I grew up in rural Kentucky, and I hated it.
I was miles from my friends, and worse, miles from the nearest library. My phone wasn’t even in the same calling locality as everyone I knew, which in the bad old days of landlines meant that talking to people who mattered cost real money. Casual conversation was a luxury, and loneliness was the norm.
We had a well that ran dry often enough that sink baths became normal. Movies were not a thing. Biking to see friends wasn’t an option. Even the most ordinary markers of childhood life felt impossibly far away. Rural life, for a child who loved books and people and stories, could feel like exile.
And yet — I would not trade it.
Because living out there taught me things you cannot learn any other way. Not from books, documentaries, or slogans, but from consequence.
I learned how land and humans actually work together. I learned where food comes from and how easily abundance turns into scarcity. I learned the rhythms of seasons, animals, weather, and limits, and I learned that nature is neither gentle nor sentimental, but it is honest.
We had every pet imaginable: cats, dogs, chickens, even peacocks. Sometimes I rode our horses. My brothers and I made up games together, and I made up stories. We were steeped in the quiet magic of everyday life, which included beauty and loss in equal measure.
That’s where I learned why deer hunting season exists. Deer no longer have natural predators in much of the country, and left unchecked they overpopulate, sicken, destroy crops, spread disease to cattle, ruin their own habitats, and eventually starve. Hunting isn’t cruelty; it’s management imposed in the absence of nature’s own restraints.
I also learned what real pollution looks like. One year, a neighbor abandoned a cow carcass upstream from us, fouling the clean water of our creek. The cause was obvious, the damage immediate, and no models were needed to explain it. There were consequences.
And then there was Boots, my calf, who I had bottle-fed from a pail with a nipple. One particularly lean winter, Boots became freezer filler, initiating my brief and painful flirtation with vegetarianism. Food is not an abstraction when you live with the land; it is life, death, and responsibility intertwined.
This is what you learn by actually living with nature, not treating it like a fragile ornament, and not worshiping it as a god.
Conservation Was Once Simply About Responsibility
Living that way doesn’t make you sentimental about the land; it makes you realistic.
You don’t imagine nature as fragile, and you don’t imagine it as benevolent either. You learn quickly that neglect can be just as destructive as abuse. That was the original meaning of conservation — not preservation in amber and not moral purity, but continuity: ensuring that land, water, animals, and people could keep functioning together over time.
Conservation assumed human presence and human use, but it also assumed consequences.
If you polluted a creek, you were at fault. If you overhunted, you paid for it later. If you exhausted the soil, the harvest failed. Reality enforced restraint far more reliably than ideology ever could, because failure was personal, traceable, and unavoidable.
That model worked because incentives were aligned. The people who depended on the land were the same people who had to live with the results of their decisions.
At some point, that understanding was replaced.
The Tragedy of the Commons Rewritten
The classic Tragedy of the Commons argues that shared resources are destroyed because no one has enough incentive to preserve them. That framing misses a critical variable.
The real issue is not ownership; it is future claim.
People conserve what they expect to need again. Farmers preserve soil because depleted land ruins the next harvest. Hunters preserve wildlife because empty woods end the hunt. Loggers replant because no forest means no future work. Ranchers manage grazing because overuse destroys pasture. None of this requires virtue, but it does require continuity.
Modern environmentalism claims to solve the Tragedy of the Commons by restricting or eliminating human use altogether, but in doing so it removes the very incentives that once made conservation work. When land is taken out of use, it is also taken out of care. The continuity is broken, and now no one cares about the future use of the land. By freezing it in amber, environmentalism makes the environment useless.
Environmental organizations do not live on the land, inherit it, or remain when policies fail. Their relationship to nature is symbolic rather than functional, and symbols do not enforce restraint. In fact, they are often counterproductive; those who symbolically help alleviate problems often come to think that somehow, magically, their virtue signaling is an actual solution. So real problems are not addressed at all. What follows is a quieter tragedy: no one benefits directly from long-term environmental health, so no one bears direct responsibility. Management becomes interference, judgment becomes taboo, and neglect is reframed as respect.
