How To Murder A Good Idea By Jeff Smith AS A KID growing up in Tucson I looked to my parents first, and their friends and the parents of my best friends secondarily, as examples of how grown-up, fair-minded and honest people ought to act. Common sense and common decency seemed to be the standard. As I remember, my mother and father were extremely level-headed folks. They came from the state of Maine, from small towns in farm country. Both went to college, were well-read, well-spoken and had been to Boston. The significance of the latter, in the Aroostook County, Maine, context, was a certain level of sophistication and cosmopolitanism. My parents both were life-long Republicans, but this sprung from New England fiscal conservatism practiced on a personal level. They weren't stingy or suspicious of other people of whatever culture, color or class; they just spent carefully. They were self-reliant and they were kind, but above all they kept their common sense. My natural rebellious streak of youth led me to register as a Democrat when I was old enough to vote, and it puzzled my father I suppose, because the mean-spirited selfishness I saw coming in the Republican Party was not the kind of Republicanism he was drawn to in his politically formative years. I expect that he and Mom would have been Democrats like I was, if they'd come along when I did. My brand of idealism was founded in practicality. It made sense to me to be charitable to the less fortunate in society and to take good care of Mother Earth. Good housekeeping. It struck me that people given a fair shake and a hand up would make more congenial neighbors and productive workers and taxpayers, and that an Earth well cared-for would maintain us all in good health and plenty. So I went about my life and my work without having to worry overmuch about cleaving to any rigid dogma of political correctness or cross-referenced environmental agenda: common sense is plain enough and simple enough that one does not need to keep his finger moist and constantly in the wind to catch the slightest puff of change in direction of the prevailing politick. But this style of old-fashioned sensibility doesn't seem to be cutting it anymore. Despite a modicum of ear wash from the mainstream press to the effect that we should not be slaves to P.C., or to micro-manage ourselves according to hourly opinion polling, the dominant media and political forces have become so extravagantly attached to consensus, and to the notion that every move society makes must pass a battery of tests, that we're damn near buried in bullshit. A case in point: Pima County's Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan. This plan is a classic Good Idea, and I suspect Chuck Huckelberry, the man whose byline it carries, is a common-sense sort of guy. The trouble is, some of the influence makers who are pushing the plan have become so wrapped up in their own agenda of please-all-our-friends-and-political-fellow-travelers that they will bury any hope of passing the plan under the sheer weight of consensus they seek to build. By the time they have run the plan by every wing-nut interest group they want to advise and consent, the simple folks at home will be confused, then fed up and finally bored out of their minds. I read an editorial last week in The Arizona Daily Star on the day the supervisors reviewed the conservation plan. "Today the Board of Supervisors gets a progress report on the effort, which it should keep pushing toward boldness...This reflects that the county is now ready to start gearing up the actual machinery that will hash out the plan...The board should first seat a large, diverse, 77-person steering committee to shape the plan through consensus-based decision-making." Jesus. With friends like the Star editorial board the plan needs no enemies. Keep pushing toward boldness. Yeah, boy: When we get to boldness we'll have the world by the balls. Now ready to start gearing up. Let's see: ready, start, gearing up, now; that's four ways of saying essentially that for the past year all we've been doing is getting horny over some fantasy. It's like the old joke about giving up half your sex-life: either thinking about it, or talking about it. Imagine how much the Star's recommended large, diverse, 77-person steering committee will speed this process of getting ready to start gearing up. Perhaps even enough to run the whole, top-heavy new bureaucracy head-on into the Star's next bright idea: The Omnibus Pygmy Owl Committee of Inquisitors. Because bright and sensible as Chuck Huckelberry is, and much as the Star editorial board condescends to endorse his plan in principle, they say the supervisors need to be "much stricter" than Huckelberry proposes, in limiting what people do wherever potential pygmy owl habitat may exist. Or any other species someone may decide is menaced and needs a knee-capper to look out for it. And the Star, or the Southwest Center for Biological Diversity, or some other such well-connected/well-heeled bunch of trust-fund eco-fascists will inform us as to what and where they may be, thank you very much. Pardon my sorry, common-sensical ass, but this pygmy owl thing has come to symbolize precisely what has gone wrong with so many ideas that started out simple and good, but have long since lost touch with the real world and the real people who populate it. Yes, I recognize there are indicator species, the health of which speak to the overall wholesomeness of the planet. I also recognize that throughout the history of the planet, species go extinct every day. Charles Darwin understood this. And he demonstrated to anyone with literacy and common sense that this makes for more vigorous species in a constantly evolving biological dynamic. A case can be made that, outside outright extermination or wide-ranging poisoning of ecosystems, the degree of attention we currently are spending to save the pygmy owl will result in future generations of pygmy owls that aren't fit to survive in an evolving world. Are we screwing around with Darwinism, to the ultimate weakening and ruination of the green (and in some cases, brown, cement gray and blacktop) world? Food for thought.

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