I know modern liberals will be shocked and appalled to hear it, but I came to environmentalism via fishing and hunting, as many people from rural areas did and still do.

All this may be surprising for some readers, particularly for those who view hunting and hunting culture with distaste. Environmentally-conscious liberals are indeed often repulsed by the idea of forming political coalitions with people who, they may argue, are interested in animals only because they want to kill them. “If a person believes it is immoral to shoot and kill an innocent wild animal,” Dray observes, “no counterargument about hunting as a means of maintaining wildlife population levels or people getting back in touch with nature is likely to resonate.” But, as Dray also pointedly notes, the anti-hunting public has often proved unwilling to pick up the conservation slack: Attempts to extend Pittman-Robertson-style taxes to other outdoors gear, like hiking supplies, have all failed.

I remember talking with my grandfather when I was 5 or 6 about how we had to preserve the river and the forest so that other people would be able to enjoy them in the future, and how when we’d catch catfish we’d check to see if the fish was gravid and then if was, we’d release it rather than eat it. My grandfather, by the way, was an extremely staunch conservative. Yet even he recognized that the land and the water were held in trust for the future, and explained to me when I was that age how the Native Americans had lived there on that river for thousands of years without destroying it all, and we could too, if we tried.

Yes, that brand of conservatism really did exist once. It’s almost all gone now.

I don’t remember which sf story it was, and the idea has probably appeared in more than one, but in some novel or story I read years ago, a super-intelligence had the ability to commandeer a person’s mind in short order by fuzzing the human subject.

At the time I thought, this makes a nice story but by necessity, a human mind is extremely resilient to this sort of hijack. Now, I am not so sure; I think the story only got the time scale wrong. The AI could complete the task in seconds, while now it’s possible in a few months. As much is compressed and elided in stories of any type, I now realize that essentially, the tale was correct, and we can see that evidence all over and have been able to for a while.

The fossil fuel industry fuzzed billions of humans for years to make them believe global climate change was not real. The tobacco industry did the same thing. Other industries are now undertaking similar tasks, and have been for many years.

Oh, sure, it doesn’t work on all humans all the time, but in the real world it works on enough of them enough of the time (and partially works on everyone all the time) that the long-ago sf story was more accurate than not. A fuzzing-based brain hijack is possible, and can wreak great destruction. We can see the results of that all around us now.