Keith
Member
I'm attaching the article below because it touches on on a number of themes we deal with here in THR. It discusses Timothy Treadwell, the animals right activist who was recently eaten by a big critter. But, in a larger sense you can take it as a commentary on some other familiar issues.
How those who live in protected gated communities can advocate disarmament of those who don't.
How increasingly alienated many people have become from not only the natural world, but from the reality of every day life!
We read the posts on this board about people abandoning California because of the gun laws, but I submit it's part of a larger event. We are becoming a schizophrenic nation where urban people and rural people are increasingly at odds. Where those who live on the coasts are increasingly at odds with those who live in fly-over country.
I feel like a foreigner when I visit the lower 48, yet it isn't me that has changed!
Are guns just the canary in the coal mine?
http://www.adn.com/outdoors/story/4253338p-4264024c.html
Treadwell lived life in vastly different worlds
Timothy Treadwell, who was killed by a bear earlier this month, was recently memorialized in Malibu, Calif. ( )
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(Published: October 26, 2003)
MALIBU, Calif. -- I'm sitting in a low-slung beach chair on the edge of a blue Pacific that stretches off forever. A breeze is blowing in off the ocean from somewhere in the direction of Hawaii, but it is still hot. Too hot.
Southern California is in the midst of a record-setting heat wave. The television weatherman is warning it could hit 100 degrees in nearby Los Angeles on this, the third week in October. There is talk of temperature records being set in Burbank and Orange County back off the coast where these Pacific breezes are supposed to moderate.
I am here for the memorial for local hero Timothy Treadwell, one of two unfortunates killed by a brown bear in Katmai National Park and Preserve earlier this month. The other was his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard.
As someone who has seen grizzlies killed and as someone who once shot a grizzly bear off his own leg, I find it decidedly unpleasant to think about how Timothy and Amie died. There might be more unpleasant ways to go but not many.
Bears kill ugly, ripping and tearing and dismembering. The only solace here is in the thought that hopefully Timothy and Amie were in such shock they didn't feel anything. Still, it isn't pleasant to think about.
There are no bears here. Malibu's largest animals are the pelicans that bob in the surf offshore or do crash landings in Malibu lagoon.
Because of the people and the traffic, there can be no bears here. They wouldn't stand a chance. Neither do I.
I have been on the ground just a few hours, and already I'm anxious to return to Alaska. Sure, I could adapt to living here. Humans are the most adaptable mammal on the planet. We survive in places where rats can't even make it. We function in climates that cause cockroaches to expire.
Enduring and enjoying, however, are two very different things. And Southern California is simply not a very enjoyable place.
It's not the heat, though I'm no fan of anything much above the 72 degrees of room temperature.
It's not the traffic, though the congestion here can only make one chuckle at Anchorage residents who whine about traffic jams.
It's not the people, though that's hard to judge given that the vast majority hide in bunkered homes along the coast or move above in the air-conditioned cocoons of automobiles.
And yet it is about all of these things. The sum total of the parts adds up to an inhuman place. Malibu residents live in walled-off worlds both literally in their homes and figuratively in the visible separation between the rich in their Mercedes and the poor sweeping their driveways. It's almost like being transported back in time to the medieval fiefdoms of dukes and princes.
Is this what we get when modern people are finally cut off from the wild places that have shaped our lives for thousands of years?
We formed societies, it's worth remembering, not by accident, but because we needed them to survive. As those societies evolved away from the wild places, they continued to be shaped by them.
Wild places are where danger and adventure lurked, along with opportunity and disaster, challenge and defeat. The stresses endured there made the comfort of people look better. The wilderness shaped us as social animals in this way for a long time.
Take note of how tourists often define Alaskans as being so "friendly.'' We're not. They've got the wrong word. Friendly is the neighbor who brings over fresh-baked cookies. People must first be friends to be friendly.
We're not friendly. We're simply social. We're open. We're welcoming.
We can enjoy chance meeting with other people because we know that when we want to be away from them, we can be. We still entertain the luxury of retreating into the wild places that shaped the evolution of the human soul.
Southern California has taken a whole different spin on this basic human need. For retreat here, you battle like hell to earn enough money to buy your way into the Malibu Colony where you can live with a bunch of other wealthy folk behind an 8-foot-high stone wall that sits behind a 6-foot-high chain-link fence which guards a barren 25-foot patch of ground that appears to be nothing more than a free-fire zone around a prison.
From inside this enclosure, you can admire Timothy Treadwell for abandoning it all for months at a time to go save the great brown bears of Alaska, even if they don't need saving.
The question that will trouble me for a long time is how Timothy Treadwell could split his life almost equally between the harsh existence of a tent on the Katmai coast and Malibu. I couldn't do it.
You would almost have to be schizophrenic. It makes me wonder if Timothy really kicked the drug habit to which he had confessed.
You don't have to be long in this hurried-up, bunkered-down place to begin to understand why mind-altering drugs might become attractive. It is a place that makes Alaska, even with all its human-added warts and blemishes, look very, very good.
