Of campers, rapture, and companion animals

Along with other protesters and Women in the Woods, Betty Krawczyk continues to occupy a strategic logging road in the Upper Walbran Forest. Click here to see the press releases on the group’s new website, with a great photo of Briony Penn interviewing Betty Krawczyk. (More photos on the site’s other pages.) They look like they’re having a blast. I wish I had more energy and could join them, but I confess that I hate camping — unless it’s in a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria. I want to defend these forests, but, born under Saturn, I’m a prisoner of my comfort zone — along with my domestic obligations to pet & kids. I’m not sure that I even own a raincoat, which seems to be a sartorial must-have up-island, at least until June. (Victoria, in a rain-shadow, is desert compared to the real forests just a few kilometres west and north of us.) Another new link, BC Pathways, showed up, too. Seems to be a small group, but something tells me they’re worth watching.

The BC government’s environmental abuses are matched by the Bush administration’s south of the border. There, too, areas that had been protected as wilderness are now subject to the Bureau of Land Management’s decisions to allow mining, drilling, logging, or road-building. It just makes you wonder what Edward Abbey would have done, doesn’t it? I can’t imagine what he would have said to the likes of Republican Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, who is the new chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, and who sees himself as doing the Lord’s work in pushing for the overturning of environmental protection laws. As a Christian fundamentalist, Inhofe and many in the Bush administration and its immediate circle simply don’t believe the fossil record. They cling instead to the notion that the earth is just a few thousand years old. In their belief system, global warming and environmental degradation is a good thing because it shows the truth of prophecy: that the earth will be destroyed and the true believers will be “raptured” up to heaven. Gawd, pass the Prozac….

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Change of topic: file this under weird: the Vancouver Sun carried an article from the Baltimore Sun today, Chinese systematically kill pets of SARS patients, that describes the effect the epidemic is having on companion animals in China. Not a pretty picture. One man, affected by specious, if official, rumours that pets carry and spread SARS, threw his Pekinese out a 6th story window, but when this didn’t kill the dog, he buried it alive. I also didn’t know that government regulations forbid public dog walking between the hours of 8 a.m. to 7 p.m., and that the first-year registration fee for dogs is around $850 CDN, an astronomical sum for many Chinese. Under these circumstances, “walking a dog conveyed the same kind of class message as driving a BMW once did in North America.”