Asserting that something is valuable does not make its value indestructible under mechanization.

Evidence

The sportsman has no leaders to tell him what is wrong. The sporting press no longer represents sport; it has turned billboard for the gadgeteer. Wildlife administrators are too busy producing something to shoot at to worry much about the cultural value of the shooting. Because everybody from Xenophon to Teddy Roosevelt said sport has value, it is assumed that this value must be indestructible. — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 635

Categorization

• QUESTION: Modern named question: when institutions dedicated to a value (parks, wildlife agencies, environmental orgs) optimize the wrong proxy, does the underlying value reliably erode — and who in the contemporary landscape-reading world plays the ‘gadgeteer’? Worth chasing.
• XREF: Links to Howes’ point about institutionalization blunting interdisciplinary subversiveness, and to recreation policy chapters ch21 on mass recreation diluting what it seeks. — connects to: Economic obsession with growth itself destroys the conditions that make prosperity possible — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Other…, 13; A claim’s falsity does not bar it from structuring thought — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 179; A belief’s utility does not make it true — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 1066 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• A belief’s utility does not make it true #complicates (0.85) — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 1066
• Efficiency is treated as uncontestable truth rather than a contestable value #complicates (0.80) — David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, 121
• A claim’s falsity does not bar it from structuring thought #complicates (0.75) — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 179
• Value emerges from relational valuation practices, not from objects themselves. #complicates (0.75) — Ève Chiapello, Financialisation of Valuation, 23