If I had a gun and knew how to use it, my first target would be the fiends who’ve been destroying Joshua Trees in the eponymous park. The rest of you bastards can wait. [More]And naturally she doesn't want you to have a gun.
Actually, her whole Twitter feed reads like a parody of the raging bitter leftist hag stereotype. I wonder how many cats she owns.
I know the area in question well -- it was one of our preferred camping sites when we lived in SoCal and we have many happy memories from there. One truism I have noticed about all wilderness areas -- the easier they are to get to by car, the more of an attraction they are for the same types who trash their neighborhoods.
Our groups, which included many of the types of people she seems especially hostile to, applied the same ethic we lived our lives by to making sure what we left were footprints that the high desert winds would soon blow away.
[Via Michael G]
"Take only pictures, leave only footprints."
ReplyDeleteWhen I was in Boy Scouts (way back before it became a gender-neutral parody of itself), our troop had a rule: After breaking camp, but before leaving a site, everybody finds two additional pieces of trash that we did NOT bring, and disposes of it properly. If it was a true "wilderness" (i.e. no trash cans), we bagged it up and packed it out with us along with our own stuff.
The spirit of good stewardship -- of leaving a place nicer than you found it -- ran strong.
We're no longer involved in Scouting, but we're teaching that same responsibility of good stewardship to our kids. Too many don't, and the result is public spaces that resemble landfills and open sewers (e.g. Portland and San Francisco). We can't clean up the world -- or even one city -- by ourselves, but we can AT LEAST make sure we don't contribute to the mess, and when possible we can leave a place just a little nicer.
It's such a small, nearly effortless gesture, but if everyone did that....