Free The Voice of Reason: A V.I.P. Pass to Enlightenment by Chael Sonnen Page B

counterpart isn’t just screaming to their dealer across the way for another bag, so she can join him in the land of Nod for a while * .
    That is your heritage, friend. That is whom you take your cues from.
    Feelin’ the heat yet, Activist Boy? Seems like it. You’re starting to sweat a lil’ bit. Starting to stink again, too. But this time you reek like a root cellar full of musty rutabagas. We gotta get some deodorant on you, stat.
    To make some of my better points, let’s head out on a safari. It’s important. There are some rhinos that need our help!
    That’s right, save the rhinos … or the pronghorn antelope, or the dung beetle, or the meerkat, or whatever your pathetic choice of animal to champion this week as a way of vaulting yourself into my consciousness without any legitimate accomplishment or quality of your own. But let’s go with the rhinos for now. Big. Cute. Deadly. Got no real issues with them. But if their numbers are dwindling, and they are, isn’t that nature’s way of showing them the door, like nature does with every species eventually? Didn’t nature put us here, too? Isn’t the natural order of things for species to eventually go extinct? Doesn’t the fossil record indicate that everything dies out sooner or later? How do you know that nature, and fate, and evolution didn’t put us here to get rid of them, so something better and more productive might rise in their place? How do you know that keeping them around by artificial means isn’t stifling the development of a baboon with two brains that might cure cancer in five hundred years? Who are you, eco-boy, to decide? Why do you, and not nature, get the deciding vote on what goes on the species scrap heap and what doesn’t? I know. Rhinos are beautiful, they’re intelligent, blah blah blah.
    Like the whales. We’ve gotta keep them around, too, because someday we’re going to be able to communicate with them. This coming from the likes of you, who doesn’t even communicate with the members of his own family residing two towns over, which speaks the same language. But we keep the whales around for the extremely unlikely reason that we might be able to “communicate” with them one day. As far as I’m concerned, I’d rather get rid of them if it affords the benefit not having to put up with the likes of you, even if that means that my great-great-great-great-great-grandson is never going to get an email from friggin’ Shamu. And what is Shamu going to say, anyway? “Hey, humans. This is a chain email. Bring me some fish and a cute female whale to mate with. Then leave me alone or I’ll bite ya in half.”
    Trees. Got to save the trees. Majestic giants, leafy wonders, your bark-covered blood brothers. Right. Gotta fight those evil lumberjacks. Don’t let the fact that natural occurrences, like floods and lightning-ignited forest fires, kill more trees per year than human logging. Inconvenient truth, and leaves you nothing to scream about and no one to scream at . It’s frustrating, I know, because how can you feel morally superior to a swollen river or an electrically charged thundercloud? Neither of them cares about you, and neither of them will throw fifty dollars of guilt money into a paper envelope and send it to your annoying tree charity of choice, just to make you shut up and go away. So that leaves us for you to annoy, and pester, and feel better than. As for me, I like the fact that trees exist so they can be cut down, and used to build things, like hospitals, and schools, and airports, and research labs. I like that. I want more of that. The older and bigger the tree that gets cut down, the better. It’s had a wonderful, glorious, long life. It is getting closer (by dint of probability) to dying every second in a fire, or flood, or by disease, and getting rid of it will open a hole in the forest canopy that will let sunlight in, which will then help to make the area ready for a new tree, which would never have