Chapple, Steve. Confession of an Eco-Redneck. Cambridge: Perseus Publishing, 1997.
In this insightful collection of outdoor essays, Steve Chapple unleashes a new species onto the environmental landscape: the “eco-redneck” is a beast previously unknown to the world at large, but Chapple effectively places its taxonomic background within familiar psychological territory—that vigorous, difficult terrain of freedom and wilderness that forms the bedrock of the American character.
Chapple sets forth the premise—startling to many, innately understood by a growing number—that one may be a zealous advocate of wilderness preservation and still enjoy the hunt; that dining on tofu in Washington, DC café doesn’t necessarily make one a better environmentalist than grilling backstraps over a campfire in Kentucky. By transcending the emotional baggage of the hunting/anti-hunting debate and setting forth his arguments for natural interaction in an air of humorous detachment, Chapple does a service to those whose feel that science, rather than lurid emotionalism, should and indeed must be the guiding light in wildlife conservation. Whether criticizing the naiveté of housecat owners who let their charges out at night to “be free” (feral and semi-feral housecats slaughter hundreds of millions of wild birds each year) or denouncing the plans of a mining corporation to decimate the headwaters of the Yellowstone River, Chapple pulls few punches in defense of the wild and of our natural right to participate therein.
When approaching subject matter such as a theoretical dinosaur hunt or human/grizzly interaction in Wyoming, Chapple consults an impressive array of experts in the field (in the above instances, noted paleontologist Robert Bakker and grizzly expert Doug Peacock). He takes us to some splendid places to reveal the innovative ways being put into practice to protect and restore wild lands. Traveling to Ted Turner’s Rocky Mountain fiefdom, the 137,520-acre Flying D Ranch, Chapple notes how Turner has maximized both profits and preservation goals by tearing down five hundred miles of fencing, repairing eroded stream banks and supplanting cattle with bison, whose migratory grazing patterns enhance rather than harm native grasses. Turner’s aggressive entrepreneurial stance may have angered traditional ranchers in the area, but Chapple seems attracted to people who provide results rather than rhetoric. In Montana, he talks with American Rivers general counsel Thomas Cassidy, whose prescription for watershed restoration is simple and concise: “It ain’t rocket science… Number 1: Protect the headwaters… At the least, fight to make sure the banks aren’t logged. A bank without trees or cover silts the river, and fish cannot spawn. Number 2: Protect the riparian areas downstream… Number 3: Dams kill rivers… No water, or channelized water, means fewer fish, different [exotic] fish, or no fish.”
Chapple provides us with several entertaining accounts of the absurd and eccentric—Hawaii’s agonized debates over choosing its state fish; the origins of jackalopes and fur-bearing trout; the author’s passion for still-hunting television sets—but what is most admirable in this collection is his consistent, deep-rooted commitment to the proposal that hunters and fishermen play an active and vital role in nature conservation. In his essays “The Bambi Syndrome,” “Eco-Rednecks” and “Animal Rights—Say It Isn’t So, Cindy!” Chapple explores the hypocritical fallacies of the anti-hunting agenda and neatly dismantles the voguish myth that hunting is detrimental to wildlife:
“It defies common sense. Who loves the mountains more than those who hunt them? Who has done more for wetlands than duck hunters? More to stop nickel-and-dime trailer courts, subdivisions, and septic tanks at streamside than trout and bass organizations? More to convince farmers not to rain-forest-torch the cover that runs alongside country roads than pheasant beaters? These days, sportsman and environmentalist are apt to be the same person.”
Reviewing an advertisement campaign by the animal rights organization PETA (featuring sparsely clad female models—this is politically correct?), Chapple rightly chides them for their unscientific, puerile view of the natural world as a Peaceable Garden—lions lying down with lambs, etc.—one in which pain is an alien blight imposed by Man (gender specific) and meat-eating is an exercise in savage terror.
“The PETA people are not about saving the wild,” says Chapple, alluding to the group’s mission priority of preventing individual animals from experiencing physical pain or death. “They’re about spiritual arrogance. They have a fear of killing. A fear of eating. A fear of growing old and fat and, strangely, I suspect, for all their [models’] nakedness, a fear of sex.” A fear, in other words, of our inescapable animalism, which despite our vaunted self-consciousness and technological prowess keeps our interests firmly grounded in the same tedious, all-consuming pastimes which guide all the other animals: food and sex.
The horrors of industrial agriculture, of feedlots and mechanized slaughterhouses, are real and pervasive symptoms of the moral corrosion that indolent gluttony and corporate dominion have imposed on the country. Animal rights organizations are correct to attack the practices of these monolithic companies, whose persistent crimes against the environment and the sanctity of life are aggregate infringements on all our liberties. Nonhuman animals clearly possess a right to exist; to deny this would be to rebel against scientific knowledge and the objective conception of life itself.
But when pop stars insist on sneering condemnations of hunters and fishermen as injurious to the natural world, they reveal their agenda as based simply on personal distress at witnessing predatory interaction, a phenomenon without which we would never have achieved our humanity. It is the factory farms that should be targeted by those interested in preserving animals from needless suffering; as Steve Chapple makes clear, the implication that hunters and fishermen are cut from the same shameful cloth is naked effrontery.
