Lex Anteinternet: Some feral threads in the fabric.

Lex Anteinternet: Some feral threads in the fabric.: 

Some feral threads in the fabric.

I'm not going to take this too far, and you definitely could, but a couple of odds and ends I've run across recently.

One is this Agrarian blog I recently located:

Foothill Agrarian

There are only handful of really worthwhile agrarian blogs around.  That's at least better than the situation with the distributist situation, where there's nothing worthwhile whatsoever.  Of the handful that are out there, the two best ones are linked in here.  A third one that is also worthwhile (which is a successor to two prior blogs, just as this blog also is), is also linked in, but it's not quite as good.  I'll do a thread on them some other time, or on all of these together. A fourth one would get a link for its actual agrarian posts, but it descends into "Southern Agrarianism" of the Lost Cause variety, and we're not going there.  Nope, no way.

Anyhow, I thought that this entry by an agrarian California sheep rancher, who is an adult entrant into hunting, really interesting.  He's also a self professed agrarian.

Persistence

We've posted a lot about hunting here, from the prospective of the nearly feral agrarian who has been a hunter his entire life.  It's interesting to see some similar views come about from the thoughtful agrarian adult who came to it late.

I haven't made it all the way through the back entries on Foothill Agrarian. Not by a long shot, but I was also struck by this entry:

Coming to Terms with Being Part-Time

This is a little like reading my own thoughts.  Indeed, this guy is just about the same age as me (I'm a little older), and he's a rancher, not a "homesteader", which anymore conveys something else, and frankly something less serious, or perhaps less realistic.  I'll be looking forward to perusing his prior entries.

I'm glad I found his blog.

Here's the other thing that caught my eye.

Helsinki says no meat will be served, single-use cutlery used at its events

This quite frankly is a deceptive headline, but that's how it generally reads, even in English language editions of Finnish newspapers.  What it really means is that the City of Helsinki will be changing what it serves at official state and municipal functions, and venues it owns, and it actually still will be serving meat.

What it will serve is local fish and also local game.  We don't see wild game as a restaurant item much in the US, and indeed its subject to very strict statutory provisions everywhere.  Why peole make the distinction between fish and "meat" baffles me, but they have here.

This is being done, maybe, by Helsinki (its drawing a lot of criticism) to reduce, it claims, its carbon footprint.  There's a certain "m'eh" quality to this as frankly the concept that bovines are farting the plant into a climate crisis is not really well thought out.  Humans are omnivores and meat is part of our diet, including meat that is raised by farmers and ranchers.

Having said that, I've long been an advocate for getting your own meat directly, and therefore I'm somewhat applauding Helsinki here, probably surprisingly to those who might know me. They're emphasizing local fish, which is something that people of that city probably mostly subsisted on until the mid 20th Century. And hunting wild game has always been a big part of Finnish culture, and still is.

Now, I'm not advocating for what Helsinki did, and I suspect that the Woke city counsel of the city, or whatever its administering body is, won't have this in place long.  I'm a stockman and I'm hugely skeptical of the cow fart accusations on the climate.  Depending upon how cattle are fed, this is not the problem its made out to be, and so to the extent its a problem, and there's always been ungulates around all over, it can be addressed.  But I find it really surprising that in 2021 I'll occasionally find even ranchers and farmers who don't hunt.

People should get their meat locally if they can, and included in that, is getting it directly from the field.  Its healthy, and honest, and connects you with reality in a way that going to the stocked shelves at Sam's Club doesn't.

Lex Anteinternet: Blog Mirror: KARELIAN BEAR DOGS: HUNTER TURNED PR...

Lex Anteinternet: Blog Mirror: KARELIAN BEAR DOGS: HUNTER TURNED PR...:   

Blog Mirror: KARELIAN BEAR DOGS: HUNTER TURNED PROTECTOR

 

KARELIAN BEAR DOGS: HUNTER TURNED PROTECTOR

Lex Anteinternet: BLM acquisition unlocks thousands of acres, new st...

Lex Anteinternet: BLM acquisition unlocks thousands of acres, new st...:  

BLM acquisition unlocks thousands of acres, new stretch of North Platte near Casper

 This major public access story hit the news here Thursday.

BLM acquisition unlocks thousands of acres, new stretch of North Platte near Casper

I'm quite familiar with this stretch of property. As a kid, before the recent owners who owned transferred it, I used to hunt part of it.  I never asked for permission, even though I'm sure I should have.  In those days, in the 70s, we asked for permission a lot less, and it was granted by fiat a lot more.

This is a real boon to sportsmen.  It'll open up miles of river to fishing, and miles and miles to hunting.  I've passed by deer and doves in this area a lot as I didn't have permission to go where they were.  Now I'll be able to, although I hope the BLM makes as much of this roadless as possible.

I hope they also lease it out for grazing.

Indeed, I have some mixed feelings about this as I really hate to see a local ranch go out of production.  The family that owned it had started off as sheepmen in Johnson County and moved down to Natrona County when their land was bought for coal production.  Now they'll just be out of agriculture entirely, and I really hate to see that, even though I'm glad to see this didn't go to out of state interest.  Indeed, what occurred is more in keeping with the purpose of the original Federal land programs, including the Homestead Act, than what often does occur with land sales now days.

I will note that, of course, in the age of the internet this of course resulted in moronic comments, including the blisteringly ignorant comment that its somehow unconstitutional for the Federal Government to own land. That comment is so dense that it should disqualify a person from going onto land in general until some education occurs.