How those who live in protected gated communities can advocate disarmament of those who don't.
How increasingly alienated many people have become from not only the natural world, but from the reality of every day life!
We read the posts on this board about people abandoning California because of the gun laws, but I submit it's part of a larger event. We are becoming a schizophrenic nation where urban people and rural people are increasingly at odds. Where those who live on the coasts are increasingly at odds with those who live in fly-over country.
I feel like a foreigner when I visit the lower 48, yet it isn't me that has changed!
Are guns just the canary in the coal mine?
http://www.adn.com/outdoors/story/4253338p-4264024c.html
Treadwell lived life in vastly different worlds
Timothy Treadwell, who was killed by a bear earlier this month, was recently memorialized in Malibu, Calif. ( )
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(Published: October 26, 2003)
MALIBU, Calif. -- I'm sitting in a low-slung beach chair on the edge of a blue Pacific that stretches off forever. A breeze is blowing in off the ocean from somewhere in the direction of Hawaii, but it is still hot. Too hot.
Southern California is in the midst of a record-setting heat wave. The television weatherman is warning it could hit 100 degrees in nearby Los Angeles on this, the third week in October. There is talk of temperature records being set in Burbank and Orange County back off the coast where these Pacific breezes are supposed to moderate.
I am here for the memorial for local hero Timothy Treadwell, one of two unfortunates killed by a brown bear in Katmai National Park and Preserve earlier this month. The other was his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard.
As someone who has seen grizzlies killed and as someone who once shot a grizzly bear off his own leg, I find it decidedly unpleasant to think about how Timothy and Amie died. There might be more unpleasant ways to go but not many.
Bears kill ugly, ripping and tearing and dismembering. The only solace here is in the thought that hopefully Timothy and Amie were in such shock they didn't feel anything. Still, it isn't pleasant to think about.
There are no bears here. Malibu's largest animals are the pelicans that bob in the surf offshore or do crash landings in Malibu lagoon.
Because of the people and the traffic, there can be no bears here. They wouldn't stand a chance. Neither do I.
I have been on the ground just a few hours, and already I'm anxious to return to Alaska. Sure, I could adapt to living here. Humans are the most adaptable mammal on the planet. We survive in places where rats can't even make it. We function in climates that cause cockroaches to expire.
Enduring and enjoying, however, are two very different things. And Southern California is simply not a very enjoyable place.
It's not the heat, though I'm no fan of anything much above the 72 degrees of room temperature.
It's not the traffic, though the congestion here can only make one chuckle at Anchorage residents who whine about traffic jams.
It's not the people, though that's hard to judge given that the vast majority hide in bunkered homes along the coast or move above in the air-conditioned cocoons of automobiles.
And yet it is about all of these things. The sum total of the parts adds up to an inhuman place. Malibu residents live in walled-off worlds both literally in their homes and figuratively in the visible separation between the rich in their Mercedes and the poor sweeping their driveways. It's almost like being transported back in time to the medieval fiefdoms of dukes and princes.
Is this what we get when modern people are finally cut off from the wild places that have shaped our lives for thousands of years?
We formed societies, it's worth remembering, not by accident, but because we needed them to survive. As those societies evolved away from the wild places, they continued to be shaped by them.
Wild places are where danger and adventure lurked, along with opportunity and disaster, challenge and defeat. The stresses endured there made the comfort of people look better. The wilderness shaped us as social animals in this way for a long time.
Take note of how tourists often define Alaskans as being so "friendly.'' We're not. They've got the wrong word. Friendly is the neighbor who brings over fresh-baked cookies. People must first be friends to be friendly.
We're not friendly. We're simply social. We're open. We're welcoming.
We can enjoy chance meeting with other people because we know that when we want to be away from them, we can be. We still entertain the luxury of retreating into the wild places that shaped the evolution of the human soul.
Southern California has taken a whole different spin on this basic human need. For retreat here, you battle like hell to earn enough money to buy your way into the Malibu Colony where you can live with a bunch of other wealthy folk behind an 8-foot-high stone wall that sits behind a 6-foot-high chain-link fence which guards a barren 25-foot patch of ground that appears to be nothing more than a free-fire zone around a prison.
From inside this enclosure, you can admire Timothy Treadwell for abandoning it all for months at a time to go save the great brown bears of Alaska, even if they don't need saving.
The question that will trouble me for a long time is how Timothy Treadwell could split his life almost equally between the harsh existence of a tent on the Katmai coast and Malibu. I couldn't do it.
You would almost have to be schizophrenic. It makes me wonder if Timothy really kicked the drug habit to which he had confessed.
You don't have to be long in this hurried-up, bunkered-down place to begin to understand why mind-altering drugs might become attractive. It is a place that makes Alaska, even with all its human-added warts and blemishes, look very, very good.
) of this nation. The growing separation between the "classes" and what may be an ever diminishing middle class - the "stability" factor for this country as we're all suppose to be able to achieve it.