We have added a "pages" feature to this blog. The currently visible page is:
There's a couple more in the hopper.
This blog has gotten more active than it was originally, as more original posts are now included here. Originally, it was just a feed for Agrarian topics from Lex Anteinternet. Showing, I suppose, that this is more active, this page is visible on that blog as well.
Very unusual to see a one off bill like this:
To prohibit the implementation of the Draft Resource Management Plan and Environmental Impact Statement for the Rock Springs RMP Revision, Wyoming, and for other purposes.
Ms. Hageman introduced the following bill; which was referred to the Committee on Natural Resources
To prohibit the implementation of the Draft Resource Management Plan and Environmental Impact Statement for the Rock Springs RMP Revision, Wyoming, and for other purposes.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
SECTION 1. RESTRICTION ON DRAFT RMP AND EIS FOR ROCK SPRINGS RMP REVISION, WYOMING.
The Secretary of the Interior may not finalize, implement, administer, or enforce the Draft Resource Management Plan and Environmental Impact Statement for the Rock Springs RMP Revision, Wyoming, referred to in the notice of availability titled “Notice of Availability of the Draft Resource Management Plan and Environmental Impact Statement for the Rock Springs RMP Revision, Wyoming” published by the Bureau of Land Management on August 18, 2023 (88 Fed. Reg. 56654).
FWIW, a really good look at the plan was featured on Governor Gordon's podcast. The big complaint with the plan (which I don't think is that bad) what that it was sort of dropped on the area by the BLM after people believed that the groups they were working in with the BLM would have an impact on the plan, and didn't appear to.
I'd guess, but don't know, that the chances of a one off bill passing in the current Congress is really small.
His life will grow out of the ground like the other lives of the place, and take its place among them. He will be with them - neither ignorant of them, nor indifferent to them, nor against them - and so at last he will grow to be native-born. That is, he must reenter the silence and the darkness, and be born again.
Wendell Berry, A Native Hill.
So we've gone through this and lamented on the state of the world.
We looked at how working for largely local businesses, in an economy in which most were local, would work, in terms of economics.
In other words, if you needed an appliance, and went to Wally's Appliance Store, owned and operated by Wally, rather than Walmart, owned and operated by anonymous corporate shareholders, how would that look?
And we looked at something more radical yet, Agrarianism.
So how does this all tie together, and what difference would it really make?
Let's revisit the definition of Agrarianism.
Given the above, isn't Agrarianism simply agricultural distributism?
Well, no.
Agrarianism is an ethical perspective that privileges an agriculturally oriented political economy. At its most concise, agrarianism is “the idea that agriculture and those whose occupation involves agriculture are especially important and valuable elements of societyBradley M. Jones, American Agrarianism.
Agrarianism is agriculture oriented on an up close and personal basis, and as such, it's family oriented, and land ethic oriented.
We also noted that agrarianism as we define it incorporates The Land Ethic, which holds:
All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts.The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants and animals, or collectively the land.The Land Ethic, A Sand County Almanac. Aldo Leopold.
So what would this mean to society at large, and a distributist society at that?
To start with, it would mean a lot more family farm operations, and no remotely owned and operated ones where the land was held by Bill Gates or the Chinese Communist Party. Combined with Distributism, it would also mean a lot more local processing of agricultural products. Local packing houses, local flour mills, local bakeries.
It would also mean a society that was focused on local ownership of homes with residents who lived a more local, land ethic focused, lives.
Indeed, the local would matter much more in general.
And with it, humanity.
There would still be the rich and the poor, but not the remote rich and the ignorable poor.
Most people would be in the middle, and most of them, owning their own. They'd be more independent in that sense, and therefore less subject to the whims of remote employers, economic interests, and politicians.
All three major aspects of Catholic Social Teaching, humanity, subsidiarity, and solidarity, coming together.
An agrarian society would be much less focused on "growth", if focused on it at all. Preservation of agricultural and wild lands would be paramount. People would derive their social values in part from that, rather than the host of panem et circenses distractions they now do, or at least they could.
They'd derive their leisure from it as well, and therefore appreciate it more. If hiking in a local park, or going fishing, or being outdoors in general is what we would do, and we very much would as the big mega entertainment sources of all types are largely corporate in nature, preservation of the wild would be important.
And this too, combined with what we've noted before, a distributist society and a society that was well-educated, would amount to a radical, and beneficial, reorientation of society.
