World Bank calls on countries to take urgent steps to protect 'natural capital'

[XemaSab]

26. Even though I don't agree with Glider Guider a lot of the time

I respect where he's coming from.

You're trying to pull some kind of "I am teh scientist here and I understand teh logic and my word is teh law" trip, but as a scientist I am down with the big tent.

One of the best classes I ever took was a class called inscape and landscape. This class was more valuable to me than environmental ethics in learning where different people are coming from and respecting those places.

The class was full of Carhartt-wearing forestry majors and dred-wearing environmental science majors. One of the things that we had to do for the class was get up and talk about our personal experience with nature. Predictably, most of the forestry guys brought in pictures from their duck-hunting adventures and most of the environmental science majors talked about how spiritual the redwoods were.

Three stories stood out to me.

There was this girl who looked like the ur-hippie of ur-hippies. She had long dreds and wore corduroy patchwork skirts and Guatemalan shirts and always looked like she had just come from a drumming circle. I never really had a lot of respect for her, but when it was her turn to give her presentation she talked about how she had been a sorority girl in New York state and she'd been in a terrible car accident and after a long, long recuperation she decided to renounce materialism and go protect the redwoods. Who am I to argue with this?

Another girl always dressed in a very stylish, sophisticated manner. She wore white dress shirts and black power skirts and pumps and she always had her makeup perfectly done. This stood out to me because the school I went to is very laid back and nobody dresses up. Like, for the guys a shirt with buttons is very dressed up, and for the girls anything more dressy than a nice tank-top will make you stand out. It turned out that she was a coal miner's daughter from West Virginia and she had grown up in a log cabin out in the woods that her dad had built himself.

Finally, there was this tiny little girl, she must have been about 5'1" and all of 85 pounds. She had these big blue eyes and this flowing white hair and this translucent white skin. If I was going to cast a play that had a fairy in it, she would have gotten the part. Well, she got up and she gave her presentation and the class was stunned. Like, a significant percent of the class were rootin' tootin' huntin' shootin' good ol' boys, and even they were stunned. She got up and she's like "Here's a FOX I trapped last month!" and she shows a picture of this poor defenseless gray fox in a leghold trap. She showed like 20 pictures of animals she'd caught. It was really something.

The moral of the story is that people might be coming from a place that you don't know anything about, and before you lay a heavy trip on someone maybe you should just consider the idea that you're poorly informed about them and maybe... just maybe... there's a time to hold back on judging people and just take in what they have to say. Then again, people who may seem innocuous up front might just kick your ass.