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Fish stocking shows we’re out of touch

The decision by Salmon Arm Council (with one exception) to approve fish-stocking of McGuire Lake is both instructive and fascinating.

Human ecology is defined as, “The branch of ecology that considers the relations of individual persons and of human communities with their particular environment.  Human ecology encompasses both the responses of humans to, and the effects of humans on, the environment.”
As a ‘case-study’ in Human Ecology, the decision by Salmon Arm Council (with one exception) to approve fish-stocking of McGuire Lake is both instructive and fascinating.
Instructive, because this decision confirms that the outdated mind-set (paradigm) of valuing nature as only being a play-thing for our entertainment, still prevails – even in 21st century greenery. 
Nature as being valuable in and of itself, is mostly absent from government discussion, and even environmental discussion, where activist groups have turned a blind eye to McGuire from day one.
Instructive, too, that the city appears to have decided on behalf of minority, fish-stocking interests, rather than for the community as a whole.  (A few short years ago, the community strongly rejected such a fish-stocking proposal for McGuire)
And fascinating, because McGuire and its arbitrary manipulation, is an elegant microcosm of our environmentally-damaging mind-set in the world at-large. A devaluing of nature’s workings and inherent worth, world-wide, is thus abundantly demonstrated in larger-scale impacts, such as habitat-loss and disappearance of wildlife, degradation of the atmosphere and even the land, itself – all as being just convenient dilution and disposal sites for our many pollutants and questionable chemical panaceas.   
Evolutionary science is quite clear on the probable outcome for living organisms with out-of-touch attributes, and human ecologists are equally clear on a similar, likely outcome for out-of-touch, nature-devaluing cultures, as well. 
That is, both living organisms and human cultures that can’t – or won’t – adapt to change, simply fail  to survive.   Not surprisingly, new thinking could just be adaptive!

Tom Crowley