Muley Fanatics Foundation, Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, Wyoming Wild Sheep Foundation and Wyoming Game Warden Association have all received in excess of $300,000 in funding via Commissioner License donations and subsequent tag sales/auction/raffles since 2008.  

• 37 individual hunters have purchased three or more Commissioner Licenses since 2008, including five Wyoming Residents. One specific hunter has purchased ten Commissioner elk tags since 2008, eight of which were used for a single hunt area (area 123-1).
• 96 of the Commissioner tags purchased 2008-2018 were used for Area 7 (Laramie Peak) bull elk. 

• Once the tag is donated to a nonprofit, it’s entirely up to that nonprofit how the tag is sold. Tags are sold via banquet auction, raffles, phone auction, and online auction sites such as www.onlinehuntingauctions.com and even ebay.com When auctioned, sometimes a required minimum price is required. Other times a price is set and the first person to offer the asking price receives the tag. 

• There is no requirement for the nonprofit or organization acquiring the tag indicate how the money from the tag sale is to be used, no mandatory reporting or accounting back to the department, and no documented accounting or follow through from the G&F Commissioners.  

Okay, the first thing this does is raise the question who or what is Mountain Pursuit.  I still don't really know other than it seems to be an angry organization founded in Jackson Hole by Jackson resident Rob Shaul.

Looking into it, I frankly think Shaul has taken being personally disgruntled over the top and is guilty of the classic confusion of associating personal interest with virtue.  While his new group bills itself as being an organization that boosts subsistence hunting, it's focus is really not quite that.  It's clearly very much opposed to trophy hunting, but it's also a bit gushy about bow hunting with Shaul being an avid bow hunter. While I may, or may not, take that a bit further below, as a rifle hunter I don't have anything against bow hunters but the evolution of their advocacy has gone from skill to claims of moral superiority which are weak at best and actually counterfactual at worst.  More on that later, maybe. Be that as it may, Shaul hits on something when he states, about his organization;

We want to represent the subsistence-based resident hunter, 2e just like to go out and get an elk or a deer, cut it up and eat it. There’s no one representing that guy right now, and we want to represent that guy.

Actually I  think that guy is represented, but Shaul isn't completely without a point, even if he's not completely in focus.

Anyhow, I'll be frank that I've long been disturbed by the practices that have come about on Commissioners' licenses and I frankly feel that the entire practice is contrary to the basic nature of Wyoming's otherwise very sound wildlife management.  I'm for very much reforming the practice.

Mountain Pursuit, the organization that got in the paper on this topic, claims to be, as noted, a "subsistence" hunting organization.  I'm a subsistence hunter and perhaps that's why, while I'm surprised by this development, I'm not surprised that it came from a subsistence hunter group.  I am surprised that there is a subsistence hunter group.  If that was its real focus, and I'm not entirely convinced that it is, I'd hope that it would do well.  Based on what little I know if it so far, I'm not impressed whatsoever and I don't think this is what it will develop into.  But the topic is an interesting one.

And I'll note, some of my opinions that I'll express here are going to be hugely unpopular with some people.

A person might of course ask, legitimately, what the heck I'm even writing about. What's "subsistence hunting".  Well, simply put, that's hunting to put meat on the table, whether that be deer, duck or fish (fishing, dear reader, is simply fish hunting).   If you look on the topics on this site about fishing and fish hunting (yes, fishing), you'll see that they're all actually about subsistence hunting.

Most American hunters are subsistence hunters.  Most globally are.  That is, they hunt to put meat on the table.  And taking this a bit further yet, humans are evolved to eat meat in their diet and they're wired by their genetics to acquire meat in that fashion, which puts them deeply in touch with nature.  Hunting for your meat is the way you should acquire it, if you can.  If you can't, the market has long taken care of that, but don't fool yourself, hiring somebody out to do that for you, which is what you are doing, isn't more moral in any fashion.  It's less.  The least morally sustainable position of them all is that taken by vegetarians and vegans, whose lifestyle guarantees the consumption of vast quantifies of resources to sustain their weird and unnatural diet which is principally based on a hatred of the condition in which they find themselves, a species of self hatred that often expands out into misanthropy.

So if this seems like I'm taking a position that you should go out hunting or fishing, if you can, it is.  You should.  If you aren't, part of what it means to be a human being and contact with nature is wholly absent and part of your deeper existence as a human being in nature is absent, as you are absent from your nature and nature as a whole.  And don't fool yourself that hiking with a sack of free range GMO free granola changes that, it doesn't.

And I'll go one step further than that and continue it on to something that I didn't get to do last year, raise a garden.  I.e., I feel the same way about raising your own produce, to the extent you can.  If you don't, you really don't understand your food in any fashion and are ignorant on the most basic elements of life.

I'll go one step even further than that.  I think the fact that a large number of people no longer participate in these activities is responsible for well over 50% of the problems that plague the modern world.  Just yesterday we ran the item Blog Mirror: Why 2018 Was the Best Year in Human History!

which makes really good points, but it's fairly obvious that there are titanic problems out in the modern world including everything from scientific problems, from social problems, to a basic breakdown in Western society as a whole.  A good deal of this can be attributed to the fact that most people in the modern Western world live inside houses all day long, work inside buildings all day long, and get their food from other people inside of more buildings.  They're profoundly disconnected with reality which has destroyed, in many instances, their sense of a realistic self and now, in recent years, created a world in which so many are so lost that they seek to redefine themselves outside of their own biological constraints.  A lot of modern humans see the world as if they're characters in a Japanese anime cartoon.

It's pathetic.

Okay, so what's that have to do with this story, if anything?

Well, perhaps more than it might at first seem.