The commons is not protected. It is abandoned.
From Pollution to Climate and the Loss of Accountability
For a long time, environmentalism focused on pollution, and it was right to do so.
Pollution is concrete. You can see it, smell it, and measure it. A river runs foul, soil turns toxic, air burns the lungs, and someone, somewhere, caused the damage. Pollution had victims, perpetrators, and remedies, and it was often traceable to a source, which meant it could be confronted, regulated, and often fixed.
I encountered this version of environmentalism in high school, and it exhausted me. We were hammered endlessly about pollution, especially acid rain. Charts, warnings, and dire forecasts were repeated until they blurred together. It was overwhelming, but I still understood why it mattered. Acid rain wasn’t a metaphor; it damaged forests and property and killed lakes. There were sources, and there were consequences.
That mattered because it meant accountability.
But pollution had a limitation from an institutional standpoint: it was solvable. Regulation reduced it, technology improved outcomes, and once problems were addressed, attention moved on. Victories were possible, and victories limit expansion.
So environmentalism pivoted, and acid rain, less traceable than other climate damagers, proved to be the perfect transition. It wasn't one industry causing acid rain; it was several, and it was hard to tell who most contributed, so all industries were required to put in scrubbers so that their emissions were cleaner. And this worked, though it was expensive. But the idea of collective guilt was fertile, and it bore fruit.
From pollution — local and traceable — to climate: global, modeled, cumulative, and abstract. Under this framework, responsibility became universal. You no longer had to poison a river to be culpable; you only had to exist. And because everyone emits carbon dioxide, everyone has a carbon footprint, it was no longer solely the liability of industries.
By dissolving accountability, environmentalism quietly did industry a favor. No single company bears the full cost of remediation anymore. Cleanup becomes optional, scrutiny diffuses, and supporting climate initiatives is cheaper than paying for specific damage. Climate change spreads cost and blame across everyone instead of concentrating it where harm occurs. And it focuses harm on the one emission that everyone is culpable of, while ignoring other real damage. Carbon dioxide is suddenly the gorilla in the very small room.
And because everyone is guilty, no one is responsible.
Environmentalism as a Pseudo-Religion
Once responsibility became universal, environmentalism had to motivate compliance another way.
Carbon footprint became a form of original sin. Redemption was impossible — only mitigation. A priesthood of experts emerged, insulated from failure, while skepticism was reclassified as moral defect. Rituals replaced repair, and a permanent emergency justified permanent authority.
Nature stopped being a system to manage and became a symbol to revere. And symbols do not need to function.
This moral structure produces a strange result.
A coal mine run with restraint has a defined footprint. It employs locals, operates under enforceable regulations, is monitored, and must reclaim land. When it fails, names are attached and consequences imposed. Liability is clear and actionable.
A large environmental NGO bears none of that responsibility. It does not live on the land or inherit its consequences, and when it succeeds in shutting down local industry, it pays none of the cost, not unemployment, not depopulation, not unmanaged land, and not the environmental damage displaced elsewhere, often overseas where environmental restrictions are lax and the harm done by irresponsible industry may be incalculable.
The harm does not disappear; it relocates.
The irony is uncomfortable but unavoidable: the coal mine is often more accountable than the institution opposing it. This does not mean coal is good; it means responsibility matters.
Environmental harm with limits, oversight, and repair is often less destructive than moral purity with no accountability.
What Caring Actually Looks Like
The divide is not between those who “care about the Earth” and those who do not. It is between two ideas of care. One treats land as a sacred abstraction. The other treats it as a living system that must be managed, used, restrained, repaired, and passed on. I learned early that care is not a feeling. It is attention, knowledge, and consequence. It is knowing when to intervene and when to leave well enough alone.
When liberals accuse you of not caring about the Earth, the answer is simple:
“I don’t worship nature. I take responsibility for it.”
That difference, between reverence and stewardship, guilt and accountability, is where real conservation still lives.
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