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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   33233 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 24, 2025

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https://www.cbsnews.com/news/national-park-ranger-fired-dream-job-emotional-viral-letter/

Here's a quote from this person's letter:

"I am the highlight of your child's school day. I am the band aid for a skinned knee. I am the lesson that showed your children that we live in a world of gifts- not commodities, that gratitude and reciprocity are the doorway to true abundance, not power, money, or fear," Gibbs wrote. "I am the one who taught your kid the thrush's song and the hawk's cry. I am the wildflower that brought your student joy. I am the one who told your child that they belong on this planet. That their unique gifts and existence matters."

You're right, it sounds like some of the other things they do other than talk about plants is talk about bird songs.

Their work helps to create awesome resources like this https://auth1.dpr.ncparks.gov/flora/index.php. I don't know the other states resources but we have entire databases around what plant species occur in what counties, their various different attributes and descriptions, etc. Natural plant diversity is an important part of the ecosystem, from the beetles/flies/bees that pollinate them to the herbivores that eat them, to the carnivores that eat those. Also good proof that they're not just "telling tourists about flowers"

And this is abstractly valuable. Do you think this means they should be able to demand that people make sacrifices in their own lives to give money for this?

I'd say that they have a responsibility to recognize that demanding we all pay for this stuff is a privilege, and recognize that as much as they might not enjoy, they might have to do things like send 5 bullet points describing what they do every week. I think it would be reasonable to ask them to send an email every day detailing what they did. I've certainly had various slack bots and things that have asked that of me, and I didn't throw a protest or pen and melodramatic letters about it.

A random worker writing a letter trying to appeal to parents is not some full job description of everything they do. If that's genuinely what you got your idea of park service work from then you should reconsider how you source your information and beliefs going forward.

And this is abstractly valuable. Do you think this means they should be able to demand that people make sacrifices in their own lives to give money for this?

Another topic you don't seem to have any knowledge about. Maintaining a healthy ecosystem and biodiversity isn't some abstract value, it helps keeps the world we're living in stable. This is the system of our world and we are not yet an interstellar species. A nd it helps with things like pharmaceutical research. So much of the medicine we have right now comes from random plants. Famously aspirin came from Willow bark originally but we also have stuff like heart medications from Foxglove research. You can find tons of examples like this from random plants and animals. Likewise you can get from basic internet searches plenty of studies talking about this very thing https://aacrjournals.org/cancerdiscovery/article/14/3/392/734905/Biodiversity-Medicine-New-Horizon-and-New https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5735771/ etc etc etc you can look up for plenty of examples.

You’re wrong about where I get my characterization of federal workers. Especially parkies.

we need to save the environment

Correct. The people who we hired to do it should take their job more seriously.

That was the source you gave for your information.

That was a reference I gave to a story that has been in the news, and the one that I alluded to.

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