As noted above, and elsewhere on this site, most of the local hunters and fish hunters are subsistence hunters, and indeed most of them in the United States are.  But somewhere in modern times the "trophy" hunter came along.

Now, we need to be careful here and not go down the road that Shaul apparently is.  "Trophy" hunting doesn't even have an accepted definition and it flatly doesn't mean the same thing to every person.  Under our state's law, trophy hunting is actually really limited to the hunting under license of mountain lions, wolves and grizzly bears, the latter of which you can't hunt for at least the time being even though their numbers are expanding off the charts.*  It's assume that everything you hunt you intend to eat and indeed its a crime if you don't use your wild game in that fashion.  You shoot it, you eat it.

But what some people mean by "trophy hunting", and that includes somebody like Shaul, is what is sometimes called "head hunting".  I.e, hoping to secure a large set of horns to display. 

Now, what should be obvious from the discussion above, if you shoot a deer or elk, or what have you, with a large set of antlers, etc., you still have to eat the meat. So there's nothing intrinsically wrong about focusing on that sort of "trophy".  Keeping the trophy has been a common thing to do since time in memorial.

Having said that, however, the focus on it really is fairly new, and an odd development in some ways.  While records, actually for scientific purposes, have been kept by hunting organizations of trophy sizes for over a century, for the most part really focusing on rack size is something that was relatively uncommon until fairly recently.**  And, in spite of the focus on it that clearly exists, it still isn't the primary focus of most hunters today.  So what's the problem here?

Well, like a lot of things, its multifaceted and involves money.

A feature of our really rich society has been, at least since the 1980s, to focus a lot of money into nearly any activity and, when the Baby Boomers flood it, to allow the money angle to pervert it.  Numerous wholesome and ancient activities have undergone this since the 1970s.  Things as simple as even riding a bicycle have been appropriated by classes that insist that your bike must have the same cost and technological level of development as the F-36.  Riding a mountain bike, a really neat type of bike in my view, that my wife bought me over 20 years ago brings this home to me every year as some will insist that the bike must be replaced by a new super expensive high tech one, because it can be.

This same sort of emphasis has lead to a situation in the Western U.S. in which game and fish agencies must contemplate the views of local subsistence hunters, local head hunters, local trophy fishermen (yes, I'm still including fishermen), and well funded out of staters. Add into that mix landowners who see dollars from out of staters as well, and it's an interesting mix.

And the Commissioners licenses feed into that story, which is why Shaul's group notes that.  His real complaint is that difficult to get licenses have become subjects of high bidding through the largess of the commissioners.

There is something to that.

Now, in a lot of cases these licenses go to benefit organizations that benefit wildlife in the first place.  But that's not really the point.  We should be really careful about catering to the really wealthy in something as basic, elemental, and fundamental as this. 

Indeed, we ought not to do it at all.  I.e., it would be best for the Commissioner's licenses, in my view, to simply go.

But, by the same token, I wouldn't stop there.  I frankly think that management for horn size, if it really occurs (and its not all that clear that it really does), should likely go as well and that all of the Wyoming areas ought to be draw in for every species. And out of state licenses ought to go out the window as well unless there's a lack of local hunters for the required draw, which rarely happens.  That would be hugely unpopular with many as it removes a source of income from the state, but it would also suggest that those from out of state ought to focus on the hunting opportunities where they live, and they really should.  I'm not completely adamant on this however, so I would yield and see reasons to yield on allowing out of state tags but the focus on the subsistence nature of hunting should remain, in my view.

Indeed, I'm so adamant on it I'm going to go on and anger a bunch of people that I probably haven't angered yet.  The donaters.

Let me note, before I go on further, that I'm not only advocating this position, I partially live it today and I've fully lived it in the past.  A friend of mine, who briefly went through a delusional period of being a vegetarian, returned full blown to this position and calls himself now a "killetarian", and that's pretty much how I once did it.

From the point at which I left home to go to university until the point at which I was marred, and I was married at age 32, meat on my table had been meat that I'd shot or hooked.  As my father grew a huge garden every year, for much of the year I also had vegetables that we'd raised.  Indeed, after he died I took that over, but due to a recent well failure, I didn't put in a garden last year and since getting married and imagining myself to be really busy, there's been more years than not which for which I haven't done one.  Still, even at that, I can recall when my children were small harvesting my potatoes the day after I harvested my deer, which is how things should be.

Which leads me to trespass on something that people cringe upon when you do, which is an evolving "donate the meat".

An odd thing about most foods is that while we crave basic things fairly universally, oru individual taste adjust to what's available in our diet.  Everyone has met people who simply don't like certain foods, which tends to be as they've not tried them as adults and if they do, they'll be outside of their frame of reference and taste strange at first.  Growing up in a household in which wild game was on the table very often, and vegetables we grew ourselves, and apples from the backyard, etc., I have a really wide food palete and there aren't too many foods I won't try or find strange.

I think this was the norm, actually, with most people up until some point after World War Two.  But it isn't any more.  Now most people have incredibly small food paletes, another deficit of the modern age.  Indeed, I've noticed that even a lot of people in agriculture, whom you would think have wide ones, have extremely narrow ones.  And not all that long ago I read an article which verified what I suspected; people in an aboriginal state have much larger food paletes than people in urban societies.

I note that as this brings up the "I don't like that food" claim. This comes about for a variety of reasons, a primary one being that a lot of people know how to cook one type of meat, and one only, that being fatty commercial beef.  Another reason, however, is that this is what they're used to eating, and only that.  Even vegetarians and vegans really tend to only have that as a frame of reference.

Indeed, in recent years this has become so pronounced that I've noticed entire demographics that in former years would have been familiar with at least pork, lamb and poultry in addition to beef no longer are.  This past Thanksgiving, for example, I heard for the first time in my life people state "I don't like the taste of turkey".  That's because they're eating a processed turkey once a year.