In this insightful collection of outdoor essays, Steve Chapple unleashes a new species onto the environmental landscape: the “eco-redneck” is a beast previously unknown to the world at large, but Chapple effectively places its taxonomic background within familiar psychological territory—that vigorous, difficult terrain of freedom and wilderness that forms the bedrock of the American character.
Chapple sets forth the premise—startling to many, innately understood by a growing number—that one may be a zealous advocate of wilderness preservation and still enjoy the hunt; that dining on tofu in Washington, DC café doesn’t necessarily make one a better environmentalist than grilling backstraps over a campfire in Kentucky. By transcending the emotional baggage of the hunting/anti-hunting debate and setting forth his arguments for natural interaction in an air of humorous detachment, Chapple does a service to those whose feel that science, rather than lurid emotionalism, should and indeed must be the guiding light in wildlife conservation. Whether criticizing the naiveté of housecat owners who let their charges out at night to “be free” (feral and semi-feral housecats slaughter hundreds of millions of wild birds each year) or denouncing the plans of a mining corporation to decimate the headwaters of the Yellowstone River, Chapple pulls few punches in defense of the wild and of our natural right to participate therein.
When approaching subject matter such as a theoretical dinosaur hunt or human/grizzly interaction in Wyoming, Chapple consults an impressive array of experts in the field (in the above instances, noted paleontologist Robert Bakker and grizzly expert Doug Peacock). He takes us to some splendid places to reveal the innovative ways being put into practice to protect and restore wild lands. Traveling to Ted Turner’s Rocky Mountain fiefdom, the 137,520-acre Flying D Ranch, Chapple notes how Turner has maximized both profits and preservation goals by tearing down five hundred miles of fencing, repairing eroded stream banks and supplanting cattle with bison, whose migratory grazing patterns enhance rather than harm native grasses. Turner’s aggressive entrepreneurial stance may have angered traditional ranchers in the area, but Chapple seems attracted to people who provide results rather than rhetoric. In Montana, he talks with American Rivers general counsel Thomas Cassidy, whose prescription for watershed restoration is simple and concise: “It ain’t rocket science… Number 1: Protect the headwaters… At the least, fight to make sure the banks aren’t logged. A bank without trees or cover silts the river, and fish cannot spawn. Number 2: Protect the riparian areas downstream… Number 3: Dams kill rivers… No water, or channelized water, means fewer fish, different [exotic] fish, or no fish.”
Chapple provides us with several entertaining accounts of the absurd and eccentric—Hawaii’s agonized debates over choosing its state fish; the origins of jackalopes and fur-bearing trout; the author’s passion for still-hunting television sets—but what is most admirable in this collection is his consistent, deep-rooted commitment to the proposal that hunters and fishermen play an active and vital role in nature conservation. In his essays “The Bambi Syndrome,” “Eco-Rednecks” and “Animal Rights—Say It Isn’t So, Cindy!” Chapple explores the hypocritical fallacies of the anti-hunting agenda and neatly dismantles the voguish myth that hunting is detrimental to wildlife:
“It defies common sense. Who loves the mountains more than those who hunt them? Who has done more for wetlands than duck hunters? More to stop nickel-and-dime trailer courts, subdivisions, and septic tanks at streamside than trout and bass organizations? More to convince farmers not to rain-forest-torch the cover that runs alongside country roads than pheasant beaters? These days, sportsman and environmentalist are apt to be the same person.”
Reviewing an advertisement campaign by the animal rights organization PETA (featuring sparsely clad female models—this is politically correct?), Chapple rightly chides them for their unscientific, puerile view of the natural world as a Peaceable Garden—lions lying down with lambs, etc.—one in which pain is an alien blight imposed by Man (gender specific) and meat-eating is an exercise in savage terror.
“The PETA people are not about saving the wild,” says Chapple, alluding to the group’s mission priority of preventing individual animals from experiencing physical pain or death. “They’re about spiritual arrogance. They have a fear of killing. A fear of eating. A fear of growing old and fat and, strangely, I suspect, for all their [models’] nakedness, a fear of sex.” A fear, in other words, of our inescapable animalism, which despite our vaunted self-consciousness and technological prowess keeps our interests firmly grounded in the same tedious, all-consuming pastimes which guide all the other animals: food and sex.
The horrors of industrial agriculture, of feedlots and mechanized slaughterhouses, are real and pervasive symptoms of the moral corrosion that indolent gluttony and corporate dominion have imposed on the country. Animal rights organizations are correct to attack the practices of these monolithic companies, whose persistent crimes against the environment and the sanctity of life are aggregate infringements on all our liberties. Nonhuman animals clearly possess a right to exist; to deny this would be to rebel against scientific knowledge and the objective conception of life itself.
But when pop stars insist on sneering condemnations of hunters and fishermen as injurious to the natural world, they reveal their agenda as based simply on personal distress at witnessing predatory interaction, a phenomenon without which we would never have achieved our humanity. It is the factory farms that should be targeted by those interested in preserving animals from needless suffering; as Steve Chapple makes clear, the implication that hunters and fishermen are cut from the same shameful cloth is naked effrontery.
