Calling Cowshit on Bee
Prospect Exclusive: The Sacramento Bee Doesn’t Know Cowshit
There is no shortage of drivel in mainstream media, but the Sacramento Bee has raised the "non-story" to new heights, and in so doing, has insulted some of my best friends. Here’s a heads up, Bee, from the mighty Sierra County Prospect: read your crap before you send it out.
The crap in question is found here:
The piece begins with this moronic line: "As director of the emergency room at the UC Davis Medical Center, Robert Derlet always wondered what made people sick." Hey, Robert, it’s germs, man! You’re probably the last person alive to hear of the Germ Theory of Disease. So, Robert, who is the director of the ER but clearly not a doctor (we’re pretty sure doctors learn about germs in medical school) decides it could be the water! Some germs travel by water! He’s done it, Robert has solved the problem of cholera! To be honest, it has been 40 years since anyone who knows anything about the wilderness has considered our streams to be free of bacteria and other parasites. The streams of the Sierra are very clean by the standards of most places, but yes, there are bacteria living in our streams, just as there always have been. For years it’s been known that most people in rural populations have or have had Giardiasis. Robert, someone has been there before you- not a pioneer, either, the U.S. government: go Here to learn about Giardiasis.
However, Robert, the so-called "beaver fever" we were worried about didn’t come from beavers, it came from people, using the lakes basin and crapping everywhere. Most of the really nasty critters we get from public waters come from people with their nasty brown-smeared butts swimming and crapping near by. Anyway, Robert tested water here and there and discovered that "no where is water dirtier than U. S. Forest Service land." Here’s my first question on that, Robert: what other lands did you test? Did you have permission to trespass on private land, or permission to test their water? I’m guessing Robert mostly tested public lands. Good advice, Robert: don’t show up on private lands here testing water or anything else. So Robert made yet another astonishing discovery: cows poop! I personally have known cows all my life, and yes, Robert is right, they do poop. And, what do you know, like every other living creature, there are bacteria in the gut of cattle. Indeed, there have to be, or the cow would die. Robert took the leap to decide that it was bacteria from cattle and pack animals, and not filthy humans, that were polluting the waters of the Sierra. Robert, while you were out testing, did you bag every crap and bring it out? Did you filter your whiz when you widdled? Did you keep your filthy sweat off our pristine Sierra? Elsewhere in the article Robert and the Bee assert high elevation "lakes and streams were clear as champagne and pollution-free". First, champagne isn’t clear, and second, those waters are not pollution free. They might have low bacteria counts, partially because they are cold and low in oxygen and nutrients, but they are polluted just the same, with hydrocarbons and acid rain FROM THE CITY. Anyway… Eventually we get down to the nitty gritty. Here’s a quote from the Bee article: "At one time, cattle were important for developing civilization here," said Derlet. "But now, with 40 million people in California, the Sierra is not for cattle. It's for water. We need water more than Big Macs." Derlet goes on to complain that the Forest Service gets "less than a latte" in payment for each cow. The "latte" is the unit of measure this urban bone head can summon. The ultimate ignorance is that it is people, not cattle, that pose the greatest risk. Grass fed, high quality cattle carry far fewer exotic strains of E. Coli than your average city toddler. There might be an over-all greater number of individual bacteria, but there are many strains of E. Coli your gut right now as you read this. Are you dying? Europeans and their food animals have shared bacteria for centuries; it’s one of the reasons they had so many diseases, like pox, which wiped out the Native Americans. Pretending now that we’d be clean if it weren’t for cows pooping in the hills, or that urbanite dipwicks wandering the outback are cleaner than cattle is simply stupid. This isn’t about science or cattle, it’s about an urban agenda that says they own the Sierra and those of us who live and work and put up with four seasons here are squatters. Duplicitous, ignorant urbanites like Derlet and lackey media, like the Bee has been in this instance, are one of the reasons rural people are starting to believe they are being eradicated. This isn’t just theory; already we’re being pressured to keep cows from crapping in the Sierra Valley. The water has been tested, and is going to be tested more in the future. It isn’t our Sierra Valley, it’s the collection basin for urban water. Right now, most standards are voluntary, but that won’t be the case for long. Eventually, thanks to an army of "new environmentalists" like Derlet we’ll have to have a permit to graze private lands. John Muir, who has been dead nearly a hundred years, is quoted several times in the Bee piece. We have no problem with Muir, who was a visionary, but he’s become the icon of unreasonable environmental protection (posthumously). In a final insult on reason, Derlet equates a cow flop in a stream with "raw sewage". He claims that water sources where people congregate but not livestock were largely clean. I doubt that. I’m willing to bet that anywhere people visit is going to be littered with human skin, parasites, and certainly diseases. This last gives a clue to the problem of the witless urban environmentalist. They believe a cow, who has been eating pretty much natural graze, whose stomach is by design filled with a carefully managed stew of bacteria, is as polluting as a human who eats every manner of crap and puts an unimaginable amount of heavy metals and trash into their bodies, and who travels hundreds of miles, coming into contact with thousands of filthy humans. We all know there are bacteria in cowshit, but a pasture full of flops has less hazardous material than one urban family flushes into the sewer every year. Here’s my suggestion: you really want to clean up the Sierras? Do something about the cities in the flatlands, first. Finally, Derlet is ready for controversy! He even quoted Ghandi: "first they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win." There is no doubt he, and other urbanites like him, will win. They out number us dozens or hundreds to one at the ballot box. All the money and all the power is concentrated in the urban areas. We in the rural lands are essentially colonies to them. They’ve begun to claim our water, and propaganda pieces like that in the Bee, filled with dead heroes and visions of a pristine wilderness awaiting them, are preparing the stage for our undoing. In other countries the indigenous peoples are dying rather than accept urbanization and the commodification of the elements of their world. Already many of our local unemployed timber workers have died young from alcohol and inactivity. We’re colonies to the urban centers, and they’ve made it clear: they don’t need our Big Macs, they need our water. As an aside, a BM is junk next to a piece of Sierra Valley grass fed beef. Grrr!
Again, we get it! Derlet, who has been published in "peer reviewed journals", wants rural people out of the rural lands. Again, we are told these aren’t our hills where we live, they are the playground of the urban elite. This isn’t our water, it belongs to the people in the cities.
