Comment by stouset
14 hours ago
Then you get people (understandably) upset that just about any work they want to do to improve their own private land needs to involve the EPA and/or a local wildlife commission.
14 hours ago
Then you get people (understandably) upset that just about any work they want to do to improve their own private land needs to involve the EPA and/or a local wildlife commission.
The modern phrasing of "improve" and "develop" for destroy is pretty upsetting to me.
My environment was improved to an unliveable asphalt/gravel sprawl from edge of city with woods with frog and birdsong...
The two meanings are not synonymous. One can certainly destroy land through improving or developing it, one can also do improve it responsibly and minimally.
Building one or two small permanent structures on many acres of forest is not destroying it by a long shot.
Everything you do to waste land area by "lightly" touching it further increases sprawl because it increases the land required to do things.
Environmentalism is in direct conflict with densely packing "stuff" onto land whether that's people or industry. If you want to preserve nature embrace the "concrete jungle" and the density it brings.
Look at historical small towns vs modern build outs of the same population. Despite building maybe four stories high at most 50k people in some New England or Midwest mill town fit on a tiny fraction of the developed area of the same modern population simply because environmentalists weren't around to mandate engineered drainage ditches and green spaces and setbacks and require every podunk business have fire lanes a drunk could back a lowboy into and all planters in their parking lot and the other stuff
High density development leaving as much pristine nature as possible is vastly superior to sprawl for the environment, but the comment you replied to didn't seem to describe a density issue.
1 reply →
environmentalists well-known for instituting fire lane policies
1 reply →
The alternative is we drive ourselves ever closer to the brink.
It is entirely possible that our current way of living, including the idea of “private land” as it exists today, may not be conducive to our long-term survival.
The forces of nature care not for our political and philosophical debates.
If you don't want to deal with swampy land full of beavers, don't buy swampy land full of beavers.
They should of done a better job purchasing land.
This is the opposite of a useful perspective.
Someone, definitionally, owns all the privately held land in the US. Large landowners in rural areas are on average more politically connected and wield more political power in their communities.
Telling them that any sort of work on their own land—no matter how small—requires extensive oversight might be well-intentioned but pisses off a lot of people who will then become bitter opponents of even well-designed environmental legislation. Telling them they should have made better purchasing decisions just motivates them even further.
What actually ends up happening is these people then do it anyway with zero oversight, because the amount of land involved is too vast to enforce these things on. You also get large concerted efforts to overturn any and all environmental protection.
You act like it is impossible to use land that beavers live on without destroying the beaver dams or removing the beavers, and yet there are plenty of people that do that very thing their entire lives without a problem.
I didn't say they can't do anything with their land, but if you live on land with beavers you should know how beavers and beaver dams work so you don't do something stupid, like building a structure in the flood path of a stream or river full of beavers, or killing the beavers so that you can and then complaining about the beavers coming back.
Complaining about how beavers work and what beavers are doing on your land is the same as building on a historic floodplain and then complaining about it flooding. Or building in hurricane territory and complaining about hurricanes. Or building in the woods and complaining about deer eating your plants and trees falling on your driveway. One person's lack of foresight is not and should not be everybody and everything else's problem.
Do your research before you buy things. Only an asshole buys and/or builds next to an area with long established feature X and then complains about feature X existing and how its "unfair" they can't have it taken down or destroyed at will.
1 reply →
Ignoring externalities remains popular.
We live in a society. I can’t build a helipad on my roof in the middle of Seattle. Technically that’s a limitation on my personal liberty. We accept it because of the cost to the people around me.
Unfortunately it seems like considering the cost to those around you is becoming a dying art
Good? They don't own the commons.