In the interest of not having my writing practice for the day be another fucking cover letter, I will sit here at the computer for a little while and write about some things that have been on my mind. Sometimes tiny ideas pop into my head, and I write them down in the Notes app on my phone. I often don't remember what I even meant when I wrote it, and it takes me a little time to recall what I thought was so important about this idea. It doesn't help that usually, the note is in the form of a one-liner; it makes the whole thing feel like an out-of-context joke that really makes no sense unless the circumstances it arose from are available to me.
Below are a couple recent ones, along with an attempt to expand a bit on them:
“A good background might be even more special than a good bird.”
When I read this the other day, I was surprised it was in my phone, to begin with. Not only did I not remember what I meant by it, but I had not even remembered writing it. When I noticed it, it was like walking into my living room at 2AM to get a drink of water and finding Bertrand Russell sitting at my kitchen table playing solitaire and smoking a pipe. It was a strong feeling that this does not belong, almost enough to throw me into a youtube rabbit hole researching the Mandella Effect and the possibilities of a human jumping between alternate universes.
But then it all came back to me, as quickly as the fleeting thought came and left me while I was out photographing birds. Once I remembered where I was when I made this note, its meaning became glaringly obvious: birds are everywhere, good backgrounds are hard to come by. There are plenty of cool birds around to take pictures of most days, but those birds are rarely in a position relative to me that gives the photographs I'm taking of them an excellent background. Telephone wires, tree branches, roads, a dumb, dull blue sky… these things all tend to ruin my pictures. A common bird, however, has never ruined a picture on its own. The most memorable days for me as a bird photographer are when everything looks perfect in the viewfinder there in the field. And that is almost entirely dependent on a glorious background, which I have found in the last couple of years is hands down the most challenging thing to come by out there. Birds will always be beautiful, but backgrounds, unfortunately, will not.
“Funding is based on strong use; the goal was always to move toward a weaker definition where all are included."
This one took me a minute. Funding of what? Ah yes, wildlife and habitat conservation/restoration. That thing I always talk about and the one subject that returns more blank stares than any other.
Strong use and weak use refer to the use of wildlife resources and include trampling caused by hiking, taking fish and game from the woods via angling and hunting, off-roading, plinking, camping, etc. Strong users would be those who use a lot, especially in a way that they can be charged more and more for their use. Weak users don't do much out in the woods and rarely participate in anything that would result in income generation for natural resource managers. Income is generated for wildlife and habitat protection primarily through fishing licenses, hunting licenses, State Park and National Park passes, and campgrounds. Additionally, there are taxes on hunting equipment that go directly to the cause. Outside of this, there is not a hell of a lot of passive income to fund the protection of our lands and animals. At the end of the day, strong users can be thought of as hunters and anglers, while weak users are those once-a-year hikers that hit the free trail closest as the crow flies to their couch.
Wildlife management has focused almost entirely on increasing strong users. More people hunting and fishing and visiting state parks translates into more money to fund hunting and fishing and state parks. While I am all for more people going outside in theory, I worry that Aldo Leopold was right in that this system builds a relationship between people and the woods that mirrors that of Lenny and that poor rabbit. Aldo says that this kind of funding system that depends on people taking from nature will end in humans fondling the woods to death; selling tickets to the show to try and save it is self-defeating and ignores a couple of essential facts.
Fact 1: We are all users even if we do not go outside and recreate in the mountains. Being alive inherently means that your existence is causing resources to be pulled out of the earth to sustain that existence. For this reason, we have to widen the definition of a strong user in a way that basically includes everyone so that everyone gets charged to keep the ecosystems we depend on functioning and providing the services we need to survive. I’m pretty sure we already do this with all kinds of shit and that this is just called a “general tax."
Fact 2: All living organisms have an intrinsic right to go on existing. When we only use money from strong users to protect ecosystems, biases creep in. We get organizations who lobby for MORE DEER, MORE ELK instead of just the healthier, diverse ecosystems we really need for the long-term survival of these species and thousands of others. We get hunters protesting the reintroduction of carnivores because it would, in theory, decrease the number of huntable animals on the landscape. We farm fish and dump them into rivers and lakes instead of working out why our bodies of water cannot produce fish in abundance anymore. If we had a more general-purpose way of funding ecosystem management (maybe the previously mentioned “tax” idea), then all living organisms from Steller’s Jays to morel mushrooms would have an equal right to protection.
When only one group is funding public resources, we run the risk of a short-sighted management policy resulting from catering to a blinkered interest group. I would love to see a wider net be cast to collect money for habitat restoration and wildlife protection. But that would require that people appreciate nature even if they don’t drive out there to experience it themselves. This is a hard pill to swallow. The possibility of getting it done depends entirely on the moral, aesthetic, and scientific education of a group of primates who would preferably not learn.
Like Aldo, I am pessimistic.
“Planets as golf balls”
What the fuck. No clue. Ok, the last one:
“I'm just glad I stopped and took the time to understand the length and depth of our almost infinite ignorance."
This was the most obvious one and was one of those "fuck, I shoulda said X” things. I made this note while walking away from another conversation where someone was probing me on what I planned to use my degree for. My response is always that the learning was the point, and I honestly have not given enough thought to how I will monetize my degree. The conversation kind of flopped from there, probably because I was embarrassed and somehow felt irresponsible for not thinking too deeply about the job prospects for a philosophy major in 2022. This question always makes me feel childish about my desire to learn for its own sake. It depresses me that the single goal of gaining new knowledge and grasping what humans have learned since they started writing stuff down and saving it for the future is not the reason most people get a degree.
The history of humans itself is infinitely fascinating. There is no word for how interesting the history of the whole fucking universe is. Our knowledge is flimsy and consistently incorrect. Our world changes as we find new ways to think and talk about it. Being exposed to dozens of theories every semester, comparing and contrasting them, siding with one, and then the next week siding with its critics is what is beneficial about philosophy. No, there are not a lot of jobs that pay for someone to be able to deconstruct and explain Hemple or Quine. But there is so much value in taking on and then rejecting so many viewpoints over a few short years that I don’t really care. I can go fix appliances if I have to. I can be happy doing anything from here on out, and I have philosophic exposure to the infinite amount of ways there are to be human to thank for that.
This leads to a decent conclusion about why I am wasting time fleshing out these baby ideas when I know no one will read them. It is helpful to me, the only person that really matters around here. These thoughts come and go so quickly, and I barely understand them at the moment they strike me, let alone a couple weeks later when I am scanning my phone for essay ideas. The fact that I could crank out 1500 words in a couple of short, enjoyable hours is proof to the only person I really give a shit about that this is something I enjoy doing for its own sake. And those, I have found, are the kinds of things that are always worth doing.
Sometimes I wonder if I am lying to myself when I tell people that the degree was an end in itself and doesn't need to be a means to career advancement. It's days like today when it becomes wonderfully apparent that I am telling the truth.