We won't pretend that such a society would be prefect. That would be absurd. Human nature would remain that. All the vices that presently exist, still would, but with no corporate sources to feed them, they'd not grow as prominent.
And we will state that it would cure many of the ills that now confront us.
Such a society would force us to confront our nature and nature itself. And to do so as a party of a greater community, for our common good.
Which, if we do not end up doing, will destroy us in the end.
Last prior:
Finis
Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: St. Patrick's Day: Lex Anteinternet: St. Patrick's Day : A Celtic cross in a local cemetery, marking the grave of a very Irish, and Irish Catholic, figure....
In the afternoon, I went out fishing and took the dog. On the way, I was listening to a podcast, like I'll tend to do. It was a Catholic Answers Focus interview of Carrie Gress and it was profound. I'll post on that elsewhere.
We didn't catch any fish. Nothing was biting, so we came home.
Amen, amen, I say to you, when you were younger, you used to dress yourself and go where you wanted; but when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go.
John, Chapter 21.
The theme of this week, I fear.
Approximately 30 years ago, I was presented with an opportunity that I desired greatly to take. It was, however, irresponsible in about every way a serious person would regard something to be irresponsible. I accepted it, and then back out.
It was a mistake.
History does not really repeat, as they say, but rhymes.
This week, I'll start dealing right off the bat with a crisis, and it's a multi party crisis. From crisis, comes opportunity of all sorts, and if not traveling into a fork in the road, I'm definitely traveling into a traffic circle.
I know with certainty which road I want to take, and that it goes where I want to go, and it can be travelled.
I also know that another road is the responsible one, in every conventional fashion. That will be the one I'm expected to take. And even now, that's the one I'm going to.
But I don't want to.
And that will be a mistake.
And what's this thing about Agrarianism?
I believe that this contest between industrialism and agrarianism now defines the most fundamental human difference, for it divides not just two nearly opposite concepts of agriculture and land use, but also two nearly opposite ways of understanding ourselves, our fellow creatures, and our world.
Wendell Berry.
Well, no.
Agrarianism is an ethical perspective that privileges an agriculturally oriented political economy. At its most concise, agrarianism is “the idea that agriculture and those whose occupation involves agriculture are especially important and valuable elements of society
Bradley M. Jones, American Agrarianism.
Agrarianism is agriculture oriented on an up close and personal basis, and as such, it's family oriented, and land ethic oriented.
We have noted before:
But Agrarianism goes much further than this. It retains something that the rest of society has tragically lost, which is that we are inseparably bound to the soil, and inseparably bound to nature.
The fact that we have lost this has been massively corrupting and is massively destructive. Indeed, it threatens to destroy us.
Not everyone in a modern agrarian economy would be farmers, as some like to either imagine, or criticize. But society would be family farm oriented. And it would value the land ethic.
All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts.The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants and animals, or collectively the land.
The Land Ethic, A Sand County Almanac. Aldo Leopold.
Realizing that agrarianism is, whether we like it or not, and that we ignore it at our ultimate peril and destruction, is the paramount task of agrarians today. No one thing every cures all of a society's ills, but a modern agrarian economy would come pretty darned close.
Which presumes not only a well grounded society, but a well-educated society.
We've lost that.
Southern Rockies Nature Blog: Greens and Guns: Ted William's recent article in Audobon lambastes hunters, anglers, and environmental activists for failing to make common cause. In ...
Interesting comment.
I have long thought this very thing.
You probably have to be a lifelong, or at least a long time, resident of Wyoming to remember Crow now, but he was a great man.
Born in 1939, and passing away four years ago on Thanksgiving Day, Crowe was a local character who authored a slightly fictionalized account of his early years in the book A Growing Season. Born in Kansas, he came to Wyoming as a teenager with his family and was shipped off to the UC Ranch for summer work in an event which would end up defining the rest of his life, a fairly typical Wyoming story, really.
Crowe served in the U.S. Army, married upon his return, and the went to Casper College and UW to earn a PhD in Zoology in 1974. From there he became a very significant wildlife manger for hte Wyoming Game and Fish, and ultimately served in the U.S. Fish & Wildlife and a host of southern African fish and game organizations. He was dedicated to wildlife.
He was also a great author, although it only expressed itself in a handful of books. A column in The Wyoming Wildlife, while he worked for the Wyoming Game and Fish, was the first thing I read it in every time it arrived.
Crowe was outspoken and folksy, but hugely intelligent and dedicated. He epitomized wildlife management in Wyoming of his era and is greatly missed.