One of the things that was noted at the time that various Plains Indian tribes surrendered and came on to reservations is that they complained that their beef rations were "sweet".  I've lived that and know what they mean.  When I ate only wild game from about age 20 until age 32, adjusting back to beef in the diet was really weird.  It was so sweet. By that time, I'd so acclimated to wild game that my tastes very much preferred it.

As my wife is from a ranch and we have cattle, we're going to be eating beef and she's acclimated the other way.  But even at that, our beef is a range cow that chose to retire, and it tastes completely different from what's sold in the stores and at restaurants. I tend to order steaks and what not when I'm traveling or going to restaurants (although I'm about to stop as I'm continually disappointed by restaurant beef) and I'm nearly always disappointed with what I get.  It's not that I'm getting a poor cut of meat, I'm not.  I'm getting what most people consider a really good one. But I'm so used to grass fed cows that have not been fed out, I think that most of the beef in restaurants is really strange tasting.  I've had commercial buffalo a couple of times in the past year, and it doesn't.  It's a lot closer to range beef.

Anyhow, the reason that I note all of this is that I have a suspicion of the "donate" crowd as I feel if you hunt it you should consume it.  I might be capable of being convinced that the donations aren't taste motivated but I'll have to be convinced.  And as the donations defeat, at some level, the nature of hunting as set out above, I'm really not too keen on this development

Taking this even a step further, I've witnessed in the last year a new trend in which at least in my state ranchers are allowed to donate their landowners tags for charity.  I'm totally opposed to this.

Now, I'm entitled, I should note, to a landowner tag.  I'm going to start applying for it this year as I've passed and not been able to get where I wanted to go.  I'm not against landowners tags and they fit in with what I've noted.  People owning agricultural land should, I feel, live on it and from it and taking part of the game they've supported is part of that.

But donating a tag, even for a charitable cause, defeats that and brings back disturbing recollections of a time in which agriculturalist in this state took a serious run at trying to get the legislature to give them ownership of the wildlife. Wildlife is wild, it doesn't belong to anyone.  Being able to donate a tag is contrary to that reality, and it shouldn't be allowed.  I'm for wounded veterans being able to hunt, but they are able to hunt as per the regular system, which I'd note I'd modify.  I might be willing to entertain a special class of license for truly wounded veterans, although I'm frankly hesitant here as well as I've lived through the era in which there were vast numbers of combat veterans who were given no special breaks at all and find the new era a bit suspicious in some ways.  

Anyhow, I'm for subsistence hunting in the emphasis.  Indeed, I'd propose a lifetime subsistence license be created, which would be modeled on the existing lifetime small game/bird/fishing license that already exists.  It'd be costly, but it'd be worth it.  I can imagine fairly readily how it would work, but I'll skip going into that here.

I'll skip it in part because I'm going to pick on "trophy" or "sport" fishermen for a moment here.

If I've seen some evolution on hunting, and I have, over the years to more of a focus on "trophies" than once existed, I've really seen one on fishing.

My father and one of my uncles were adamant fishermen and as a kid growing up we had trout constantly.  As an adult I've been baffled by the romanticization of trout fishing that followed A River Runs Through It, even though I think it's a great movie  After that film, fly fishing, which was locally just a way to catch fish, turned into some huge Metrosexual Uppie activity and the cost of it shot out of sight.

The local river, indeed, went from the local river, into being a Blue Ribbon Trout Stream, and along with that change in status came "fishing guides".  That a person would need a fishing guide just baffles me no end.  What's a fishing guild do?  Anyhow, along with all that came "catch and release".

I think catch and release is absurd.  Fishing is fish hunting and you catch the fish to eat them.  Catching an animal to let it go, particularly after catching it with a barbed hook, is simply delusional. 

Now, all fishermen let some fish go. A person doesn't want to take a tiny fish that can and will grow into a larger one.  But to let the big ones go you caught?  It's weird.

I've caught a few big fish in my life and my father caught many more.  We kept and ate them. That was the point in the first place. Indeed, at my parent's home they had a small plaque with the image of my relative, on my mother's side, Jonathan Dean Swift in which he was quoted as saying:

They say a fish should swim thrice, once in the sea, once in butter, and once in good claret.

That quote was attributed to him on that plaque, but in looking it up its also attributed to a certain O'Keefe (which would please my fishing uncle, who was an O'Keefe).  However, it also seems to be a Polish proverb, in this version;

Fish, to taste right, must swim three times – in water, in butter and in wine.

It wouldn't surprise me, frankly, if the quote is a Polish proverb and the fancier Irish/Anglo Irish version was simply adapted from it.  Oh well.

But it's correct.

_________________________________________________________________________________

*Before this is misconstrued, there are real reasons to hunt these "trophy" animals at least in my states and the surrounding ones.  They're all hugely successful predators that prey on domestic livestock and, at least in the case of grizzly bears and mountain lions, are also dangerous to human beings when uncontrolled. They basically fit into what's normally considered a "predator" under our state's law except that the need to regulate their taking is acknowledged so that they're preserved, even though quite destructive and dangerous.

**As has been noted previously on this blog, the practice of really focusing on trophy size was almost completely absent in this region when I was a kid.  People appreciated a nice "rack", but most of them were acquired purely accidentally.  On occasion a hunter would focus on a trophy they knew to be where they were hunting, which was admired for the skill required, but almost nobody saw it as one of the primary reasons they were hunting.

Today it is often emphasized and many people will ask you what your deer or antelope "scored".  I've never learned the scoring system but I'm still flustered when asked.  I has in my late 20s before anyone ever asked me that and up until that time I really never even thought about it.  I'm asked it routinely now.

