JayB

Churchill in SF Probably - Not Work Safe...

Ditto.

Way to nail it on the first attempt. Thanks for the TR and photos.

My main point with respect to the third world was that adopting policies that will, in practice, increase local poverty in those countries will also result in more a rapid deterioration of the local environments in those countries. Global depletion of non-renewable resources is a related problem, but not identical to the condition of the local environment in the third-world. The bottom line is that mankind has yet to categorically reject any technologies that result in increased comfort and well-being, so the only way to repress effective demand for the resources used to produce those things is either by limiting effective demand through poverty or imposing restrictions on their use via state power of some sort. I personally don't think that Ming Li and Motombo are going to forsake electric lighting and hot meals voluntarily, so the only hope is more efficient resource utilization. Converting all of mankind to super-efficient flourescent bulbs, well insulated homes, and recycling is a hell of a lot more realistic than fundamentally altering human nature. Your comrades tried that one and the experiment went rather poorly.

In large swaths of the developed world, the trend towards population growth have steadily declined to the point that reproduction is below replacement level. This pattern has been consistent across virtually all cultures - as development and prosperity increase, reproduction decreases. The only place where you see rampant population growth these days are those locales where poverty is still rampant, and it is in those places where the condition of the local environment is the worst. Moreover, as development increases, the capital necessary to fund the improvements in technology necessary to increase efficiency increase as well, and the net output per unit input of labor and raw materials increases - which is precisely what has kept the Malthusian prophesy at bay for the past two hundred years. If you look at the way things have actually worked in practice, it seems clear that the best way to "reverse the trend" of overpopulation and habitat destruction is to fight poverty. With respect to our consumption of the world's resources, take a third world country that depends on the export of a given resource for a considerable amount of its GDP, and cut the global market for that resource by 10% a year, and monitor the local environment in that country. Odds are the environment and the health of the inhabitants will decline in tandem with the net decrease in national income. People that can't afford kerosene don't go without heat - they start cutting the trees down. People that can't afford to buy food don't philosophically resign themselve to their fate, and lie down and starve - they eat whatever they can get their hands on, and aren't all that likely to know, notice, or care if the creature that they are eating is endangered or not. Or they prostitute themselves, sell their kids, kill the folks with food and or resources - none of which does much for the inhabitants or the planet. They - like you - depend on someone providing a market for what they have to sell. For you it's your expertise, for most developing nations, its either resources or cheap labor. Increasing efficiency on the user-end, and mitigating the environmental impact on the producer end seems like a better plan than hoping that human nature will fundamentally change in a way that's to your liking and vountarily relinquish the things that make their lives more pleasant and comfortable, or depriving the poorest nations on earth of a market for the few things that they have to sell.

I am not sure that it follows that either the people or the environment in the said third-world nations would be better off it wealhy countries quit buying the few things that these nations can produce to generate income. Do a little thought experiment with your own health and home, and imagine that the market for what you have to sell - your skill-set/labor - evaporated and your household income declined in tandem. Odds are that you'd have a significant decline both in the state of your health and your home. Protecting the environment requires a population that's comfortable enough to care about things, a civil society that's capable of enforcing the environmental regulations passed by the legislature elected by the population that gives a shit about the environment, which requires a tax-base capable of funding the insitutions necessary to enforce the said regulations, which requires taxable revenue, which requires income, which requires profits. The fiscal ecosystem is not unlike those in the natural world, in that removing one of the key components often results in the whole thing imploding.

