The Shredding of Our Moral Core

According to Immanuel Kant, "We can judge the heart of a (person) by his(/her) treatment of animals." In a more general sense, that behavior, along with how people treat the environment, probably also says something about the heart of a society.

It is with a heavy heart then that I have watched recent environmental policy coups play out around the United States. For example, as this article from BuzzFeed describes, the Republican-controlled US House of Representatives recently passed legislation to reinstitute the barbaric killing of wolves and bears on wildlife refuges in Alaska. The approved tactics include aerial shooting and killing pups and cubs in their dens. To say nothing of the fact that these activities would take place on wildlife refuges, the inhumane legislation reveals those supporting it as sadistic, sociopathic, and bereft of conscience.

Morally corrupt as it is, the wolf-bear policy displays a cunning level of strategy. Targeting wolves and bears proves a clever tactic for unraveling the threads of human concern and environmental policy. As apex predators, those species indicate the health of the ecosystems in which they live. When they're wiped out, proponents of environmental exploitation can more easily make the case that extracting resources will not damage an ecosystem anymore than it already is. Additionally, as charismatic megafauna, wolves and bears generate public concern, and people rally to save them. In short, these species are critical to environmental preservation, and it is no accident legislators are targeting them.

We see the reasons for using bears and wolves as strategic targets in environmental policy proposals and decisions across the country. Stripping the species of their federal protections takes the first step in breaking down the systemic mechanisms that foster, institute, and enact our environmental ethics. Eliminating key reasons to protect the land opens the door to proposals that allow for expanded environmental exploitation. For example, we've already seen a proposal to permit oil and gas drilling in national parks and renewed efforts by Democrats and Republicans in the state of Alaska to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Ultimately, taking federal government out of the picture puts our environment in the hands of private interests, which is exactly the point of these policies. One of the best (though most egregious) examples of this process comes from Oregon, where a state board led by Democratic State Treasurer Tobias Read voted to sell off the Elliott State Forest to private interests. Covering the story, Men's Journal calls the sale "the natural conclusion of a land losing federal protection" and "a bad sign for America's public lands." Throwing away our heritage of conservation and our responsibility to future generations, the board sold the forest for short-term profits.

In the place where our moral and environmental ethics once found their footing, a corporate callus now resides, an indifference to anything other than consuming resources and making money. That's how, according to Greenpeace, the public relations firm for Energy Transfer Partners, the company building the Dakota Access Pipeline, ended up writing the letter in which the Republican governors of North Dakota, South Dakota, and Iowa asked the Army Corps of Engineers to approve the pipeline.

At their heart, these actions by our elected officials represent a bipartisan, corporate attack on the core of our society and the shredding of our moral and environmental fabric.