It needs to be emphasized that this may mean something or nothing in a larger sense. If a person wants to focus on a large deer, elk etc., well so be it. But at the end of the day, it's meat on the table that should be the primary focus.  

When the big science revelation falls flat on the facts

 

Something that's been noted a lot recently, and which genuinely should cause people concern, is that Americans have come to have an increasing contempt for science.

That's bad.

An educated, modern people, should be informing itself by science in making important decisions. And the evidence is pretty clear that at least into the 1980s, they did.  But not so much now.

And part of the reason of that is that Americans also tend to get a pretty big dose of bad science, which doesn't help to build trust in science and scientist at all.

Part of that falls into the category of the big announcement that just flatly fails to comport with actual real work observations. And we've gotten a fair amount of that in the past several decades.  And I say that as a person with a science background.

We got a big dose of that the past couple of weeks. At least if you are a hunter or fisherman you did, as probably every urban dweller you know sent you the news about the study that was published in Science that humans are a Super Predator and the current methods of fish and game conservation are all wrong.

There's only one problem with that study.

It completely fails to comport with actual observed information gathered over the past couple of centuries.  Or at least if the reports about what it says are correct, it does.

The study raises fears that we're going to hunt and fish all wildlife into extinction as, basically, we're a Super Predator that uses technology (i.e., tools, because it includes our distant ancestors) and we take the best of our prey, and prey on other predators, and are wiping everything out.

Except, its pretty clearly we're not.

Indeed, the evidence is highly to the contrary.

All big game species hunted in North America and Europe have increased dramatically, in numbers, and in health, over the past century.  All of them.  The predators we're supposedly about to wipe out have, in the same areas, increased, not decreased, in the last century as well.  Large ungulates are reclaiming ground that they had retreated from a century ago, in prodigious numbers.  Ungulate species that were on the brink of extinction, such as the Pronghorn antelope, now exist in huge numbers.  Deer exist in insanely huge numbers.  Elk have increased.  About the only exceptions to these rules are wear predators (remember, which we are supposedly wiping out) have been reintroduced and there are no human controls.

And all this was due to modern game management, funded almost exclusively by hunters.

In other hunted species this si also largely true. Waterfowl populations, which were headed for a collapse, recovered with the exception of a very few species, but some waterfowl species have always gone up and down in numbers. Quite a few species of birds now exist in areas that they are not native to, and thrive, as they were introduced.  Again, things are going well.

And we hardly need mention small game species, the numbers of which are exploding.

So where's the data to support the Science article in North America and Europe, as to land animals?  It doesn't exist.

Indeed, what the article would largely support is the introduction of North American style game management where it doesn't exist.  And where some of those influences have crept in, that has worked. 

I'll not go much into South America, where once again, things are largely going fine.  They are in the large landmass of Russia as well.  Africa and Asia definitely have their problems, however, but that's because the hunting culture there is completely different than the one mentioned above.  Having said that, in Africa, where a peculiar sort of Trophy Hunting has come in, actually sees game animal numbers increasing, not decreasing. Even animals like lions, so recently in the news, are actually increasing substantially in areas where they are controlled via legal hunting.  Where trouble exists in Africa, it's due to poaching, not legal hunting.

I'll abstain commentary on fish, as I don't know enough about sport fishing to comment.  Maybe the article is more accurate there. But this leads to me to what I'd next note.

I'm not a "sport" fisherman, nor am I a "Trophy" hunter.  I fish and hunt but I'm more in the subsistence category.  I suspect most hunters fit into  my category in varying degrees, although articles of this type seem to miss that.  I can't blame them too much, as writing in the big game arena tends to focus on Trophy Hunting rather than Subsistence Hunting.  The difference is fairly significant, but to summarize it, I'm just as likely to take a doe deer or antelope than a buck, as I'm hunting for the table.  Around here, indeed, that was the norm up until perhaps the 1970s, when people who moved in, that trophy concepts came in.  But the game isn't really managed that way, and there are still plenty of Subsistence Hunters around here.  We aren't in a special defined category under the law, like in Alaska or the Yukon, but we exist, and that's what most hunters actually are. 

Which should be encouraged.  It's hunting of that type that's preserved wildlands nature around the world.  It's preserving the wild, and preserving the mental sanity of our increasingly loopy species, by keeping us in touch with what we actually are, and are meant to be by nature.  Truth be known, the soccer mom driving the SUV all around during the day, and who lives in a McMansion, and doesn't raise or take any of her own food is a much bigger threat to wildlife than any hunter is.

None of which is to say that there aren't problems.  The commercialization of everything in American life is introducing problems by inserting a certain manor lord mentality amongst those with means that didn't previously exist, and that does cause the reduction, ultimately, of availability of everything.  Urbanization is a big problem. And technology is indeed a problem, as people are defeating the limits of the natural world, but also making themselves irrelevant at the same time in everything. 

But another problem is the release, in this fashion, of science that's simply contrary to the observed data.

We've seen a lot of bad science in recent decades.  Immunization causes Downes Syndrome.  Aluminum cookware causes Alzheimer's.  All sort of bad dietary information.  Other examples could be given.  And when this is the case, it causes contempt for science. And that's a terrible thing.  That plays to the ignoring of real problems, which is a huge problem. Scientist ought to therefore be careful about releasing studies that the observed data just doesn't support, or which is speculative in the extreme.  I'm not blaming scientist for the increasing degree of contempt of science, but stuff like this doesn't help.

Contrary to our natures

When this blog was started several years ago, the purpose of it was to explore historical topics, often the routine day to day type stuff, from the period of roughly a century ago.  It started off as a means of researching things, for a guy too busy to really research, for a historical novel.

