Wolf extermination is land improvement

So after a long and overwhelmingly successful campaign to exterminate wolves in America we’re starting to actively try to reverse course and reestablish wolves in the wild. And part of that involves retrospectively casting the earlier extermination efforts as the product of some sort of misguided fear or ignorance but bitch please, we knew exactly what we were doing, it was cold, pragmatic land improvement.

Now, our stock image of “land improvement” is agricultural - grading land flat, draining wetlands, adding irrigation, so as to enable it to produce more crops. You’ll remember that a lot of the formal ideology of American settler-colonial land appropriation was that the native inhabitants didn’t have ownership of the land because they hadn’t made it theirs by performing such land improvements, and were instead something like long-term vagrants.

(As a side-note, in early America land clearance was effectively free or even profitable if you were tied into the transatlantic economy - a landowner could hire a gang of men to chop down the trees on his plot and then immediately pay for the effort by reselling the wood, depending on the local markets and geography either raw as fuel or construction material, or instead processed into lumber, furniture components or [in the deep woods where transport was toughest] by burning to ash for use in lye manufacture. Keep in mind that in this period wood was quite dear back in Europe, while in the New World it basically grew on trees.)

Now, as you’ll know if you followed my recommendation to read Changes in the Land, American natives actually did perform extensive operations on land to improve its productivity, but were often overlooked in this because what they were optimizing weren’t the familiar forms of either manorial or smallholder agrarianism. The classic example is setting regular forest fires, which cleared out underbrush and allowed for fresh green growth, thus increasing the carrying capacity for game like deer, thus increasing the productivity for hunting and gathering.

(Another side-note: you see similar if less intentional dynamics today. When people talk about deer-human conflict - car crashes, nibbled gardens, etc. - as a result of humans pressuring deer through invading their habitat that’s exactly wrong. That stuff gets worse as exurban development continues because humans are creating new deer habitat. The deep woods are too tangled and impassible for deer and don’t have enough sunlight to support nibbling-height plant growth. Plains are better food-wise but too vulnerable - deer escape predators by bounding over undergrowth that predators can’t follow through. So their ideal habitat are edgelands - lightly wooded areas, ideally with access to marginally more and less overgrown regions. And exurban development functionally creates edgeland.)

So once a few years ago I took Blue Bitch from Portland to Missoula and back, for a cousin’s wedding. Got a few good stories out of that. Did you see that New York Times package? I should tell you my Sandpoint story sometime.

And back in Portland OR-7 had been in the news, this wolf with a tracker that was the first wolf known in Western Oregon for more than half a century, and he wandered down around to California (first known for nearly a whole) and against all odds found a mate and birthed a litter, real heartwarming story. But after I crossed over the Cascades range, and intensifying as I continued east into Idaho and Montana, I started to run into merchandise, on gas station shelves, pickup truck bumpers, locals’ torsos, that all ran around themes like Fuck Wolves; or Kill Wolves; Wolves Can Go To Hell; Kill All Fucking Wolves, Who Can Go To Fucking Hell, And Then The Fucking Wolf-Loving Hippies Too. I was actually a little impressed at how many variations on the theme they managed to pull off.

Because wolf extermination was land improvement. Like, we knew wolves were apex predators and important to the functioning of the natural ecosystem when we killed them, THAT’S WHY WE KILLED THEM. By killing the apex predators we became the apex predators, and wolf-cleared lands became much more productive for hunting. The state government of Alaska sends helicopters out to kill wolfpacks every year for this exact reason, to enrich the hunting prospects. (A substantial share of the Alaska population derives a nontrivial portion of their yearly diet from wild game.) By replacing the apex predator with ourselves we allowed for animal husbandry - livestock raising - which is essentially hunting plus low time preference.

It wasn’t because we were afraid of them although their reputation as mankillers (mostly lone forest travelers in prey-scarce seasons) sure didn’t fucking help their cause, it was an economic decision. We killed them as an act of land improvement, to raise the yield of hunting and animal husbandry.

Now of course animal husbandry and hunting don’t provide as much calories per acre as intensive agrarianism, but they’re still perfectly viable for regions with lower population densities or ill-suited to agriculture - soil too rocky or acidic, insufficient water, no easy transportation to markets for low-value, high-volume bulk products.

And this - the mountainous terrain of eastern Oregon into the Rockies - was hunting and animal husbandry land, this was the land, the culture, the economy made viable by wolf extermination, and so I’m not surprised they said Fuck You to wolves and wolf reintroduction, because wolf reintroduction was basically saying Fuck You to them.

After I found a hotel for a night I ended up in a bar, struck up a conversation with a local, wanted to know what it was like from that side. It was basically like you’d expect - that the government that acted in their name had abandoned the duty of protecting their livelihood from predators was improper, that it would actively try to stop them from protecting themselves was repugnant. She attributed it to city folk in Portland who couldn’t imagine what it was like to be a farmer. (Nearby Idaho, for example, started annual wolf hunts as soon as federal protection as “endangered species” was lifted.)

I said that wasn’t true, Portland’s the earthiest city I know, people are very in touch with the land and the truth of fundamental production, there are lots of people who can imagine what it’s like to be a farmer.

And let that sit a beat and then delivered the punchline: …there’s just more people who can imagine what it’s like to be a wolf.

Which is it, really, that for all the foofaraw what we’re doing is actively and intentionally degrading a functional segment of our polity in the name and interests of those not only not our countrymen but not even our species, and when they ask why we would do this, and what we’re offering in return we basically tell them - they who actually fucking know from wolves - “well, it’s really cool to think of yourself as a wolf”.