Lex Anteinternet: Yellowstone. A really radical idea.

Lex Anteinternet: Yellowstone. A really radical idea.: 

Yellowstone. A really radical idea.

A really radical idea that won't happen, but maybe should.

There have been really horrific floods, as we all know, in Yellowstone National Park. Roads in the northern part of the park may be closed for the rest of the summer.  Here's a National Park Service item on it:

Updates

• Aerial assessments conducted Monday, June 13, by Yellowstone National Park show major damage to multiple sections of road between the North Entrance (Gardiner, Montana), Mammoth Hot Springs, Lamar Valley and Cooke City, Montana, near the Northeast Entrance.
• Many sections of road in these areas are completely gone and will require substantial time and effort to reconstruct.
• The National Park Service will make every effort to repair these roads as soon as possible; however, it is probable that road sections in northern Yellowstone will not reopen this season due to the time required for repairs.
• To prevent visitors from being stranded in the park if conditions worsen, the park in coordination with Yellowstone National Park Lodges made the decision to have all visitors move out of overnight accommodations (lodging and campgrounds) and exit the park.
• All entrances to Yellowstone National Park remain temporarily CLOSED while the park waits for flood waters to recede and can conduct evaluations on roads, bridges and wastewater treatment facilities to ensure visitor and employee safety.
• There will be no inbound visitor traffic at any of the five entrances into the park, including visitors with lodging and camping reservations, until conditions improve and park infrastructure is evaluated.
• The park’s southern loop appears to be less impacted than the northern roads and teams will assess damage to determine when opening of the southern loop is feasible. This closure will extend minimally through next weekend (June 19).
• Due to the northern loop being unavailable for visitors, the park is analyzing how many visitors can safely visit the southern loop once it’s safe to reopen. This will likely mean implementation of some type of temporary reservation system to prevent gridlock and reduce impacts on park infrastructure.
• At this time, there are no known injuries nor deaths to have occurred in the park as a result of the unprecedented flooding. 
• Effective immediately, Yellowstone’s backcountry is temporarily closed while crews assist campers (five known groups in the northern range) and assess damage to backcountry campsites, trails and bridges.
• The National Park Service, surrounding counties and states of Montana and Wyoming are working with the park’s gateway communities to evaluate flooding impacts and provide immediate support to residents and visitors.
• Water levels are expected to recede today in the afternoon; however, additional flood events are possible through this weekend.

Here's an idea.

Don't rebuild the roads.

For years, there have been complaints about how overcrowded Yellowstone National Park has become.  A combination of a tourist economy and high mobility, and frankly the American inability to grasp that the country has become overpopulated, had contributed to that.  For years there have been suggestions that something needed to be done about that.

Maybe what is needed is. .. nothing.

Well, nothing now, so to speak.

Yellowstone was the nation's first National Park.  It was created at a time when park concepts, quite frankly, were different from they are now.   Created in 1872, its establishment was in fact visionary, and it did grasp in part that the nation's frontier was closing, even though the creation of the park came a fully four years prior to the Battle of Little Big Horn.  There was, at the time of its creation, a sort of lamentation that the end of the Frontier was in sight, and the nation was going to become one of farms and cities.

Nobody saw cities like they exist now, however, and nobody grasped that the day would come when agricultural land would be the province of the rich, and that homesteading would go from a sort of desperate act to something that people would cite to, in the case of their ancestors, as some sort of basis for moral superiority.  Things are much different today than they were then.

Indeed, in some ways, the way the park is viewed is a bit bipolar.  To some, particularly those willing to really rough it, Yellowstone is a sort of giant wilderness area.  To others, it's a sort of theme park. 

The appreciation of the need to preserve wilderness existed then, but what that meant wasn't really understood.  The park was very much wilderness at first, and some things associated with wilderness went on within it, and of course still do.  Early camping parties travelled there.  People fished there, and still do.  Hunting was prohibited early on, which had more to do with the 19th Century decline in wildlife due to market hunting than it did anything else.  This has preserved a sort of bipolarism in and of itself, as fishing is fish-hunting, just as bird hunting is fowling. There's no reason in fact that Yellowstone should have not been opened back up to hunting some time during the last quarter-century, but it is not as just as the park is wilderness to young adventurers from the National Outdoor Leadership School in Lander, and hearty back country folks of all ages, it's also a big public zoo for people from Newark or Taipei.  

Since 1872, all sorts of additional parks have been created. Some are on the Yellowstone model, such as Yosemite.  Others are historical sites such as Gettysburg or Ft. Laramie.  All, or certainly all that I've seen, are of value.

But they don't all have the same value.

Much of Yellowstone's value is in its rugged wilderness.  Some cite to the geothermal features of the park, but that's only a small portion of it.  And for that reason, much of Yellowstone today would make more sense existing as a Wilderness Area under the Wilderness Act of 1964, the act that helps preserve the west in a very real way, and which western politicians, who often live lives much different than actual westerners, love to hate.

A chance exists here to bring back Yellowstone into that mold, which it was intended in part to be fro the very onset, and which many wish it was, or imagine it to be, today.

Don't rebuilt the roads.

That would in fact mean the northern part of the park would revert to wilderness, truly.  And it means that many fewer people would go to the park in general.  And it would hurt the tourist communities in the northern areas, and even in the southern areas, as the diminished access to the park would mean that the motorized brigade of American and International tourists wouldn't go there, as they wouldn't want to be too far from their air-conditioned vehicles.

But that's exactly what should be done.