It didn't start off as a general commentary on the world type of deal, nor did it start off as a "self help" type of blog either.  Over time, however, the switch to this blog for commentary, away from the blog that generally hosts photographs, has caused a huge expansion here of commentary of all types, including in this category and, frankly, in every other.

 

The pondering professor of our Laws of History thread.

Readers of this blog (of which there are extraordinarily few) know that I've made a series of comments in the "career" category recently that touch on lawyers and mental health. They also know that I was working on a case (actually, two cases) in which an opposing lawyer, without warning or indication, killed himself.  That's bothered me a great deal thereafter.  It isn't as if we could have done anything, but that it occurred bothers me.  And, as noted in the synchronicity threads, I've been reading a lot of comments in lawyer related journals and blogs on this topic as well.  Perhaps they were always there and I hadn't bothered taking note of them, or perhaps that's synchronicity again.

In that category, I stumbled upon a piece written by a fellow who runs a very well liked blog, and who is a lawyer, but whom has never practiced.  I very rarely check that blog, The Art of Manliness, but it's entertaining to read (or probably aggravating to read for some) and I was spending some early morning time in a hotel room waiting for a deposition to start and stopped in there for the first time in eons.  Sure enough, there's an article by a lawyer on the topic of mental health.  Specifically, there was an article on depression, which is the same thing that a lot of these lawyer journals are writing on.  Having somewhat read some of the others, and being surprised to find this one, I read it. Turns out there's an entire series of them and I didn't read them all, but in the one I did read, I was struck by this quote:

If depression is partly caused by a mismatch between how our bodies and minds got used to living for thousands of years, and how we now live in the modern world, then a fundamental step in closing this gap isn’t just moving our bodies, but getting those bodies outside.

I think there's a whole lot to that.
 

The "office" your DNA views as suitable. . . and suitable alone.

Indeed, I think a drove of current social and psychological ills, not just depression by any means, stem from the fact that we've built a massively artificial world that most of us don't really like living in.  It's a true paradox, as I think that same effort lies at a simple root, the human desire to be free from true want.  I.e., starvation.  Fear of starvation lead us to farming to hedge against it, and that lead to civilization.  Paradoxically, the more we strive for "an easy life", the further we take ourselves away from our origins, which is really where we still dwell, deep in our minds.

Okay, at this point I'm trailing into true esoteric philosophy and into psychology, but I think I may be more qualified than many to do just that.  Indeed, I was an adherent of the field of evolutionary biology long before that field came to be called that, and my background may explain why.  So just a tad on that.

Some background

 

With my father, at the fish hatchery, as a little boy.

When I was growing up, I was basically outdoors all the time, and I came from a very "outdoorsy" group of people. And in the Western sense.  People who hunted and fished, garden and who were close to agriculture by heritage.    They were also all well educated.  There was no real separation in any one aspect of our lives.  Life, play, church, were all one thing, much as I wrote about conceptually the other day.

When I went to go to college, post high school, I really didn't know what I wanted to do and decided on being a game warden, which reflects my views at the time, and shows my mindset in some ways now, set on rural topics as it is.  However, my father worried about that and gently suggested that career openings in that field were pretty limited.  He rarely gave any advice of that type, so I heeded his suggestion (showing I guess how much I respected his advice), and majored in geology, and outdoor field.

As a geology student, we studied the natural world, but the whole natural world back into vast antiquity.  Part of that was studying the fossil record and the adaptive nature of species over vast time.  It was fascinating. But having a polymath personality, I also took a lot of classes in everything else, and when I completed my degree at the University of Wyoming, I was only a few credits away from a degree in history as well.

Trilobites on display in a store window in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Now extinct, trilobites occurred in a large number of species and, a this fossil bed demonstrates, there were a lot of them.

That start on an accidental history degree lead me ultimately to a law degree, as it was one of my Casper College professors, Jon Brady, who first suggested it to me.  I later learned that another lawyer colleague of mine ended up a lawyer via a suggestion from the same professor.  Brady was a lawyer, but he was teaching as a history professor.  I know he'd practiced as a Navy JAG officer, but I don't know if he otherwise did.  If lawyer/history professor seems odd, one of the principal history professors at the University of Wyoming today is a lawyer as well, and the archivist at Casper College is a lawyer.  I totally disagree with the law school suggestion that "you can do a lot with a law degree" other than practice law, but these gentlemen's careers would suggest otherwise.

Anyhow, at the time the suggestion was made I had little actual thought of entering law school and actually was somewhat bewildered by the suggestion.  I was a geology student and I was having the time of my life.  I was always done with school by late afternoon, and had plenty of time to hunt during the hunting season nearly every day, which is exactly what I did.  By 1983, however, the bloom was coming off the petroleum industry's rose and it was becoming increasingly obvious that finding employment was going to be difficult.  Given that, the suggestion of a career in the law began to be something I took somewhat more seriously. By the time I graduated from UW in 1986, a full blown oilfield depression was going on and the law appeared to be a more promising option than going on to an advance degree in geology.  I did ponder trying to switch to wildlife management at that point, but it appeared to be a bad bet at that stage.

Casper College Geomorphology Class, 1983.  Odd to think of, but in those days, in the summer, I wore t-shirts.  I hardly ever do that now when out in the sticks. This photos was taken in the badlands of South Dakota.

So what does that have to do with anything?

Well, like more than one lawyer I actually know, what that means is that I started out with an outdoor career with outdoor interests combined with an academic study of the same, and then switched to a career which, at least according to Jon Brady, favored "analytical thinking" (which he thought I had, and which is the reason he mentioned the possibility to me).  And then there's the interest in nature and history to add to it.

Our artificial environment

So, as part of all of that, I've watched people and animals in the natural and the unnatural environment. And I don't really think that most people do the unnatural environment all that well.  In other words, I know why the caged tiger paces.

