To The Reader’s Forum:

Beth Payton’s “How Much Time ?” in the Nov. 23-24 edition of The Post-Journal is a beautiful example of the cult-like aspect of environmentalism and of the logical fallacy of naturalism.

She paints all “broadly applied herbicides” with a broad brush, the same one she uses for “deforestation (and) our continued reliance on fossil fuels.” She asks about county officials, “What are they thinking?” I don’t live on the lake or use it much so, like Will Rogers, all I know is what I read in the paper, but I suspect they were thinking they might try to give the people from whom they extract such heavy taxes some reasonable use and pleasure from that lake. They didn’t spray the entire county with DDT. They didn’t kill the eagles and the ospreys; and they didn’t ravage the rain forest.

Cults are built on passion and passion is stupid. It can only count to two: good or bad, them or us, all or nothing. What does Payton actually want — inject each individual weed, let the weeds be and stand in front of your mirror amid the stench admiring your environmental purity, everybody move away from the lake? I might agree with that last one, but compel them to do so — no. Cults thrive on togetherness and virtue signaling and that is what makes this such a great class room example. No consideration or even recognition of the particular chemical involved or the way it was applied, in fact fierce rejection of the idea that would be relevant, just proud announcement of which side she is on and true believer blindness to all details and other considerations.

Entropy increase is the most pervasive, relentless fact of the universe. Eutrophication is its manifestation in lakes. Human use and especially waste discharge have accelerated this and introductions of weed and other exotic pests have made things way worse. The clock can’t be turned back and even if it could, improvements might be possible and wanted. There is no “natural” the way the cult dreams of it and that is not all bad or all good.

Norman Carlson

Busti