A few weeks ago, with John Pondoro Taylor, on our companion blog Going Feral, we made a controversial entry. Keeping with that theme, we do the same here.
If a person has agrarian interests, there's no escaping The Southern Agrarians as there is not escaping their magnum opus, I'll Take My Stand. It is one of the great, if highly flawed, works of modern agrarian thought.
The irony, I suppose, of the work and the group needs to be mentioned from the onset. They did not make their living from the land, although it's not necessary to do that in order to be an agrarian. Rather, they were twelve men of letters who wrote what amounted to an agrarian last stand, which they were very conscious of it being at the time. They were:
This Day in History: Chuck Mawhinney, Legendary Marine
“My father was a Marine during World War II,” he later explained. “I started shooting at a very young age, and he taught me to shoot like the Marines taught him, so there wasn’t any big transition from hunting in Oregon to becoming a sniper.”
I have no doubt this is true, uncomfortable truth for many that it may be.
Dick Proenneke may be the ultimate modern subsistence hunter and fisherman in so far as the Western World is concerned.
Proenneke was born in Iowa in 1916. His father was sort of a jack of all trades laborer, which is and was common to rural areas. His father was also a veteran of World War One. Dick followed in his father's footsteps prior to World War Two, leaving high school before graduation, something extremely common in that era (less than 50% of males graduated from high school prior to World War Two He joined the Navy in World War Two and took up hiking around San Francisco while recovering from rheumatic fever contracted in the service. Having the disease was life altering for him, as he became focused on his health. He received a medical discharge from the Navy in 1945.
After the war he became a diesel mechanic, but his love of nature caused him to move to Oregon to work on a sheep ranch, and then to Shuyark Island, Alaska, in 1950. From 1950 to 1968 he worked for a variety of employers, including the Navy and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. He moved to the wilderness in 1968, at age 52, the year that in many ways gave us the Post Post World War Two World we are now seeing collapse. He lived there, as a single man, until 1999, when old age forced him out of the woods and to his brother's home in California. He died in there in 2003, at age 86. His cabin now belongs to the Park Service.
Proenneke loved photography and left an extensive filmed record of his life in Alaska.
There's a lot that can be gleaned from his life, some of which would probably be unwarranted, as every person's life is their own. Having noted that, however, it should be noted that Proenneke is not the only person to live in this manner in Alaska's back wood, including up to the present. So he's not fully unique, but rather his high intelligence and filmed record has made him known.
It's also notable, fwiw, that he was a single man. Basically, if looked at carefully, his retreat to the woods came in his retirement, as he had very low expenses up until 1968, and had worked for the government for many years. He never married, so he never had a family or responsibilities of that type. Many of the men who live in wild Alaska have married into native families, so their circumstances are different.
Probably every young man who loves the outdoors has contemplated doing something like what Proenneke actually did, while omitted the decades of skilled labor as a single man that came before it. And in reality, Proenneke, had lived over half his life as a working man with strong outdoor interests, rather than in the wilderness. People really aren't meant to live the way he lived, in extreme isolation, save for a few.
Related Threads:
President Theodore Roosevelt convened the first North American Conservation Conference at the White House.
The conference was between delegates of the US, Canada, and Mexico.
Oddly enough, Wallace Stegner was born on this day as well, in Lake Mills, Iowa.
My frank reaction is, "so what"?
Ten entities intend to sue the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service for not extending protection for wolves under the Endangered Species Act.
That has proven to be correct.
This entry may be controversial.
Certainly, it's questionable.
John Howard "Pondoro" Taylor was a near contemporary to last week's entry, Jack O'Connor. O'Connor bore an Irish last name, and Taylor did not, but Taylor was a Dublin born son of a well-to-do surgeon and fit into the Anglo-Irish Protestant class that basically ran Ireland until the Anglo-Irish War. Indeed, it is rumored that Taylor may have gotten into trouble somehow with the IRA, resulting in his relocation to Africa.
I've read the Peter Hathaway Capstick's biography of Taylor, but I've forgotten almost all of it. I usually retain a great deal of what I read, but Capstick is not my favorite author and I've lost the details. That means this entry is, to a large degree, uninformed.
First, does Taylor deserve a spot here at all?
Taylor was an Ivory hunter, and frankly, he was a poacher. That puts him outside of the classification of subsistence hunter, to be sure.
More on that in a moment.
