Date: Fri, 23 May 2003 17:24:39 -0400 Reply-To: Maryland Birds & Birding Sender: Maryland Birds & Birding From: Walter Ellison Subject: Re: Open season on Horseshoe Crabbers & Birders? MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Hi All, One small problem with people being the only thing to preserve - if you only preserve people sooner or later you will only have other people and their domestic animals to look at and no resources to support a lot of those people. If you preserve the resource from which people make their living you preserve their way of life. If you don't preserve the resource their way of life disappears anyway. Ask the striped bass (called rockfish here) fishermen on the Hudson River done out of their resource by pollution not "basshuggers", or the Newfoundland and New England fishermen done out of a cod fishery by their own unrestricted fishing. There's a reason we don't have people making a living off Passenger Pigeons any more - the unregulated behavior of other people in the 19th Century. We can't tolerate completely unregulated behavior - including living too high off the hog ourselves - if we want to see birds in the future, we can't tolerate unregulated behavior if we wish to even *have* a resource to use in the future. It's all about the future - Do we throw it away today? Or save it? Good Birding & Good Atlasing, Walter Ellison MD-DC Atlas Coordinator - MOS 23460 Clarissa Road Chestertown, MD 21620 phone: 410-778-9568 e-mail: rossgull@crosslink.net "A person who is looking for something doesn't travel very fast" - E. B. White (in "Stuart Little") ----- Original Message ----- From: "Tom Dunne" To: Sent: Friday, May 30, 2003 4:46 PM Subject: Re: [MDOSPREY] Open season on Horseshoe Crabbers & Birders? > I love watching birds. I love being in nature. I even might like to hug a > Horseshoe crab. But I've found that I really don't like most birders, most > "Mother Nature" types, and this recent thread (along with the Feral Cat > thread) are the reasons why. I was pleased to see Maryanne's response, which > points the finger at the real problem with all that's wrong with the man vs. > nature argument. It's people who have so damn much that they sit high in > their ivory towers looking down on humanity, yet forget that they are part > of it, and degrade the lives of fishermen, loggers, and the like, by placing > the welfare of crabs above them. > > And to make such ignorant statements such as: > "People can (and should) do something else for a living than cut down old > growth forest and harvest horseshoe crabs. So they have to be retrained. > Anybody can be retrained. Even me. We do have programs for displaced workers > in this country." > > makes me ask myself if I want to be associated with other "birders". Birds, > crabs, heck, even trees are important. But not as important as the welfare > of "PEOPLE". You know, if all of you tree-huggers (or "crab-huggers") out > there took all the money and time that you put into "saving nature" and put > it into "saving people" (read "Jerry, go volunteer time/money to retrain > that 5th generation fisherman to become a lawyer") then maybe there would be > a raised consciousness about the lesser problems in this world, like saving > horseshoe crabs. Heck, then once he's a lawyer, then he, too (like you) can > afford to spend thousands of dollars on hobbies. Right now, he's just trying > to figure out how to feed his kids. > > tom. ======================================================================= To leave the MDOsprey list, send e-mail to listserv@home.ease.lsoft.com with the following message in line 1: signoff mdosprey ======================================================================= =========================================================================