People who live with and around nature are flat out different than those who do not. There's no real getting around it.  People who live outdoors and around nature, and by that I mean real nature, not the kind of nature that some guy who gets out once a year with a full supply of the latest products from REI thinks he experiences, are different. They are happier and healthier.  Generally they seem to have a much more balanced approach to big topics, including the Divine, life and death.  They don't spend a lot of time with the latest pseudo philosophical quackery.  You won't find vegans out there. You also won't find men who are as thin as pipe rails sporting haircuts that suggest they want to be little girls.  Nor will you find, for that matter, real thugs.

You won't find a lot of people who are down, either.  

Indeed the blog author noted above noted that, and quotes from Jack London, the famous author, to the effect  and then goes on to conclude:

If depression is partly caused by a mismatch between how our bodies and minds got used to living for thousands of years, and how we now live in the modern world, then a fundamental step in closing this gap isn’t just moving our bodies, but getting those bodies outside.

I think he's correct there. And to take it one step further, I think the degree to which people retain a desire to be closer to nature reflects itself back in so many ways we can barely appreciate it.

Truth be known, we've lived in the world we've crated for only a very brief time.  All peoples, even "civilized people", lived very close to a nature for a very long time. We can take, as people often do, the example of hunter gatherers, which all of us were at one time, but even as that evolved in to agricultural communities, for a very long time, people were very "outdoors" even when indoors.

Ruin at Bandalier National Monument.  The culture that built these dwellings still lives nearby, in one of the various pueblos of New Mexico. These people were living in stone buildings and growing corn, but they were pretty clearly close to nature, unlike the many urbanites today who live in brick buildings in a society that depends on corn, but where few actually grow it.  The modern pueblos continue to live in their own communities, sometimes baffling European Americans.  I've heard it declared more than once that "some have university educations but they still go back to the reservation."

Even in our own culture, those who lived rural lives were very much part of the life of the greater nation as a whole, than they are now.  Now most people probably don't know a farmer or a rancher, and have no real idea of what rural life consists of.  Only a few decades back this was not the case.  Indeed, if a person reads obituaries, which are of course miniature biographies of a person, you'll find that for people in their 80s or so, many, many, had rural origins, and it's common to read something like "Bob was born on his families' farm in Haystack County and graduated from Haystack High School in 1945.  He went to college and after graduating from high school worked on the farm for a time before . . . ."

 Louisiana farmer, 1940s.  Part of the community, not apart from it.

Now, however this is rarely the case.  Indeed, we can only imagine how unimaginably dull future obits will be, for the generation entering the work force now.  "Bob's parents met at their employer Giant Dull Corp where they worked in the cubicle farm. Bob graduated from Public School No 117 and went to college majoring in Obsolete Computers, where upon he obtained a job at Even Bigger Dull Corp. . . "

No wonder things seem to be somewhat messed up with many people.

Indeed, people instinctively know that, and they often try to compensate for it one way or another.  Some, no matter how urban they are, resist the trend and continue to participate in the things people are evolved to do. They'll hunt, they fish, and they garden. They get out on the trails and in the woods and they participate in nature in spite of it all.

Others try to create little imaginary natures in their urban walls.  I can't recount how many steel and glass buildings I've been in that have framed paintings or photographs of highly rural scenes.  Many offices seem to be screaming out for the 19th Century farm scape in their office decor.  It's bizarre. A building may be located on 16th Street in Denver, but inside, it's 1845 in New Hampshire.   That says a lot about what people actually value.

Others, however, sink into illness, including depression.  Unable to really fully adjust to an environment that equates with the zoo for the tiger, they become despondent.  Indeed, they're sort of like the gorilla at the zoo, that spends all day pushing a car tire while looking bored and upset.  No wonder.  People just aren't meant to live that way.

Others yet will do what people have always done when confronted with a personal inability to live according to the dictates of nature, they rebel against it.  From time immemorial people have done this, and created philosophies and ideas that hate the idea of people itself and try to create a new world from their despair.  Vegans, radical vegetarians, animal rights, etc., or any other variety of Neo Pagans fit this mold.  Men who starve themselves and adopt girly haircuts and and wear tight tight jeans so as to look as feminine as possible, and thereby react against their own impulses. The list goes on and on.  And it will get worse as we continue to hurl towards more and more of this.

But we really need not do so.  So why are we?

"It's inevitable".  No it isn't.  Nothing is, except our own ends.  We are going this way as it suits some, and the ones it principally suits are those who hold the highest economic cards in this system, and don't therefore live in the cubicle farm themselves.  We don't have to do anything of this sort, we just are, as we believe that we have to, or that we haven't thought it out.

So, what can we do

First of all, we ought to acknowledge our natures and quit attempting to suppress them .  Suppressing them just makes us miserable and or somewhat odd.  To heck with that.

The ills of careerism.

Careerism, the concept that the end all be all of a person's existence is their career, has been around for a long time, but as the majority demographic has moved from farming and labor to white collar and service jobs, it's become much worse. At some point, and I'd say some point post 1945, the concept of "career" became incredibly dominant.  In the 1970s, when feminism was in high swing, it received an additional massive boost as women were sold on careerism.

How people view their work is a somewhat difficult topic to address in part because everyone views their work as they view it.  And not all demographics in a society view work the same way. But there is sort of a majority society wide view that predominates.

In our society, and for a very long time, there's been a very strong societal model which holds that the key to self worth is a career.  Students, starting at the junior high level, are taught that in order to be happy in the future they need to go to a "good university" so they can obtain an education which leads to "a high paying career".  For decades the classic careers were "doctor and lawyer", and you still hear some of that, but the bloom may be off the rose a bit with the career of lawyer, frankly, in which case it's really retuning to its American historical norm.