Taylor went to Africa in the golden age of African big game hunting, which roughly stretched from the 1890s until 1950, and which coincided with the height of late stage European colonialism. A "remission man", that class of English man who was sent overseas by their family, with a sort of allowance, in order that they not cause trouble in their line of succession, he was a prolific hunter but oddly solitary. He had no interest in guiding hunting clients at all. As noted, he was an ivory hunter, and a poacher, at a time when that was not admirable, but which did not threaten the game populations, but he also hunted other African species very widely, to include African game bird species we otherwise very rarely think of.
Taylor is known to us today as he was well-educated and very literate. He authored two books, one of which is an absolute classic to this day in terms of big game cartridges. His book on African cartridges basically picks up where Jack O'Connor's leaves off. He cannot be discounted as an expert on big game hunting, or on cartridges.
All together, Taylor write at least five books, with African Rifles and Cartridges being an absolute classic. There is a sequel to it, which I have not read, just on hunting cartridges alone. Interestingly, his last book, Shadows of Shame, was not only his only novel, but it apparently had subtle homosexual themes, with Taylor widely believed to be homosexual himself, which may have led to his explosion from Africa. He was also a slaveholder, in this case the two being linked as he purchased a young man in the bush from the boys desperate parents, with the African man going on to be the object of his attention later on.
Slavery and pedophile behavior cannot be excused, so the question is why list Taylor, who ended up dying in poverty in London? Perhaps he's a reminder that some individuals of great talent also have enormous faults. At any rate, he lived by his rifles for most of his life, existing off of what he shot for food and an income. He's not wholly admirable by any means, but his written works remain among the best ever written on rifle cartridges.
In Cheyenne, a War Salvage lecture was given on the topic of "How to get fat from skunk without smell". Attribution: Wyoming State History Society Calendar.
I don't think I'd try that.
Some apparently do, however.
The question is why?
Arizona born writer/professor/big game hunter Jack O'Connor was, in my opinion, the best firearms author the country has ever produced, and certainly the best one on the topic of North American big game rifles.
Born in Arizona in 1902, he was partially raised by a bird hunting maternal grandfather, due to his parent's divorce when he was five years old, which influenced him heavily. His paternal grandfather was a judge who also ranched, which also influenced him a great deal. His mother became a university professor after that, at the University of Arizona, which he ultimately would as well. As a very young man, he'd briefly worked as a market hunter for an uncle's saw mill.
O'Connor served in the military twice. He joined the Army at age 15 during World War One, but was discharged due to tuberculosis. He later joined the Navy in 1919, serving as a hospital corpsman until discharged in 1921.
He took to big game early on. By profession, he was a writer, as noted first being a college professor. He was the first journalism professor at the University of Arizona, a position he left to write in sporting journals full time in 1945. In that role, he became famously associated with the .270 Winchester and Mountain Sheep hunting. Not too surprisingly, he moved to Idaho in 1948, where sheep are indigenous, although he stated that this was in part as he felt Arizona had become overpopulated following World War Two.
While associated particularly with sheep, O'Connor was the class western North American hunter, and hunted every big game animal native to the region, frequently with his wife. He was a noted conservationist as well.
All good advice.
I'd add, here in Wyoming, a winter coat for sure.
And a blanket that will suffice for cold weather without electricity, as you might not have your car electricity all that long.
And some food for a few days is a good idea, also.
I'd also add, for at least off roady and over the road vehicles, a two-way radio. I have GMRS radios in both of my regular 4x4s, which are also my regular daily drivers. Personally, I much prefer GMRS over CB, which has a more limited range.
On this day in 1973, the Endangered Species Act, having passed by the House of Representatives, 355 to 4, with the only opposing votes coming from Congressmen Earl Landgrebe of Indiana, H. R. Gross of Iowa, Robin Beard of Tennessee and Bob Price of Texas, was signed into law.
The Nixon Administration, now mostly remembered for Watergate, and the duplicitous end to the Vietnam War, had a remarkable record of passing environmental legislation, including this landmark example. Perhaps more remarkable, at this point in time, Wyoming's Congressman, Teno Roncolio, voted for it.
My, how things have changed.
And more amazing yet, Teno Roncalio, was a Democrat, the last Wyoming Democrat to hold that position. For that matter, one of the two Senators from Wyoming, Gale McGee, was as well. McGee is the last member of the Democratic Party to hold that office in Wyoming.
Presently to admit that the ESA is a great piece of litigation is to invite castigation in Wyoming, and the world "Democrat" is nearly slanderous in nature.
