Centrism? No thanks, I prefer Circumferentialism.
I'm having fun with this. We're capable of more than any monkeys ever have been. Let's get weird. "we are not fixing lead pipes but by mandate all municipal drinking water has a minimum Ayahuasca requirement."
Well, his conservationism was all based around keeping rare animals around so he could kill more of them.
Hardly. Teddy was complex and a product of his time and upbringing. He however was quite clear on why conservation was important to him:
“Of all the questions which can come before this nation, short of the actual preservation of its existence in a great war, there is none which compares in importance with the great central task of leaving this land even a better land for our descendants than it is for us.”
And…
“Defenders of the short-sighted men who in their greed and selfishness will, if permitted, rob our country of half its charm by their reckless extermination of all useful and beautiful wild things sometimes seek to champion them by saying the ‘the game belongs to the people.’ So it does; and not merely to the people now alive, but to the unborn people.
The ‘greatest good for the greatest number’ applies to the number within the womb of time, compared to which those now alive form but an insignificant fraction. Our duty to the whole, including the unborn generations, bids us restrain an unprincipled present-day minority from wasting the heritage of these unborn generations. The movement for the conservation of wild life and the larger movement for the conservation of all our natural resources are essentially democratic in spirit, purpose, and method.”
Based Teddy
I mean, that view is not uncommon today within hunting/fishing communities. Conservation/Preservation is an important part of ensuring that others can continue to enjoy the activity. It seems like a net win to me. Anything that gets people out into nature and encourages the protection of that nature, even if the motivations are (arguably) selfish seems like a good thing.
Also the ecology of maintaining specific populations is important, deer being the most visible example. Any state environmental authority would tell you they depend on hunters. We influence our environment, and some species are better equipped to deal with that than others. If we want to maintain a diverse ecosystem, that means controlling some population numbers as habitat shrinks.
The best solution would be to not shrink the habitat, but that's gets into a lot of human factors I'm not really equipped to talk about.
Shooting and stuffing animals was seen as "conservation" back then. It seems wild to us, but in a time before it was truly fathomable you could wipe an animal from the planet, having a stuffed specimen for study was seen as laudable.
And the more rare it was, the more information could be gained by studying it's body. Again, it seems ass backwards now, but to put it into context Mendal (the guy with the peas) lived around the same period.
Teddy's big stick reaches all the way across the compass