Anyhow, this had driven a section of the American demographic towards a view that economics and careers matter more than anything else.  More than family, more than location, more than anything.  People leave their homes upon graduating from high school to pursue that brass ring in education. They go on to graduate schools from there, and then they engage in a lifetime of slow nomadic behavior, dumping town after town for their career, and in the process certainly dumping their friends in those towns, and quite often their family at home or even their immediate families.

The payoff for that is money, but that's it.  Nothing else.

The downside is that these careerist nomads abandon a close connection with anything else. They aren't close to the localities of their birth, they aren't close to a state they call "home" and they grow distant from the people they were once closest too.

What's that have to do with this topic?

Well, quite a lot.

People who do not know, in the strongest sense of that word know, anyone or anyplace come to be internal exiles, and that's not good.  Having no close connection to anyone place they become only concerned with the economic advantage that place holds for them. When they move into a place they can often be downright destructive at that, seeking the newest and the biggest in keeping with their career status, which often times was agricultural or wild land just recently.  And not being in anyone place long enough to know it, they never get out into it.

That's not all of course.  Vagabonds without attachment, they severe themselves from the human connection that forms part of our instinctual sense of place.  We were meant to be part of a community, and those who have lived a long time in a place know that they'll be incorporated into that community even against their expressed desires.  In a stable society, money matters, but so does community and relationship.  For those with no real community, only money ends up mattering.

There's something really sad about this entire situation, and its easy to observe.  There are now at least two entire generations of careerist who have gone through their lives this way, retiring in the end in a "retirement community" that's also new to them.  At that stage, they often seek to rebuild lives connected to the community they are then in, but what sort of community is that?  One probably made up of people their own age and much like themselves.  Not really a good situation.

Now, am I saying don't have a career?  No, I'm not. But I am saying that the argument that you need to base your career decisions on what society deems to be a "good job" with a "good income" is basing it on a pretty thin argument. At the end of the day, you remain that Cro Magnon really, whose sense of place and well being weren't based on money, but on nature and a place in the tribe.  Deep down, that's really still who you are.  If you sense a unique calling, or even sort of a calling, the more power to you.  But if you view your place in the world as a series of ladders in place and income, it's sad.

As long as we have a philosophy that career="personal fulfillment" and that equates with Career Uber Alles, we're going to be in trouble in every imaginable way.  This doesn't mean that what a person does for a living doesn't matter, but other things matter more, and if a person puts their career above everything else, in the end, they're likely to be unhappy and they're additionally likely to make everyone else unhappy. This may seem to cut against what I noted in the post on life work balance the other day, but it really doesn't, it's part of the same thing.

Indeed, just he other day my very senior partner came in my office and was asking about members of my family who live around here.  Quite a few live right here in the town, more live here in the state, and those who have left have often stayed in the region. The few that have moved a long ways away have retained close connection, but formed new stable ones, long term, in their new communities.  He noted that; "this is our home".  That says a lot.

Get out there.

 Public (Federal) fishing landing in Natrona County, Wyoming. When we hear of our local politicians wanting to "take back" the Federal lands, those of us who get out imagine things like this decreasing considerably in number. We shouldn't let that happen, and beyond that, we should avail ourselves of these sites.

And our nature is to get out there in the dirt.

Go hunting, go fishing, go hiking or go mountain bike riding.  Whatever you excuse is for staying in your artificial walls, get over it and get out.

 

That means, fwiw, that we also have to quit taking snark shots at others in the dirt, if we do it.  That's part of human nature as well, and humans are very bad about it.  I've seen flyfishermen be snots to bait fisherman (you guys are all just fisherman, angler dudes and dudessses, and knock off the goofy crap about catching and releasing everything.. . you catch fish as we like to catch fish because nature endowed us with the concept that fish are tasty).   Some fisherman will take shots at hunters; "I don't hunt, . . . but I fish (i.e., fishing hunting.  Some "non consumptive (i.e., consumptive in another manner) outdoors types take shots at hunters and fisherman; "I don't hunt, but I ride a mountain bike (that's made of mined stuffed and shipped in a means that killed wildlife just the same)".

If you haven't tried something, try it, and the more elemental the better.  If you like hiking in the sticks, keep in mind that the reason people like to do that has to do with their elemental natures.  Try an armed hike with a shotgun some time and see if bird hunting might be your thing, or not.  Give it a try.  And so on.

Get elemental

At the end of they day, you are still a hunter-gatherer, you just are being imprisoned in an artificial environment. So get back to it. Try hunting.  Try fishing. Raise a garden.

Unless economics dictate it, there's no good, even justifiable, reason that you aren't providing some of your own food directly. Go kill it or raise it in your dirt.

Indeed, a huge percentage of Americans have a small plot, sometimes as big as those used by subsistence farmers in the third world, which is used for nothing other than growing a completely worthless crop of grass.  Fertilizer and water are wasted on ground that could at least in part be used to grow an eatable crop.  I'm not saying your entire lawn needs to be a truck farm, but you could grow something.  And if you are just going to hang around in the city, you probably should.

The Land Ethic

 

Aldo Leopold and Olaus Murie.  The Muries lived in Wyoming and have a very close connection with Teton County, although probably the majority of Wyomingites do not realize that. This photo was taken at a meeting of The Wilderness Society in 1946. While probably not widely known now, this era saw the beginnings of a lot of conservation organizations.  At this point in time, Leopold was a professor at the University of Wisconsin.

Decades ago writer Aldo Leopold wrote in his classic A Sand Country Almanac about the land ethic.  Leopold is seemingly remembered today by some as sort of a Proto Granola, but he wasn't.  He was a hunter and a wildlife agent who was struck by what he saw and wrote accordingly. Beyond that, he lived what he wrote.

