We’re headed for a future where only the wealthy can enjoy nature | Hacker News Reader

We’re headed for a future where only the wealthy can enjoy nature

thehill.com

Made me think of this:

At any rate, spring is here, even in London N1, and they can't stop you enjoying it. This is a satisfying reflection. How many a time have I stood watching the toads mating, or a pair of hares having a boxing match in the young corn, and thought of all the important persons who would stop me enjoying this if they could. But luckily they can't. So long as you are not actually ill, hungry, frightened or immured in a prison or a holiday camp, spring is still spring. The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.

—from 'Some Thoughts on the Common Toad' by George Orwell. Highly recommend.

Let’s build a VC backed AI enabled blockchain VR version of nature for the poor. problem solved

You forgot to use BlockchainVRAI.JS framework to orchastrate this together.

It's better than nature because you can have pokemon there.

Anyone who's worried only the wealthy will be able to enjoy nature hasn't been to West Virginia.

I think "nature" in this article refers to actual natural treasures (Grand Staircase, Yosemite, etc.), not just some random forest on some rolling hills.

Clearly you've never been to Appalachia. It's beautiful, and it's full of poverty.

Sure, it's beautiful. Just not nearly as beautiful as the mountain west and west coast.

I don't think the Blue Ridge Mountains count as rolling hills, and I would count them among our national treasures.

That being said, the fact is that WV's natural resources have been subjected to some of the most profound (and least regulated) economic exploitation in the country. So I don't think the GP's point is correct.

It reads like "the Poors can live Outdoors!"* but I'm going to assume I'm mistaken or that that couldn't possibly be a popular opinion on hn.

*this is a joke and if you want to argue that i'm implying that everyone in West Virginia is homeless, bless your heart

Can you expand on this? I genuinely don't understand the "poor people are adjacent to trees" statement in the context of an entire country. Like genuinely this sounds like solid comedy unless I'm missing something here.

When you're a broke white hillbilly, you hunt and fish and do stuff outdoors because its there, its cheap, and there ain't much else to do.

Source: Grew up broke hillbilly

That's weird. A very large chunk of poor people I've met live in urban areas, and if they don't, often lack the time or resources to do those things. I must know a special type of poor person that OP hasn't bumped into.

It’s only cheap for them because they inherited vast tracts of land.

What? Do you actually believe this?

I grew up in the northern end of Appalachia, with a lot of people that had less than an acre their doublewide sat on. Nothing stopped them using the ponds and lakes, the trail systems, or the technically private but defacto public access swathes of paper company land.

Not only did they use them for recreation, they often hunted for food. Technically illegal out of season, but national forest rangers tend to look the other way if you're hunting for sustenance, since those same poachers often would blow the whistle on more serious issues. (Illegal waste dumping, marijuana grows that abuse the forest with chemicals, meth labs that might explode and start fires, etc)

Plus as a practical matter, if someone takes one shot at a deer then moves regardless of success, it's pretty much impossible to pinpoint where the shot came from.

I want "Source: Grew up broke hillbilly" on a t-shirt.

It's interesting because in Europe fishing has become an expensive pastime - that might prove the OP's point. When on vacation in Cape Cod I was pleased that fishing rights in sweetwater seem to be some kind of common property. In Europe it's state property that is licensed to private associations that sell things like daily permits which amount to around 15 to 30 euros.

And the fact that it has vast natural resources is part of why it's poor. If you can forage a meal of morels, trout, and ramps, what's the point of earning a lot of money to go to fancy restaurants? It's not like you're going to get a better meal than that even by dropping a couple hundred bucks in NYC. So you end up with lots of people who living on large parcels of inherited land but not making very much money per year, because that is actually somewhat sustainable, at least until it comes time for retirement or (more likely) you have medical issues that you can't afford to pay for.

Please tell me you’re joking.

West Virginia is precisely an example of only the wealthy enjoying nature.

The wealthy retreat to Greenbrier or go skiing at Snowshoe Mountain.

All the while, the working class turn to nature to build squatter camp in the summer to pinch and save for winter shelter since the mines went out of business. In many valleys (not the wealthy ones), nature cannot even provide decent water, the result of contamination from modern top chop mining (by the wealthy). Things have only deteriorated recently, unless you consider not dying young of black lung disease “enjoying nature”.

Well, the wealthy get to take time off of work to go camping and hiking, and the poor people get to dynamite the hills their ancestors settled. Surely they're equivalent.

I’m not an expert on top chopping but I’m pretty sure the employment opportunities for local residents are slim to none and that’s the whole point. I went to school in North Carolina where about a 2 mile drive around the side of a mountain would bring us to an overlook of a valley full of peaks that we gradually watched disappear over those 3 years I was there. The machinery was utterly massive. I think the logging crews employed more people than the earth movers but I think logging on those hillsides qualifies as one of the most deadly jobs in America. They made a TV show about it.

Aren't the areas Mike Lee is looking to sell already off limits to the public? They're not national parks, so I don't really know how usage works

If the values are wrong, this follows.

Hahaha comments agreeing with this sentiment are getting downvoted, and the thread itself has been flagged.

We've banned this account for trolling. Please don't create accounts to break the site guidelines with.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

was the article flagged because of comments or because of content? op, don't want to step on toes.

Users flagged it, presumably because they didn't think it followed the site guidelines. Hard to say if they were reacting to the article or the thread. Divisive topics like this pretty much always turn into flamewars unless they include significant new information for the mind to chew on.

And health care. And get elected in govt.

These are long overdue reforms. The states east of the mississippi did not have the lionshare of their land retained by the federal government when they became states. West of the river is a different story. With the federal government owning 2/3rds of the land in the west, things are way out of whack.

Are they? A huge portion of my state is federal or state park land, and people flock to these places to get away from the cities and the suburbs. If Lee had his way, the federal government could start selling lands in places like Mount Rainier National Park or the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest. These areas host numerous trailheads, picnic areas, campgrounds, and the like.

I can't help but agree with the author of the article, that Lee just wants to sell these lands off to rich people who will deny access. We have a long history in Washington of exploring the Cascades and the Olympics and I want that to continue for the foreseeable future. These lands are the birthright of our children and we should steward them as such.

Having moved from the seattle area to the state of maryland, the lack of parks and public land feels very depressing. You drive by giant majestic horse pastures, but the parks are so small that you can still hear cars driving by.

well said

Worse: We don't have the right to roam[1] here in the US and given how trigger-happy people are, the more land is privatized the more dangerous it is to explore.

1.https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/right-to-roam/

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