Rural Tyranny
Canada, Elizabeth Nickson, Environmentalism, Regulation, Salt Spring Island
Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, Canada.
Country-bred people inevitably grow tired of city life and find themselves driven by a desperate need to get out and into the natural world again and away from all the noise, filth, and excess of humanity.
Elizabeth Nickson (pace Samuel Johnson) grew tired of London (if not of life) and, with a friend, purchased 30 forested acres on an Pacific Gulf island seven hours off Vancouver.
A large part of the island’s acreage was owned by a European investor who eventually sold her 2000 acre holdings to a logging company.
Salt Spring Island, you need to understand, is a Pacific Northwest version of Woodstock, NY, surrounded by water. The predominant population is composed of Trust Fund Bolsheviks of the most tree-hugging variety.
Their money was accumulated by earlier generations, and these kinds of people hate capitalism and economic activity generally. When that sort of thing threatens to mar their views, they become killers.
[A] young woman stood up at the back of the hall. She was tall, lithe, utterly beautiful, and looked at least part native, with long, dead-straight black hair, a weathered suede jacket that nonetheless draped gracefully on her frame, and a wide-brimmed, black felt hat with a band bejeweled in turquoise.
The loggers froze. The residents turned and craned their necks and, from the questioning murmur that arose, I guessed few knew who she was.
“Many people all over the world . . . ,” she paused and repeated herself, her voice clear and strong. “Many people all over the world treasure this place and hold it sacred. Here and now I warn you. If you do what you are planning to do, you will stir up opposition that will cost you hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars. People will come here from all over and camp in your forests—thousands of them—until you leave. You will suffer. Your shareholders will suffer. Your company will not recover. So I tell you again. Leave now.”
If you thought it impossible for predatory capitalists who clear-cut forests to turn pale, you’d be wrong.
The triumph of the crunchies went far beyond the rout of that timber company. It extended to island rule by a regime of enviro-nut fanatics bent on stopping less-enlightened (or less financially worry-free) property owners from doing anything they do not like. And they do not like CHANGE.
Sanctimony and self-entitlement constitute the perfect recipe for ruthless tyranny, as the unfortunate Elizabeth Nickson found out.
The larger point, though, is the Island Trust or Woodstock, NY regime of righteous tyranny is not remotely restricted to those little earthly paradises.
My vacation farm in Central Pennsylvania is located in a rural township long conspicuous for its low taxes and small government. No more. We had a big tax reassessment, and in 2008 our Supervisors adopted a boiler-plate Development Ordinance that would put the usual NIMBY urban suburb to shame. I’m in a spot myself very similar to hers.