A person can Google (or Yahoo, or whatever) Leopold and the the "land ethic" and get his original writings on the topic.  I"m not going to try to post them there, as the book was published posthumously in 1949, quite some years back. Because it wasn't published until 49, it had obviously been written some time prior to that.  Because of the content of the book, and everything that has happened since, it's too easy therefore to get a sort of Granola or Hippy like view of the text, when in fact all of that sort of thing came after Leopold's untimely death at age 61.  It'd be easy to boil Leopold's writings down to one proposition, that being what's good for the land is good for everything and everyone, and perhaps that wouldn't be taking it too far.

If I've summarized it correctly, and I don't think I'm too far off, we have to take into consideration further that at the time Leopold was writing the country wasn't nearly as densely populated as it is now, but balanced against that is that the country, in no small part due to World War Two, was urbanizing rapidly and there was a legacy of bad farming practices that got rolling, really, in about 1914 and which came home to roost during the Dust Bowl.  In some ways things have improved a lot since Leopold's day, but one thing that hasn't is that in his time the majority of Americans weren't really all that far removed from an agricultural past.  Now, that's very much not the case.  I suspect, further, in Leopold's day depression, and other social ills due to remoteness from nature weren't nearly as big of problem.  Indeed, if I had to guess, I'd guess that the single biggest problem of that type was the result of World War Two, followed by the Great Depression, followed by World War One.

Anyhow, what Leopold warned us about is even a bigger problem now, however.  Not that the wildness of land is not appreciated.  Indeed, it is likely appreciated more now than it was then. But rather we need to be careful about preserving all sorts of rural land, which we are seemingly not doing a terrible good job at.  The more urbanized we make our world, the less we have a world that's a natural habitat for ourselves, and city parks don't change that.  Some thought about what we're doing is likely in order.  As part of that, quite frankly, some acceptance on restrictions on where and how much you can build comes in with it. That will make some people unhappy, no doubt, but the long term is more important than the short term.

It's not inevitable.

The only reason that our current pattern of living has to continue this way is solely because most people will it to do so.  And if that's bad for us, we shouldn't.

There's nothing inevitable about a Walmart parking lot replacing a pasture. Shoot, there's nothing that says a Walmart can't be torn down and turned into a farm. We don't do these things, or allow them to happen, as we're completely sold on the concept that the shareholders in Walmart matter more than our local concerns, or we have so adopted the chamber of commerce type attitude that's what's good for business is good for everyone, that we don't.  Baloney.  We don't exist for business, it exists for us. 

Some thought beyond the acceptance of platitudes is necessary in the realm of economics, which is in some ways what we're discussing with this topic.  Americans of our current age are so accepting of our current economic model that we excuse deficiencies in it as inevitable, and we tend to shout down any suggestion that anything be done, no matter how mild, as "socialism".

The irony of that is that our economic model is corporatist, not really capitalist, in nature.  And a corporatist model requires governmental action to exist.  The confusion that exists which suggests that any government action is "socialism" would mean that our current economic system is socialist, which of course would be absurd.  Real socialism is when the government owns the means of production.  Social Democracy, another thing that people sometimes mean when they discuss "socialism" also features government interaction and intervention in people's affairs, and that's not what we're suggesting here either.

Rather, I guess what we're discussing here is small scale distributism, the name of which scares people fright from the onset as "distribute", in our social discourse, really refers to something that's a feature of "social democracy" and which is an offshoot of socialism.  That's not what we're referencing here at all, but rather the system that is aimed at capitalism with a subsidiarity angle. I.e., a capitalist system that's actually more capitalistic than our corporatist model, as it discourages government participation through the weighting of the economy towards corporations.

It's not impossible

Now, I know that some will read this and think that it's all impossible for where they are, but truth be known it's more possible in some ways now than it has been for city dwellers, save for those with means, for many years.  Certainly in the densely packed tenements of the early 19th  Century getting out to look at anything at all was pretty darned difficult.

Most cities now at least incorporate some green space. A river walk, etc.  And most have some opportunities for things that at least replicate real outdoor sports, and I mean the real outdoor activities, not things like sitting around in a big stadium watching a big team. That's not an outdoor activity but a different type of activity (that I'm not criticizing).  We owe it to ourselves.

Now, clearly, some of what is suggested here is short term, and some long. And this is undoubtedly the most radical post I've ever posted here.  It won't apply equally to everyone.  The more means a person has, if they're a city dweller, the easier for it is for them to get out.  And the more destructive they can be when doing so, as an irony of the active person with means is that the mere presence of their wealth in an activity starts to make it less possible for everyone else.  But for most of us we can get out some at least, and should.

I'm not suggesting here that people should abandon their jobs in the cities and move into a commune.  Indeed, I wouldn't suggest that as that doesn't square with what I"m actually addressing here at all.  But I am suggesting that we ought to think about what we're going, and it doesn't appear we are. We just charge on as if everything must work out this way, which is choosing to let events choose for us, or perhaps letting the few choose for the many. Part of that may be rethinkiing the way we think about careers.  We all know it, but at the end of the day having made yourself rich by way of that nomadic career won't add significantly, if at all, to your lifespan and you'll go on to your eternal reward the same as everyone else, and sooner or later will be part of the collective forgotten mass.  Having been a "success" at business will not buy you a second life to enjoy.

None of this is to say that if you have chosen that high dollar career and love it, that you are wrong.  Nor is this to say that you must become a Granola.  But, given the degree to which we seem to have a modern society we don't quite fit, perhaps we ought to start trying to fit a bit more into who we are, if we have the get up and go to do it, and perhaps we ought to consider that a bit more in our overall societal plans, assuming that there even are any.