David,
You're right, the terminology has changed. I recall reading years ago
(can't remember the title) of a fellow who spent his free time
sabotaging the devices of organizations chopping down trees. The book
made it sound as though he was engaged in a grand and worth while
adventure. I think I was young enough that it sounded like fun. I'm
much older and reserved nowadays . . . although . . . I have this one
window in my study where the afternoon sun comes through with a
vengeance. Having the sun come up while I'm having a little morning nap
is unpleasant in the extreme . . . but just a couple of weeks ago I
looked out that window and noticed a tree I had planted years ago had
put one of its leafy branches up next to that window blocking the sun.
I of course took the earliest opportunity to go down stairs and give it
a little hug.
Lawrence
On 7/17/2020 12:00 PM, david ritchie wrote:
On Jul 5, 2020, at 6:49 PM, Lawrence Helm <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>> wrote:Searching back through e mail, I find I failed to respond to this. My thought now concerns the term “activist,” which has been around for a long while but I’m only now hearing people introduced in a manner that suggests it’s full time work. People who worked for Greenpeace or Amnesty aren’t introduced on the radio as “activists.” (I refer to the radio because I don’t watch television). I wonder what the dividing line is. Probably a catchall, like “terrorist” or “insurgent.”
David,
You are entertaining as always! ;-)
In the June 5, 2020 issue of the TLS is a review of the book /Barn 8 /by Deb Olin Unferth. The reviewer is Jakob Hofmann:
"From Kauai to Key West, flocks of feral chickens strut and crow. Less glamorous than New York's sewer crocodiles or London's parakeets, the displaced chicken still deserves an origin story. Deb Olin Unferth has written one, an account of how a contaminated patch of Iowa came to be colonized by a drove of former battery hens."
A small group of "animal rights veterans . . . embark on a hen-heist. Olin Unferth's . . . book is part Bildungsroman, part-heist, part history of industrial husbandry. Non-chronological and ornithological, it leaps forward to a charred and toxic future when chickens have outlived mankind, and back to the first fowls who shared the planet with dinosaurs . . . "
"Lurking among the quirks and capers are the ethical and logistical dilemmas of activism. Where is a sensible place to take a million clucking hens in the middle of the night? How do you 'free' something that hasn't known natural light for generations? These creatures are so overbred they no longer have a natural habitat . . . they are 'ineligible for freedom'. Battery hens are post-natural - indeed, so post-natural that releasing one is deemed an act of eco-terrorism. Rather than the daily abuses of modern hen -- though these do get a look in -- /Barn 8 /is concerned with the sinister long-term genetic tinkering that has become an unquestioned part of industrial farming. There is, however, time yet. Whatever is sating our hunger for eggs and profits is 'not a bird' anymore, but isn't yet 'not /not /a bird.'"
. . . you probably won't want to read it. I know I won't. :-(
David