This is surely true, but my point was that at the extremes the two resemble one another quite a bit more than most people think. Head for an Earth-First rally or a Louisiana tent-revival and you're going to see roughly the same wild-eyed zeal, the people held in thrall by the conceit that they and they alone are in posession of a true vision that the rest of society is oblivious to or has foolishly rejected, and the same eager anticipation of the armageddon/end-times/enviro-catastrophe that will finally vindicate them and lay the unbelievers low. These are just a few of the more striking parallels. At the fringes, the movement has become a secular religion inspired by a righteous paranoia that has as little to do with promoting a judicious use of resources as a televangelism has do with the actual teachings of Jesus. When we talk about "ecosystem collapse" there can be multiple meanings. The most extreme meaning I could ascribe to it is that our environment would no longer be able to support any of the humans who live in it. In other words, human extinction. Well, that's pretty absurd, most would agree. But if you change the definition to "no longer able to support all of the humans who live in it", then we have reached that point ready. There are populations in parts of the world who are suffering greatly from environmental degradation. Cross reference environmental degradation with the Index of Economic Freedom and you'll see a striking correlation between authoritarianism and both a degraded environment and the amplified human suffering that goes along with it. My hunch is that this linkage is much, much tighter than any connection between environmental damage and consumption, especially if one controls for population density. The average person in India may consume far less than we do, but I'd still rather breathe the air in LA than in Bombay, and if someone put a gun to my head and told me that I had to down a shot of water taken from some random point along the course of the Mississippi or some random point along the Ganges I'd have an easy time choosing, and it's equally easy to choose where I would elect to be reincarnated as a member of an endangered species, as starving people that live amongst their own sewage aren't likely to be all that concerned about my welfare. This goes for pretty much any third-world country with a population-density of any significance whatsoever. The poor resource allocation and inefficiency that go along with centralized economic planning and forced collectivism go a long way towards promoting the resource exhaustion and poverty that so many on the Left decry while simultaneously waving the pompoms for the likes of Chavez, Castro, and any other leader still engaged in the socialist experiment against reality.

So which is it? Hopefully you have been at least as scrupulous in your sourcing as your previous quote. This one, sounds like a misquote of Watt's actual testimony before the House Interior Committee in 1981: "Mr. Weaver [D. Ore.]: Do you want to see on lands under your management, the sustained yield policies continued? Secretary Watt: Absolutely. Mr. Weaver: I am very pleased to hear that. Then I will make one final statement . . . I believe very strongly that we should not, for example, use up all the oil that took nature a billion years to make in one century. We ought to leave a few drops of it for our children, their children. They are going to need it . . . I wonder if you agree, also, in the general statement that we should leave some of our resources -- I am now talking about scenic areas or preservation, but scenic resources for our children? Not just gobble them up all at once? Secretary Watt: Absolutely. That is the delicate balance the Secretary of the Interior must have, to be steward for the natural resources for this generation as well as future generations. I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns, whatever it is we have to manage with a skill to leave the resources needed for future generations." And Moyer references "similar sounding" comments in his apology - "Because those or similar quotes had also appeared through the years in many other publications -- in The Washington Post and Time, for example, as well as several books that I consulted in preparing my speech -- I too easily assumed their legitimacy. ... I regret the mistake." - so he presumably checked into the legitimacy of these quotes as well before tendering a public apology for giving them unwarranted credence. But the purpose of your using these quotations seems to be to provide a factual basis upon which to base your belief that tens of millions of Americans literally believe that: A) They can bring about the second coming of Christ by cutting down all of the trees in the within the borders of the United States. B) They have carte blanche to lay waste to the environment because they will be raptured away from their earthly tethers within their lifetimes and could not care less what happens to the earth when they are gone. Or were you trying to make some other point? I have little patience for the irrationality of creationists and/or the Lahaye/Jenkins "Left Behind" series/ "Calgon - rapture me away...." set. But the same irrationality has manifested itself time and time again in the more wild-eyed fringes of the environmental movement, who, like their theological counterparts, insist that the end is near, the only difference being that they are prophesizing imminent ecological armageddon brought about by man's disregard for nature, whereas the Born Agains are predicting the end will come as a result of man's wickedness and disregard for "The Lord." You could more or less swap "the environment" for "The Lord's Word" in each of the other's doomsday tracts and you'd have more or less the same thing. Read through a couple of the defining doomsday tracts of the 70s, Paul Ehrich's "The Population Bomb," and Hal Lindsey's "The Late Great Planet Earth" - the rhetoric is virtually identical and, despite being empirically refuted a thousand times over, both still inspire the true believers. The other morsel of irony in the Left fringe's critique of the Right Fringe's ecological track record is that when you look at actual BTU's per household, there's not much difference. You have electric lights, modern appliances, an automobile - etc - just like they do. Hardly enough of a difference to warrant the self righteous grandstanding and condemnation issuing forth from the Left fringe.

