https://www.frontpagemag.com/our-feckless-nature-fakery/
Recently, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum announced that the Trump administration is documenting the value of what we the people own: “enormous stores of oil, coal, minerals, timber, and geothermal power, all held within a vast property portfolio,” Kimberly Strassel of the Wall Street Journal writes, including “480 million surface acres, more than 2 billion offshore acres, and 750 million acres of subsurface minerals.”
These abundant assets potentially can create revenue for the federal government that could obviate the need to borrow trillions of dollars, and to extract billions more from our most productive citizens, in order to “rob selected Peter to pay collective Paul,” as Rudyard Kipling in 1919 described redistribution schemes. But as Strassel understates, such common-sense action will require “hard political choices.”
That’s because for two centuries, the West has practiced what Theodore Roosevelt called “nature fakery.” In a 1907 article, Roosevelt attacked Jack London and other romantic writers for practicing what TR called “nature fakery,” which made them “an object of derision to every scientist worthy of the name, to every real lover of the wilderness, to every faunal naturalist, to every true hunter or nature lover.”
Roosevelt was alluding to the Western transformation of how we think about the natural world and our relationship to it. Rather than recognizing nature’s “fierce eternal destruction,” as John Keats put it, we have idealized and romanticized nature, and indulged what Victorian art and social critic John Ruskin called the “pathetic fallacy.” This is the idealization of nature by attributing to it and animals the conduct and emotions of human beings. Thinking your dog “loves” you, for example, is wish-fulfillment, not a statement of reality. Stop feeding it and see how much it loves you.