Celebrating nature woos (or, natural selection in action)

[onager]

I have discovered the Secret Of Nature, so if this statement of my philosophy annoys you, don't bother reading any further:

70% of Nature is totally indifferent to you. The other 30% wants to eat you.

I recently wasted 2.5 hours of my life watching Into The Wild, the spiritually uplifting true story of Chris McCandless. He wandered off into the Alaskan wilderness and starved to death.

Well, it probably did spiritually uplift me, just not in the way director Sean Penn intended. It certainly reminded me that natural selection is alive, well, and taking care of business.

McCandless had room in his backpack for Thoreau, Jack London and Tolstoy, but didn't bother taking a map and compass. If he had, he might have noticed that the "impassable" river in front of him featured a cable tram less than a mile from where he died. And about 5 miles away, the Forest Service maintained a cabin fully stocked with food. Clearly marked on...what is that thing called again? A MAP.

Penn's movie sticks to the myth. McCandless bums all over America, dispensing goofy mysticism and unneeded advice. He's constantly harping about our evil materialistic society and the purity of nature. But "nature" in this case includes driving giant combines and shacking up with Neo-Hippies in a trailer park full of RV's and campers. Talk about a mixed message!

In another bit of myth-making, Penn and Jon Krakauer, who wrote the source book, make a case that McCandless accidentally poisoned himself by eating the wrong plants. (Natural selection has all the bases covered!) But a detailed analysis during the autopsy ruled that out. Apparently Krakauer finished the book before the autopsy was complete.

A couple of years ago we were subjected to another Mythical, Mystical Eco-Warrior who ran afoul of natural selection--Tim Treadwell. Werner Herzog made a prize-winning documentary about him, Grizzly Man.

In a very poor choice of words (or a very funny one), a reviewer at IMDB wrote: We follow an obsessed man, Tim Treadwell, whose love for the grizzly bears consumed him.

No, a bear consumed him. And his girlfriend. Treadwell spent 13 years annoying the bears in an Alaska nature preserve, despite repeated warnings from the real experts. Some of them summed up Treadwell's 13 death-free years in one word--"lucky." His luck finally ran out.

Treadwell flitted around telling the bears he "loved them." By all accounts he was obsessed with bears. And for some reason foxes, who he also considered his friends. I've heard that the beavers and porcupines were heartbroken because Treadwell had no special feelings for them, but that's just hearsay.

Many times, Treadwell claimed to have a "special spiritual connection" with bears. What were his qualifications to study bears up close? He was a failed actor who lived in Malibu, when he wasn't in Alaska harassing wildlife.

The result of all this spirituality toward the bears? The first deaths by bear attack in 85 years at the nature preserve. And two bears had to be killed.

I'd rather see a movie about the Park Rangers who risk their lives trying to save these nature-abusing morons. They really deserve the title "hero." Strictly IMO, of course, as always.

[realisticphish]

1. the grizzly guy pissed me off

what the fuck did he think was going to happen?

It's odd that so many environmentalists (which I would loosely term myself) seem to take the attitude that we are somehow above nature, and must shepherd all the little inferiors around. Reminds me of the "White Man's Burden." Yeah, we have much more developed brains, and are more adaptable, but that doesn't mean a bear can't fuck us up.

[mr blur]

7. The only intelligent thing about the film was Richard Thompson's music-

Herzog should have known better than to glorify stupidity and the guy was a violent death waiting to happen and needed medication and/or counselling more than anything else.

[trotsky]

8. "what the fuck did he think was going to happen?"

It's just woo followed to its logical extremes. All life is connected. We can all imagine the reality we want. We can listen to and speak with spirits, animals, etc. There is nothing, nothing at all in woo-dom, to warn you that a bear really is dangerous. No, it's just a kindred spirit in the universe.

[moggie]

9. Anthropomorphism should be left to Disney

I don't get it: didn't these people have pets as children? Anyone who grew up with a cat can tell you that, although you can indeed have a rewarding friendship with an animal, it's still an animal, and from time to time will do something inhuman. With a domestic cat, you won't suffer anything worse than a few scratches and offerings of bird and mouse parts, but it's enough to remind you that it's silly to expect them to share all our values.

On the other hand:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPBOA2pGPFI

[trotsky]

10. Just send healing energy and light!

Co-create with spirit a natural harmony with the animal and all will be fine! :crazy:

[moggie]

11. Take care!

I think bear chakras are in different locations, and their vibrational energies are a different shade of mauve.

[trotsky]

13. Maybe all bears are indigo children? n/t

[realisticphish]

14. or

all indigo children are bears :shrug:

[cosmik debris]

2. celebrating failure is bad enough

but romanticizing failure is demented.