You might want to look into that quote a bit further, kemosabe. In quoting James Watt, Bill Moyers cited an article in Grist magazine. On Feb. 4, Grist published the following correction: "In fact, Watt did not make such a statement to Congress. The quotation is attributed to Watt in the book 'Setting the Captives Free' by Austin Miles, but Miles does not write that it was made before Congress. Grist regrets this reporting error and is aggressively looking into the accuracy of this quotation." The Star Tribune also regrets the error, and will report any further developments in the Grist inquiry. http://www.startribune.com/stories/1519/5232182.html Bill Moyers Apologizes to James Watt for Apocryphal Quote By Joe Strupp Published: February 09, 2005 updated 2:15 PM ET NEW YORK Bill Moyers has apologized to former U.S. Interior Secretary James Watt for referencing a quote, which has been wrongly attributed to Watt for years, during a speech Moyers gave last December upon receiving an award from Harvard Medical School. The text of the speech has since appeared in several newspapers and on numerous Web sites. "I said I had made a mistake in quoting him without checking with him," Moyers told E&P today. "I should have done my homework." Moyers, a well-known journalist and recently departed host of NOW on PBS, said he phoned Watt yesterday and faxed him a letter stating his regrets. Moyers wrongly referred to Watt during a speech in New York on Dec. 1, after Moyers received an award from Harvard's Center for Health and the Global Environment. During the speech, Moyers said, "Remember James Watt, President Ronald Reagan's first secretary of the interior? My favorite online environmental journal, the ever-engaging Grist, reminded us recently of how Watt told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. In public testimony he said, 'after the last tree is felled, Christ will come back'." As of this morning, neither The Oakland Tribune or The Miami Herald, which ran versions of the speech, had published a correction of the Watt reference. Calls to editors at those papers were not immediately returned. The Star-Tribune in Minneapolis, which ran the text on Jan. 30, is planning to run a correction tomorrow , according to Editorial Pages Editor Susan Albright. She said Watt contacted the paper Friday to object to the reference. Albright plans to run what she described as a column-lengthed response by Watt to Moyer's speech on Thursday, "He was pretty upset, and we are letting him take a few punches at Moyers," Albright said. The paper also will run a statement from Moyers apologizing for the misquote. The Indianapolis Star, meanwhile, referenced the incorrect Watt comment in a piece that ran Dec. 19, which also noted Moyers' speech. But that story did not quote Moyers as referring to the Watt quote. The Washington Post ran a correction yesterday relating to a front-page Feb. 6 story that also incorrectly attributed the comments to Watt. But that story did not mention Moyers or his speech. "Although that statement has been widely attributed to Watt, there is no historical record that he made it," the Post stated. The text of the speech appeared in the Oakland Tribune on Feb. 6. The Herald ran part of the speech, including the Watt reference, on Dec. 11. After hearing of the reference to him, Watt issued a statement declaring that he never made the comment, which has been attributed to him for many years. Moyers said he chose to apologize after learning of Watt's dismay yesterday. "I called Watt and spoke with him and said I had seen this on the Web," Moyers said. "I believe he appreciated the call." Watt could not be reached for comment today. In a lengthy letter to Watt, Moyers stated his apology, but also defended himself by reminding Watt that he was not the first to wrongly attribute the quote. He then criticized Watt for his policies while in Washington. "I owe you an apology. I made a mistake in quoting the remarks attributed to you by the online journal Grist without confirming them myself," the letter stated. "Because those or similar quotes had also appeared through the years in many other publications -- in The Washington Post and Time, for example, as well as several books that I consulted in preparing my speech -- I too easily assumed their legitimacy. ... I regret the mistake." But Moyers' letter was not entirely conciliatory. "You and I differ strongly about your record as Secretary of Interior," the letter continued. "I found your policies abysmally at odds with what I understand as a Christian to be our obligation to be stewards of the earth. I found it baffling, when in our conversation of today, you were unaware of how some fundamentalist interpretations of the Bible influence political attitudes toward the environment." Moyers said he never distributed his speech for publication, but said it had been placed on the Harvard Web site, where he believes other Web sites and newspapers picked it up. "I don't know who else used it," Moyers said. "When you make a speech, you are making a public statement, and if a journalist considers that news, so be it." He added that he was not paid for the speech or for any publicaton of it, and would not have sought payment. "If anyone had asked me, I would have given my approval," he said. "It seems to me it is for public use." Moyers said he planned to contact the Star-Tribune, he did not know how else to seek to correct the record since he does not know who else reprinted the text of the speech. "It is difficult in this cyberworld to catch up with an error," Moyers told E&P. "Once something like this begins to circulate, it takes on a life of its own." http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000797041

