Cairn

get off my case, motherfucker

Fashy right wing types on twitter like to play-act at being the most hardcore. Being the most subversive, radical truth tellers, revolting against modernity, retvrning to tradition and all that. There is one bugbear common amongst the ecofascist subset which reveals the lurking whiny busybody underneath. A peeve so insidious it makes them behave just like the filthy commies they claim to hate. I’m speaking, of course, about cairn discourse.

For the uninitiated city-slicker, a cairn is simply a stack of rocks. You’ll see them along hiking trails, by streams, or perhaps on crunchy wook-adjacent instagram feeds. They seem harmless enough, but are they? There are some legitimate gripes to be had. As they are often used as trail markers on rocky treeless hikes, cairns placed off trail can confuse the path. In more popular areas there is a problem with volume — no worries if a couple people do it but if everyone joins in you’ll be left with nothing but. Fisherman particularly take issue with cairns at streams as they can disrupt the habitat of small wildlife lower on the food chain. This is where I start to rankle.

First of all, with apologies to Tucker Carlson, fly fisherman are annoying. It is an activity which attracts WASPy ivy leaguers who feel the need to adopt the affects of the poor rurals in order to glean some authenticity, and then turn what could be a simple pasttime into another dick-measuring contest of expensive gear acquisition while they tour about to places of natural beauty full of country folk who they despise for their political leanings. Then they stomp around in the water with their waders on, pulling out trout that have been stocked by the local Fish & Wildlife department, after driving for miles in their $80,000 “offroad” Toyotas, and they have the audacity to bitch about a few hippies stacking a few rocks at the side of a water hole. These ecofascist types should be able to see that their whining about cairns on twitter is identical to so many internet leftist talking points — they have found some marginal cause with miniscule real-world impact and now they feel they can grandstand about it while purity testing their followers into parroting some nonsense that doesn’t matter, all while trying to insert themselves into other peoples’ lives in order to police behavior.

Moreover there are deeper philosophical contradictions that fascist cairn-complainers don’t seem clever enough to grasp. I had been under the impression that undergirding right wing thought was a belief in Man’s dominion over Nature, striving for improvement in the self and his environment, and his goal of truly beautiful art and craft. Brother, stacking rocks is the purest base level expression of all of these ideals. It is bringing order to chaos. It is taming Nature and remaking it in Man’s and God’s image. It is testing Man’s strength and finesse against the brutality of raw stone. It is the beginning of sculpture, masonry, and architecture. To be anti-cairn is to be anti-human. Here is where I have the same advice for the ecofascists as I do for the anti-natalists and those who bark about overpopulation: if you really think Nature would be better off without humans mucking it all up, go ahead and get started by seeing yourself out.