Has it always been so common, or is it just more apparent because it has become so prevalent in mainstream politics? The Gish Gallop is a method of debate where one streams together so many unsubstantiated points that it becomes difficult to track, and rebut, them all. Perhaps the easy swipe of social media or the increased speed of emerging news have helped to wire us to be more receptive to the full-steam-ahead BS argument technique. Here, I try my hand at making a speech using the Gish Gallop technique with a collection of commonly held nature fallacies:

A Gish’ing Example

Nature is dangerous! For instance, all sorts of snakes and spiders are venomous, and people die from their bites all the time. You have to be especially careful of mountain lions, which are increasingly attacking people across California. If environmentalists have their way, there will also be wolves roaming everywhere across the Western USA- once established, they will become habituated to eating livestock and they’ll be coming after people, too. Just outside your door trying to get into your trash are very dangerous rabid opossums. You don’t even have to go outside for nature to get you. There are spiders hiding in your house, and an average of six a year drop into sleeping people’s mouths. I heard just the other day about another venomous snake crawling out of someone’s toilet. Some crazies want to blame so many things like this on global warming, which is just hype from crackpots trying to control our lives. They claim burning fossil fuels is going to kill us all, but that’s not true! Change happens, for God’s sake, there have always been natural disasters and there always will be, just get used to it, you snowflakes!

Does that kind of diatribe sound familiar? It should, and its not just coming from the political right[1] – watch out for it coming from just about any political direction, in just about any social situation. You can tell a real Gish Gallop addict by picking out just one of their tidbits and trying to follow up with a more involved conversation. If they are a galloping gish o’phile, they’ll be unable to stick to that topic and will hit you with another round of Gish Gallop before you can yell ‘stop!’ I don’t know if its just my circles of company, but I venture to guess that 1 out of 10 of my conversations encounter something amounting to Gish Gallop.

Toilet Snakes

Let’s take a look at just one of the parts of the above parade d’ BS: toilet snakes. Mention the phrase ‘toilet snake’ during a party, and it may well take root in conversation with anecdotes just as lunatic, or even substantiating evidence of this profoundly unlikely scenario. Was it Voltaire that said absurdities beget atrocities? One step leads to the next. Who are we to deny the frequency of toilet snakes, anyway? I’m sure it has happened once or twice! It may even be getting more frequent with global warming, invasive species, collapsing and outdated infrastructure, and the loss of skilled labor attracted to public works jobs. See? How familiar is that? That’s how it goes…

Turning This Around: The Antidote

How good are you at stemming the tide of verbal diarrhea? How do we collectively alter this rotten social habit? It is time to infuse more meaningful dialogue into the world. I am particularly advocating for better dialogues about nature and hoping that we carry with us enough fascinating stories that we can knit deeper and deeper oral traditions into a regionally-oriented social fabric. As we do that, I encourage us to use science as our guide, so that we have a method of building out truth, of going deeper and deeper into nature, and to add those discoveries into our stories.

The Fate of Snakes

My essay ‘Snakes on the Monterey Bay’ is one of the most popular reads on my website. I suspect that there are widespread positive sentiments about native snake species. But there are also widespread popular beliefs, well supported in social circles, that snakes are all very dangerous. Snake phobia, even nature phobia, is far too common. I well recall a time when I was working with a farm labor crew to machete poison hemlock, an invasive species that had taken over much of Younger Lagoon Reserve that I was stewarding for the University. One of the crew spotted a garter snake: quickly three were chasing it and proudly hacked it to pieces in moments before I could stop them. They seemed astounded that I was angry at their actions. I’m sure that they still think that I was acting insanely to be defending SNAKES! Why? Many people believe snakes are dangerous, and this is one of the many subjects that we can work on to improve human-nature relations.

Might you find out a bit about one of our native snakes and start a conversation about it with your friends? Such conversations could change the world for the better.

-this column slightly modified (with The Guardian link) from that which I posted via BrattonOnline.com, Bruce Bratton (and team)’s wonderful source for news. Subscribe now and save (it is free, but donations are welcome)

---

[1] Although some admit that this is their favorite method of oratory.