Don’t walk on the crust
A curse of our culture is that we have reduced necessity into profanity. You can try any recreational activity, work any job, move to any place, and there is that little thought that crawls from the deep, “You don’t have to do this.” This conditioned thought, slithering through the depths of our cultural consciousness, reveals itself when you run into public service announcements like “don’t hike off-trail”:
Hiking in the Desert? Don’t Bust the Crust! Cryptobiotic soil is essential to arid ecosystems.
I found a few telling cultural assumptions in the above sentences. 1) Your hikes in the desert will be exclusively on trail; going off-trail is a deviation from your original intent. 2) By deviating from your original intent, you are destroying life that is essential to arid ecosystems. 3) You don’t even have to do this, so why go about destroying the cryptobiotic soil? Just stick to the trail, ass.
Imagine if someone actually thrived off the land, and was confronted by a modern LNT hiker. The land-thriver would be harshly scolded for having walked on the crust. “Then how do I move about and thrive off the land,” the land-thriver asked. The hiker would respond: “Well, you don’t even have to thrive off the land nowadays so what you’re doing is unnecessary and harmful to the environment.” So the land-thriver, upon receiving this amazing news, gives up thriving off the land and heads to the nearest super Wal-Mart for some grub.
The logical conclusion that results from this environmental “keep off the grass” is found in the growing wonder about why we waste so many resources and pollute so much just to hit the crag for some weekend rock climbing. “You don’t even have to do it, so why hurt the environment for your selfish needs?”
In a land without necessity (which was supposed to be the promise of Heaven!), every single thing is optional and nothing has value, except stepping on eggshells while outdoors. When there is no necessity, every action appears to have an ulterior motive.