Rich people? Considering that most of their vehicles cost about half (or less) as much as your various BMWs, Lexuses, Benzies, Hummers, etc., that would seem to be a gross overstatement. I.e. don't ball good people like DFA in with the bourgeois elite. Yeah - because the effete boutique leftism that permeates Pearl District is about as authentic working-class as it gets. Rage against the latte'... BTW - how many hours did you log on the factory floor in order to acquire this heightened class consciousness of yours, amigo? I think I logged at least 1500 hours on the shop floor in college and and never managed to come across a self professed "leftist," "anti-bourgeoise activist," or, for that matter - anyone who drove or aspired to drive a Subaru in all that time. Plenty mexicans, guys that listened to metal, wore high-tops, smoked camel unfiltereds, drove impalas and F150's, drank PBR, and professed their undying hatred for the "yuppie-ass motherfuckers" they occaisionally came across - but, oddly enough, not a Chomsky quoting class warrior amongst them. Where were all of you guys hiding?

CBS put it pretty well in another thread: "REI relies on it's climbers cachet to get non-climbers in the door to bask in the aura of adventure. City folk who don't enjoy outdoor activities still like to project that image to their urban friends. The store needs to maintain some degree of support for climbers or they risk losing the only thing that distinguishes it from other retailers. It's like a balancing act. You definitely make more money from the non climbing goods, but you have to keep that image to get people in the store."

RIP MEC. Sounds like the REI story on fast-forward. It amazes me that the folks at the top would alienate and drive away the personnel that constituted their prime asset. Replacing the likes of Don Serl with a bunch of topropers, dayhikers, and car-campers...

I actually support the husband on this one for a couple of reasons. Firstly, because I think that a husband or wife generally knows the person who's life is in question better than anyone else, and secondly, because in legal matters concerning an incapacitated persons life or property, the spouse should have the right to make the decisions. So I wasn't so much questioning the motives in this case, but stating that in general I support the decision to end a life when the party making the decision has nothing to gain from doing so and appears to be acting out of mercy rather than interest. However, when someone does have an interest, financial or otherwise in pulling the plug on them I think their motives need to be examined much more carefully in order to insure that the decision is based on the incapacitated person's best interests. FWIW - there are also cases where parties benefit from keeping someone alive when allowing them to die would clearly be the thing to do, such as in cases where the party responsible for making the decision is receiving the incapacitated person's pension benefits. I guess the bottom line for me is that whatever decision is made should be done in a manner that insures that the choice to preserve or end a life is made in the best interests of the person who is going to be kept alive or allowed to die. It's rarely an easy call.

Yup. Capital punishment and euthenasia, like many things that are physically equivalent, are clearly not morally equivalent to one another. I'm not sure how if there's a clear answer to the ethical conundrums that this case presents, but in general I decide these things by looking at the true rationale for ending a person's life. If the motivation is truly to end their very real suffering, then I general support it, but if its being done for other motives masquerading as mercy, such as the inconvenience or expense that maintaining someone with a severe disability or on life support will present to the family or institutions responsible for caring for the person, I can't see how one can endorse ending their life. The only time when this gets more complicated is when there is actually such a scarcity of resources that maintaining this person's care will impose a fatal hardship on others who might otherwise live - and there aren't many situations like this in developed countries anymore. Anyhow - if it's now a fact that she will be killed - a lethal injection of sedatives seems far more humane than death by starvation. If it's true that her mental state can't be ascertained, then it seems clear that those making the decision should err on the side of caution and assume that she can still feel pain and act accordingly.