[Nevernose]

3. There was a guy killed in the Housaton Zoo 20 years ago

In the fall of 1988 (I remember because I read the article in my homeroom class during freshman year of high school). Anyway, to prove his kung fu prowess he climbed into the lion exhibit at the Houston Zoo, complete with kung fu robe (whatever that's called) and mastery over various forms of chi lin animal styles.

The fight was over quickly, needless to say, but THAT's the guy who needs a movie! None of this namby-pamby living in harmony with nature crap. A movie about a steroidal tough-guy whose Daddy had him in martial arts classes since he was three (so he could learn "self-discipline") and decides to take it to the next level by punching a 600 pound lion in the face.

Really, wouldn't Grizzly Man have been far more entertaining had it starred some East Texas redneck who happened to know kung fu and decided to test his skills versus a wild grizzly bear?

[onager]

5. That DOES deserve a movie!

Thanks. Maybe we need a new reality TV show, at least, about these people. Over here in Egypt, every year a few nimrods set out to "challenge the Sahara!" The Sahara usually wins.

Your story reminds me of a horrible item I read in a book about the Taliban. When they took Kabul, the city zoo only had 2 animals left, a bear and an old lion.

A Taliban soldier decided the lion's beard was an "insult to Islam," and climbed into the cage to cut it off. No, I'm not making that up. As you probably know, the Taliban have a bizarre fixation on beards. Among many other things.

That fight was over quickly, too. Another Taliban, seeing the mangled corpse of the first one, threw a grenade into the cage. It didn't kill the lion but blinded him. As I remember, the lion surviving the grenade seems to have spooked them and they left the lion alone.

[Nevernose]

6. Darwin Awards: The Series

People challenege deserts everywhere. When you go into Death Valley, for instance, they have to remind you to bring water.

Me at the entrance station: "Really? Bring water? There are people who go wandering into the desert without water? In the hottest, driest, most inhospitable, most desolate place on the entire continent? A place where DEATH is right in the name? You have to remind people to bring water?"

Park Ranger: "Yep."

Oh, and another good idea for a TV show. We get a couple of high-ranking members of the Taliban -- the craziest of the crazy, and we set him up with a good psychotherapist.

"So tell me about your beard. Did your father have a beard? Did he have a big beard or a small beard? When you were a child, did you ever accidentally see your father 'take care of' his beard? Was your mother attracted to men with big beards? Are you ever afraid that the size of your beard is inadequate?"

[onager]

15. LOL! Thanks. More krazy kampers...

I found a website once full of stories from park rangers about all the idiots they have to deal with. I remember a couple of my favorites.

There was the visitor who set out to hike up to a mountain peak. She took nothing except her cell phone, which she eventually used to make a panic call pleading for rescue.

The Rangers sent a helicopter to pick her up. But when the woman saw she had almost made it to the mountaintop, she demanded that the Rangers put her back down so she could finish her climb. They refused and she threatened to sue them.

There was the woman who drove up to the gate of Yosemite National Forest and asked to see the geysers. The ranger told her she would have to keep driving for several hundred miles north, since all the geysers were in Yellowstone National Park, not Yosemite. When she got home, she wrote an irate letter to the ranger's boss, complaining that he wouldn't show her the geysers. In Yosemite.

But my favorite was an L.A. TIMES story about the chuckleheads who drive their new SUVs into the wrong places and get stuck. In California, that's usually the deserts in summer and mountains in winter.

The two excuses most often heard by the park rangers: 1. "But on the TV commericials, this SUV can go anywhere!" 2. "My SUV is only 2-wheel drive? Gosh! I sure thought it was 4-wheel-drive!"

In California, the rangers came up with a new radio code just for these types of...rescues. It is "TNS," which stands for "Thwarting Natural Selection."

That cracks me up every time I think about it...

[Deep13]

4. "Apparently Krakauer finished the book before the autopsy was complete."

That's pretty typical for him. Andre Boukriev wrote a rebuttal to Krakauer's book Into Thin Air which detailed the events surrounding the 1996 Mt. Everest disaster. In it, Krakauer blames Boukriev, a climbing guide for Scott Fischer, for negligence that contributed to Fischer's death. In Boukriev's rebuttal called simply The Climb, he criticizes Krakauer's conclusions and claims that evidence disproving some of them was known to Krakauer before he went to print.

[TZ]

12. This kind of thing makes for a backlash...

I remember when Steve Irwin was killed how many people jumped on the "well he brought it on himself" bandwagon. Now he did take chances but he understood animals quite well and his death was nothing more than a freak accident. Of course since people don't seem to understand that random bad things happen, I shouldn't have been surprised I suppose.