The bears are winning
Latest news from Yosemite is the 14th death, again on the Mist Trail. (Or is it 15th? When last I looked, last week's fatal fall from Half Dome was number 14.)
Meanwhile, the bear death toll appears to be holding steady, and one set of survivors are about to enrich a "consultant," and soon a lawyer or three, to prove that their loved ones have no responsibility for their own stupidity.
I invite you to read the second link closely, and ask this: if a "flimsy railing," the sight of a 700 foot waterfall a few yards off on the left, danger signs, and the warnings of numerous bystanders were not enough to keep the Vernal Falls victims in a safe place, what the hell would?
Fortunately, the National Park Service has quite a bit of experience dealing with this sort of bullshit. Consider Grand Canyon, whose death tolls dwarf those of Yosemite. Lawyers have advanced similar arguments there: a railing exists, defining safe from unsafe for all but the thickest visitors. There, the "flimsy railing" (much the same design as in Yosemite) stands between the safe path and a drop one mile deep. Somehow, such railings and such warnings work for about 99.5 percent of National Park visitors. Exactly how dumb does the dumb-down have to be?
Repeat after me: the wild world is not a mall. It is not a theme park. It is a place where you must pay attention to warnings, heed your own cautionary vibes, and above all take responsibility for your actions. If you can't grasp that, you don't belong in a wild place. The bears, clearly, do. At this moment in Yosemite, the human-bear death ratio has risen to 2:1, so the numbers speak for themselves. Bears seem more able to adapt to human intrusions than some humans are able to adapt to wildness.
To keep a certain type of human safe in a place like Yosemite's Mist Trail, we would need to erect concrete block walls 25 feet high, topped with electrified razor wire. Not only would such measures keep the wild places away from the people able to responsibly enjoy them, they wouldn't be enough. People would be killed or injured trying to scale such a wall, and their relations would complain that those measures were not safe enough.
Perhaps we should keep all humans out of national parks. The half of one percent or less who deliberately put themselves in mortal peril can succeed in shutting everyone else off from the wild. And the bears would live safer lives.
Or perhaps we could send a message to the consultants and lawyers who feed off the misery that the half of one percent leave behind them: take a flying fuck at a rolling football.
Meanwhile, the bear death toll appears to be holding steady, and one set of survivors are about to enrich a "consultant," and soon a lawyer or three, to prove that their loved ones have no responsibility for their own stupidity.
I invite you to read the second link closely, and ask this: if a "flimsy railing," the sight of a 700 foot waterfall a few yards off on the left, danger signs, and the warnings of numerous bystanders were not enough to keep the Vernal Falls victims in a safe place, what the hell would?
Fortunately, the National Park Service has quite a bit of experience dealing with this sort of bullshit. Consider Grand Canyon, whose death tolls dwarf those of Yosemite. Lawyers have advanced similar arguments there: a railing exists, defining safe from unsafe for all but the thickest visitors. There, the "flimsy railing" (much the same design as in Yosemite) stands between the safe path and a drop one mile deep. Somehow, such railings and such warnings work for about 99.5 percent of National Park visitors. Exactly how dumb does the dumb-down have to be?
Repeat after me: the wild world is not a mall. It is not a theme park. It is a place where you must pay attention to warnings, heed your own cautionary vibes, and above all take responsibility for your actions. If you can't grasp that, you don't belong in a wild place. The bears, clearly, do. At this moment in Yosemite, the human-bear death ratio has risen to 2:1, so the numbers speak for themselves. Bears seem more able to adapt to human intrusions than some humans are able to adapt to wildness.
To keep a certain type of human safe in a place like Yosemite's Mist Trail, we would need to erect concrete block walls 25 feet high, topped with electrified razor wire. Not only would such measures keep the wild places away from the people able to responsibly enjoy them, they wouldn't be enough. People would be killed or injured trying to scale such a wall, and their relations would complain that those measures were not safe enough.
Perhaps we should keep all humans out of national parks. The half of one percent or less who deliberately put themselves in mortal peril can succeed in shutting everyone else off from the wild. And the bears would live safer lives.
Or perhaps we could send a message to the consultants and lawyers who feed off the misery that the half of one percent leave behind them: take a flying fuck at a rolling football.
Labels: accidents, National parks, Yosemite National Park
posted by Uncle | 23:41
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