Blasphemer! I guarantee that forthwith we shall witness a deluge of heroic Subaru stories to counter this vile slander! "This one time, my Subaru..." Anyhow - lets get back to the mileage front, shall we? The standard for fuel economy on the high end is easily double what the Outbacks get - yet we have to listen to all of the self-righteous palaver from the cult of the Subaru drone on about how they are eco-heros for nudging a few miles off of the average SUV's fuel economy. You can get everywhere an Outback will take you in a Geo Metro so until you are tooling around the Cascades in one of these suckers spare us the sermons. Thanks.

Subaru's are good for what they were designed for, and are superior to trucks/suv's for driving in wet or snowy conditions. But- their gas mileage really isn't THAT much better than a typical V6 powered truck/SUV. If you wan't to get all smug about your fuel efficiency you should keep quiet until you do all of your driving in a Geo Metro with a diesel engine, or a hybrid that you never drive at a speed at which the thing operates on gas alone - which is pretty much all highway speeds. Ditto for Volvo Crossmax station wagon drivers, etc. Apparently - the size of the engine and fuel efficiency are secondary concerns next to the political aesthetics of the car you drive when doling out the pinko/lesbo/vego/eco cred to your fellow drivers. And - while the Subarus do behave more like an AWD sedan than an SUV does on wet or snowy roads, they are decidely inferior when it comes to high-clearance driving. A long wheelbase and slightly-better-than-a-sedan clearance makes for some fairly comical situations when their owners try to take them over something more serious than the big pothole in the PCC parking lot. And - aren't they fabricated with spot welds on a box frame, rather than mounted atop a traditional truck style chasis on rails? Lighter, yes - but not a good match for the jarring that even a moderately rutted logging road can deal out. Anyhow - I am glad that all of you love your subies, but it must be something cosmic because essentially what you've got is something like a long sedan with bad mileage and the clearance/4WD performance of a chevy astro van. I'll keep the truck. Thanks. And - final request - please stop edging your Subaru wagons out into the intersection of Broadway and Denny with the apparent intention of making a left turn while mulling over the Sylvia Plath spoken word montage you saw last night, and soothing your pallette AND soul with the mug full of certified organic jasmine tea and track four from the Annie Lennox Acoustic Sessions box set, whilst ignoring the both the lack of oncoming traffic ahead of you and the column of cars behind you.Thanks.

Environmental stewardship requires a functioning civil society with an institutional infrastructure capable of both monitoring and enforcing environmental regulations, which also requires a stable revenue base that's robust enough to fund ministries as peripheral to immediate national function and survival as enforcing environmental regs - which requires a functioning economy. The bottom line is that this notion that ecotopia awaits if we simply reduce consumption seems like one of the great unexamined articles of faith of our time. Reduce consumption and reductions in production will inevitably follow. If growth in production falls below growth in population in a given area, this will normally lead to declining GDP per capita, and in countries that have a sustained decline in GDP per head conservation will become a peripheral concern next to, say, eating. No one would object to the argument that we should use our resources as efficiently as possible and strive to minimize the disruption that the said use causes to the environment. However, in a great many articles that deal with consumption it seems like environmentalism is simply a red-herring, and the real target is capitalism in general, and the lifestyle that it has made possible in the United States in particular.

It'd be interesting to see consumption versus GDP. Quite a bit of the things that we consume here, we consume in the form of products that are subsequently used around the globe. We consume nitrates that go into fertilizer that is used to make wheat that is subsequently sold overseas, airplanes manufactured in the US are delivered for use elsewhere, etc. Another thing to consider is the assumption that the rest of the world would be better off if the US consumed less of everything. One consideration that is often left out of this analysis is the fact that much of what we consume is produced by countries that are quite dependent upon the sales of the things that we are consuming. Would country X really be better off if we all but eliminated our consumption of the products that drive their economy? Excessive extraction with no protections for the resource and little consideration for the future is obviously bad for the environment, but so is a nationwide poverty so desperate that eveyone is focused on survival alone. Starving people don't seem to give a shit about the environment. If you look around the globe, concern for and stewardship of the environment seems to increase with development and prosperity.

