STIRLING: Security vs. species preservation

Save the whales, Save the whales, Save the whales, lets shoot all the seals, yea shoot all the seals " Cheech & Chong "

The last thing environmental activists are concerned about is the environment. They use environmental concerns to get money, power and feel good feelings. They have no sense about proportion of their narrow minded interests. I worked in the environmental regulation field for over 30 years. I found most to be totally uneducated in the field of biology, alarmists using environmental laws to stop activity around them, totally unreasonable to facts or law. When you really think about it, if a species is so endangered we are just prolonging the inevitable in a changing world. Does nature itself protect dying species due to habitat change? If you believe in evolution, then you don't worry about species coming and going, it has been happening from the start and will continue no matter how artificial we try to make nature. Indiscriminate wanton destruction, absolutely not! We should do what is reasonable to protect nature, but we as a species live in the world of survival by the fittest. Too many people watched Bambi movies and never grew up, the Garden of Eden exists no more.

Was it the spotted owl that they were screaming about in the late 80's/early 90's? I remember they were stopping logging operations because it could only live and reproduce in "old growth" forests. When a nesting pair (with chicks) was found in either L.A. or San Francisco the rabid environmentalists claimed they were sick and confused, or something like that. The upshot was that any owl that was surviving outside of "old growth" forests was not normal, and did not indicate that the species was, in fact, adapting to a changing world.