She also said Portlanders wouldn’t be so positive if they were the ones who had to deal with the consequences. Which is completely correct. In LA and Portland, I’ve seen some of the greenest, circle-of-life ecology types get quite tetchy about coyotes sneaking into their yards and eviscerating their housepets. Their precious social media star reduced to a mess of fur and blood, the skull’s hard to chew so they often leave the head intact, dangling off a stripped spinal cord.

And yeah when a farmer comes across a calf like that okay maybe it’s not ~a member of his family~, instead it’s just his job and his retirement and college savings accounts. So hey.

OK this is clever.

My campaign’s just barely begun and I’ve already got you begging for more. Sure, you can say you oppose me or that you don’t even take me seriously. But let me ask you: How many articles have you read about Ted Cruz lately? How many news segments have you watched on Bobby Jindal? Or Rand Paul? But if those stories have the name “Donald Trump” in them, well, look who suddenly can’t get enough.

The thing is, I’ve got all of you eating out of my hand and I haven’t even released a single campaign commercial yet. Don’t look me in the eye and tell me you don’t want to stick around and see what that looks like, because you and I both know these ads are going to be absolutely incredible. I’ll be standing there projecting my best presidential air, saying “I’m Donald Trump, and I approve this message,” and you won’t be able to take your eyes off it.

You keep obsessing over every little thing I do and say, and I promise you’ll get your commercials real soon.

nostalgebraist:

I’m still beating myself about the fact that, back when I was joking about bringing back dueling as a social practice, I never said “get ready for the new call-out culture”

iwanderedon:

flying a small airplane is easier than driving a car trufax

flying a small airplane is trivial as hell, it’s landing that’s a bitch.

filenames:

It’s really funny to pretend that Tom Waits is Tom Petty’s side project.

enskog:

Dianne L. Massey Dunbar - Water Bottles, 2015

quoms:

CONIFA aka “so that’s what all six people who care about ‘cascadia’ are up to” aka “the biannual hungarian-armenian irredentism forum” aka “monaco? but you have diplomatic recognition” aka the only football tournament that matters

I think we’ve lost something with the decline of formalized grieving rituals - sitting shiva, wearing mourning clothes or black armbands, etc.

‘cause it’s like, okay if you’re dead set on forming permanent attachments to impermanent mortals and then being sad when your error’s shown up, at least the rituals enchanted the feeling and binded individual experiences to a collective narrative.

But more than serving the mourning, the rituals served the rest of society by quarantining it - mourners would stay housebound for an initial period, and then step down to going out in clothing that distinguished their status - to be treated delicately maybe, but also not to be taken seriously.

And then, possibly the most important thing, the rituals would specify a point at which to stop, after which those who persisted were considered to be the ones violating propriety.

Bringing that back would certainly do something to foreclose the possibility of “mourner” as a permanent identity or even career - MADD types, school shooting parents barnstorming around making a show of bawwwwing over decade-old corpsemeat and then expecting society to break important shit so as to indulge them, that sort of thing.

hastapura:

“Linking brute force with the diaphanous ideal of morality carries a disturbing consequence: it means that if you’re bested by a knight, he must have been a better man than you.”

- julia gfrorer @ tcj on the above, ben duncan’s “untitled”

Since music has become an almost general amusement, nothing is more useful than a shop that has assembled all kinds of music from ancient to modern. Such is on offer at the business we are announcing today that will be opened the 22nd of this month… The subscription will be 24 livres per year, in exchange for which sum the subscriber can take whatever piece of music that they would like.

The first music subscription service, 1765. “He was promptly sued.”

From the blog post 250 Years of Music Subscription Services.

(via bmichael)

rikerist:

mircea eliade, “the sacred and the profane”

(related)

Possibly my favorite thing about Taylor Swift is how transparently, unapologetically psyched she is about getting to use other, lesser, hot young famous things as disposable toys.

A funny thing about free-range chickens is that they get taken as part of this retro-rustic thing - chickens wandering around outside in a bucolic setting, that’s the traditional way to raise your meat.

And that is ridiculous. The traditional way to raise meat chickens is on large-scale factory farms, because raising meat chickens wasn’t a tradition at all until the mid-20th century, with roots in the 1930s.

Now chickens had been raised for food, and been eaten, before then, but that’s to say that they were raised for eggs, and chicken meat was essentially a waste product of the egg industry.

There were historically two types of chicken that were eaten. One was “stew hens” - egg-layers who had aged out of productivity, so named because the aged meat (layers being bred for durability, not tenderness) was tough and thus favored tenderization through slow-cooking.

The other were “spring chickens” - surplus male chickens that were killed at a young age, after their sex (and thus uselessness as layers) became obvious.

(Chick sexing can separate males from females at hatching, but to do it reliably requires enough training and experience that chicken sexer is a skilled job in its own right, something modern large-scale farms find useful to hire but not worth the expense to barnyard farmers.)

Spring chickens, obviously, were preferred for their tenderness, but this raised their price, and the young age decreased the amount of meat on their bones. And both types coming from lines bred for laying, neither had all that much to begin with. So chicken was something of a luxury meat. (As historically were most skeletal muscle meats - the poor ate organ meats, trimmings, tendons, bone marrow, fat, and blood, to the extent they ate meat at all.)

Which makes sense - if you assume that all stew hens lay about 200 eggs a year in 2 years of production, AND that there’s no chick sexing so that there’s one spring chicken per hen, AND treat the two types as equivalent AND completely ignore unsaleable losses to disease or predators that still means only one chicken breast is produced per 17 dozens of eggs.

So knowing that you realize Herbert Hoover’s 1928 campaign slogan of “a chicken in every pot” wasn’t just offering the promise of no one going hungry, but further of widespread access to petty luxury.

squided:

ap08:

weloveshortvideos:

When you buy the best fireworks in the store

Woaaah

omg