Great thread. For me, a decision to support or oppose legislation that governs land use usually amounts to favoring the least of many evils, and an attempt to reconcile many conflicting perogatives, and often find myself holding positions that are not entirely consistent. For example: - I want to maximize habitat preservation and low-impact recreation. - I love wild landscapes but I also think that accessibility is an important component of preservation, e.g. people generally tend to value things that they have direct experience with and connections to. - I generally look at fatasses on motorized devices in wildlands with unmitigated contempt, and feel a justified superiority to them when I am in a place that I have reached under my own power, in a fashion that would likely induce cardiac arrest in them but - I recognize that they are, in their own way, an important constituency that generally do far more to preserve public lands than they do to destroy them. In this sense, they bear some resemblance to the weird symbiosis between hunters and the game animals that they kill. One example - Ducks Unlimited has arguably done more to preserve wetlands than any other lobby in the country. Another reason to avoid alienating the hook, bullett, and motor crowd too badly is that they are the kinds of people that Republican legislators will actually listen to and take seriously, whereas a dread-locked, patchouli-laden Earth First(er) will have a rather more difficult time impressing the importance of his concerns upon them. These are just a few. In the end, though, a wilderness designation seems to be the least of many evils. And - a final aside - I wonder if anyone has ever proposes land-swaps whereby one takes land that in which there's currently a modicum of restraint on motorized vehicles, that has low habitat value, and is only of minor interest to other recreationalists and removes all restrictions on motorized use in exchange for taking two or three times as much land with high habitat and recreational potential completely off the table for motorized users - e.g. take away three times as much land that they can barely use in exchange for giving them some crappy wasteland that they can absolutely trash the shit out of with ATV's, etc.

1996. UW Rock ---> Sport. 1999. Trad/Ice. Scrambling, back-packing, peak-bagging, etc - early 80s.

http://www.heraldnet.com/stories/05/03/04/100loc_drugarrest001.cfm More reading. Sounds like he was a US citizen residing in Canada so I suspect that he'll be staying south of the border.

Plugging D-Dog's name into Google certainly turns up some interesting stuff.... http://www.corporate-law.widener.edu/doc...ink%20Portland'

Anyone know what happens to Americans apprehended while committing felonies in Canada and vice-versa?

Wow. That's some serious shit. Hats off.

