Friday, May 25, 2007

Deeper Penetration


The anti-environmental Right has done a good job of inducting off-road vehicle owners into its supremely cynical “Wise Use” movement, by arguing that mowing down the wilderness in dune buggies is an entitlement, if not a moral duty.

It’s not clear where the “wise” part comes in. Unlike hunters, who have a vested interest in conserving the habitat of the animals they hunt, ORV riders need conserve little more than mounds of dirt. A desert tortoise may deliver a satisfying bounce when you run it over, but once they’re all gone, a rock will do the same job perfectly well.

A recent ORV rally suggests that despite the prevalence of libertarian dogma in the Wise Use movement, its adherents tend not to respect the idea that one’s freedoms end where someone else’s begin:

”Groups of partiers were blocking an area and forcing women to bare their breasts in order to leave, along with numerous incidents of unwanted fondling of women. When law enforcement officers took action, the crowd became unruly, throwing objects at the officers.”
It’s probably irresponsible to suggest that this behavior has something to do with the rhetoric coming from our ailing nation’s radical-right thinktanks , but so what? Irresponsibility is my inalienable right as an American. While it’s true that certain subcultures are more likely to be thuggish than others, it’s also true that the Right has done its damnedest to ally itself with those subcultures, and to conflate their witless transgression of racial, sexual, and civic norms with “individual liberty.”

At any rate, this is not an isolated incident:
The U.S. Forest Service also reports rising attacks on its rangers in connection with ORV encounters. ORVs allow deeper penetration into remote, formerly wild, areas by people seeking to escape social restrictions, often leading to destructive acts.
Who could’ve imagined that contempt for the environment would go hand in hand with contempt for one’s fellow citizens, and for the law itself? Like anti-immigration extremism and racial pseudoscience, the ORV situation is a perfect example of how the Right puts a philosophical veneer on sociopathy in order to advance its business interests.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

O I could really go on for hours about off-road vehicles and how they have increased by a factor of 10 in the last 2 years in the part of Colorado where I spend the summer.

They're driving me out of Colorado. The things are a plague on the landscape. They are little pollution packages and destroy everything. They are destroying the back country quickly and they are creating air pollution where there wasn't any and they create noise pollution and I hate them!

Phila said...

Tena,

I hear a lot of that.

And I didn't even get into their attacks on private landowners.

Anonymous said...

Interesting. You have to live outside of center city Philadelphia to appreciate this, but ORVs (quads specifically) have been proliferating in North and West Philadelphia in the last couple of years and ridden with ever more brazen lawlessness and disregard for public safety. I'm not sure what that suggests about the spread of this particular sociopathy.

Anonymous said...

I'm no fan of ATVers, I put them in the same league as the illegal aliens who have completely trashed areas of the southwest.