Month: October 2023

‘SELLING’ WILDERNESS LIKE A USED BUICK— 1998: When Everything Changed — Jim Stiles (ZX#86)

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I had stumbled upon a website called “The Wilderness Mentoring Conference of 1998.” The gathering had been assembled by a group of self-named “mentors,” professional environmentalists active at the time in organizations that reached from Washington DC to Alaska. This relative handful of New Environmentalists were frustrated by the movement’s lack of progress in pushing and passing wilderness legislation across the country.

A prominently displayed quote by Michael Carroll, later of The Wilderness Society, established the tone and direction of all that would come later:

“Car companies and makers of sports drinks use wilderness to sell their products. We have to market wilderness as a product people want to have.”

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OZ: Where Cowboys Wear Shorts, Sip Tea, and Yell “OI!!!” —Jim Stiles (ZX#85)

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The toughest, most decent ‘cowboy’ I ever met hasn’t been ‘lanky’ since he was eighteen. He barely reaches 5 foot six inches, and could not, in anyone’s wildest dreams, be regarded as laconic. In fact, it was because of his gift for gab that 25 years later, hestill comes closer than anyone to being like a brother to me. Though he is 10,000 miles away, in the southwest corner of Australia, we are kindred spirits. In fact, he just called this morning and we had, according to Aussie custom, another great “chin wag.” Nobody wags better. (And he doesn’t say, ‘Giddy up.” he shouts “Oi!!!”)

His name is John Wringe and we met at a roadhouse 200 miles north of Perth, while both of us were traveling  south, by bus — me to catch a train, the Indian Pacific, back to Sydney and the long flight home. John had been visiting his son-in-law and was now returning to his home, 150 miles south of Western Australia’s (WA) capital…

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UNSETTLED AMERICA: The Divisive Environmentalism of the Recreation-Industrial Complex …by Stacy Young (ZX#84)

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“So what,” you may ask. What’s the harm if the rich want to underwrite green causes? I think there are (at least) two broad types of problems.

First and perhaps most obvious is the risk that the influence of big money will bend the agenda of environmentalism to accommodate donors’ business interests, or at least will make it impossible to be sure that this does not happen. Giridharadas, who is a gifted aphorist, has said that, for many MarketWorlders, making a difference is the wingman of making a killing. This problem especially applies to the many big money environmental donors who acquire their fortunes from unambiguously dirty businesses.

Even putting aside direct conflict-of-interest problems, it’s hard to fully swallow the argument that spending lavishly on environmental causes actually offsets the accumulation of enormous wealth through ethically or environmentally questionable means.

A related and similarly dubious rationale frequently offered by green NGOs for courting the patronage of the 1% boils down to a belief that it takes a good guy with a fat wallet to stop a bad guy with a fat wallet.

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LOUISA WADE WETHERILL: “The Slim Woman” of Kayenta — Harvey Leake (ZX#83)

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“The person who seems to be influencing the life of Navajos most is Mrs. John Wetherill of the Kayenta trading post, Arizona. This cultured woman wields more power among them than any chief, or ‘head man’. She is a white woman adopted into the tribe and is a real leader among them, holding her position as a recognition by the Indians of her sympathetic interest in their life. A queen could hardly be more loved by her subjects. She is at once the judge, physician, interpreter, adviser and best friend of her devoted wards.”

Joseph F. Anderson, Archaeology student of University of Utah Professor Byron Cummings

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HERB RINGER: “He’d rather be in Colorado”…1946-1971 #1 (ZX# 82)

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Herb would return to Colorado scores of times over the next half century. He photographed and documented every town or ghost town he came across. He would, over the years, draw a detailed series of maps, to scale, of the mining towns that were, even in the fifties fading into history and dust. In addition to his photographs and these amazing maps (…and I plan to publish at least a good sampling of them soon), he would often spend his winters just thinking of Colorado. As he and his parents were weathered the Reno winter, he wrote his own histories of many Colorado towns and mining districts, often depending on his own extraordinary memory. His facts were rarely wrong.

But visually, there is nothing Herb Ringer accomplished that was more impressive, or insightful, than his remarkable Kodachrome transparencies. Below is just Volume 1 of a series of Colorado towns and its people, that he was wise enough to photograph, and I was lucky enough to inherit…

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