Not to mention the name associated with the said horse-breeding business. Damn. What a shame that he chose to go down that path. One does not, I venture, happen to end up with 169 kilograms of cocaine in one's posession as the result of a momentary lapse of judgement. I never would have imagined that someone who showed the kind of soul, compassion, and insight that he evinced in some of his posts would have chosen such a path. The high risk, high reward part fits. The morally dubious, spiritually cheap aspect doesn't. I have zero sympathy for cokeheads, junkies, meth addicts. They dig their own grave. I'm just suprised that he'd be one of the guys lining up to sell them the shovel. I guess when there's a significant chance that you'll die every time you indulge in your most compelling pasttime, you tend to look at the risks associated with certain choices a bit differently. Who knows. Anyhow - here's one D-Dog's posts that, for me, illustrates many of the traits that seem to be an odd fit with the story that's emerged in the news recently. After reading it, I couldn't help but imagine that he'd be one of the guys working to reduce the sum-total of misery in the world, rather than taking his place amongst those profiting from its expansion. "I'm late to this conversation, but I thought I'd throw a few cents in nonetheless. For 15 years, my focus athletically was climbing. I went through the phase of invincibility others have described, and fell in love with free soloing for several years. Did some scary trad leads that were not much below my technical ability on toprope, and came very, very close to serious injuries more than a few times. Broke some bones, nothing major. However, can't really say I ever got truly, truly scared in climbing. Temporary panic, sure. Deep-seated, long-term fear? Not really; I was always able to shake off an epic pretty easily. When I started BASE jumping a few years ago, I came to know fear much better. In the last few months, I've watched one jumper die in front of me and lost a good friend in another incident. Since I started jumping, I've discovered forms and elements of fear I never found in my climbing experience. For me, now, fear is the following: what are the consequences of a worst-case scenario, and am I willing to pay that price? In BASE, serious problems of any flavor generally mean death or very, very bad injuries. Walking away from a BASE mishap with a few broken anlkes is lucky. A broken back is medium-scale. Permanent disability or brain damage is bad. Death is really bad. "Justified fear is a shrewd advisor" - John Long, aka Largo Fear is good when it warns us of the potential consequences of failure. And, if we do something enough, failure WILL happen. Are we ready to deal with the consequences of failure in a given situation? If we aren't physically, mentally, and emotionally prepared to deal with those consequences, then I think our fear steps in to shut us down and prevent us from playing the game any more. That is a blessing, really. When we get hurt, badly or even not that badly, I think we get a deeper understanding of those consequences. Thinking about broken bones is one thing, dealing with them (and the lifetime decrease in functionality that often comes with them post-recovery) is something entirely different. Thinking about death is one thing; seeing it firsthand, living it, is different. I still jump, and I still run out stuff where falling would be really, really bad. But I do so only when my heart is in it. Sometimes, my heart just isn't in a given jump, or a given route. Then, I don't do it. I've made peace with my fears; a decade ago, I didn't really "have" fears, per se. I just didn't give a shit about the consequences of my actions as a climber. If I died, so what? Life went on. Now, I'm older and I know what happens when somebody dies. They don't suffer, really, but their lived ones, friends, and dependents do. When you "go in" in BASE (i.e. die), ripples of shock go out through the world like coencentric circles. Those waves resonate for a long, long time. As Duncan Ferguson has said (I paraphrase), one must embrace fear, not hide from it. When we are at peace with our fear, and at peace with the risks we take, we can take those risks with open eyes and an open heart. When we lack that peace, our fear holds us back - as it should. Some fears are unjustified (for the most part): falling a few feet onto good bolts on a steep sport route. Risk is quite low, like riding a roller-coaster. It is "scary" because the body feeling is novel and exciting, not because of true danger. Some fears, in contrast, are real: scrambling on exposed, loose rock in alpine gulleys IS risky, and a small mistake (or just bad luck) can result in very bad injury or death. Learn to discern between justified fear, of the kind Largo mentions, and unjustified fear. Enjoy the latter, it is a cheap thrill and fun to overcome and battle in safe situations. Heed the former, it tells us when we are near the line - or over it. The only person truly without fear is the man who honestly has nothing to lose. Those of us who have come to cherish things in this world, I believe, come to know fear that is not meant to be ignored. When this happens, I think it best to make peace with this fear and heed its message. Some risks are real. Some prices for failure are very, very high. http://juliabell.home.att.net/ Peace, D-d0g -------------------- D-d0g / BASE 715 / Fausty Hengststation Exitpoint" This post was in response to the following: "Alright, looking for some assistance here, as I'm sure I'm not alone in this... Several years back, I had a climbing accident, took a grounder from what was essentially death-fall height. Since then, I essentially shake on lead to some extent. This fear response can then affect me mentally, thus shutting me down with a cascadng effect of bad visions, defeatest thoughts, anger/frustration. Not to say that I have good days - I've still climbed hard, and often. It's too much a part of me, I've been climbing over 15 years, and I ain't walking away. I love so much of the sport - the challenge, the camaraderie, the places, the stories we generate. But this fear and the accompanying lack of self confidence keeps me from setting big goals, seriously hurt my consistency as a climber, makes me hesitate to ask partners to do long routes, as I may not be able to swing leads, and generally keeps me feeling like I may be a burden on my partners (a somewhat false image, but let's go with it for now.) The issue here is either how do I suppress that fear response, or replace it with another response that allows me to keep moving without the concern of the fall as a consequence? I've read a bit, had some professional help, including a bit of EMDR therapy, which has shown success with PTSD sufferers - I had some small breakthroughs with it, but the effectiveness seems to have worn off a bit. So, who else has done work on this, and how do you cope with the fear inherant with the sport? Dammit, I want to do hard slab again. Anyway, any sincere advice, referrals, or experiences are greatly."