Month: January 2009

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Oral History & Flawed Understanding

The good news is that cable television has resulted in a proliferation of good programs about science, history and politics.  If a picture is worth a thousand words, lots of moving pictures must be worth millions of words, but the pictures may be out of context and if you count up the total number of actual words in an hour on History Channel, you could probably fill only a couple of pages. (Re pictures – I watched “the Real Abraham Lincoln.”  It featured a reenactment of the young Abe.  But the guy has a beard.  Lincoln didn’t grow the beard until 1860.) TV spends a lot of time repeating scenes of collapsing buildings, burning fires or horsemen galloping, w/o explaining the significance.    The shallowness of the medium is the bad news.

This extends beyond the series of gripping but unenlightening images.    I also notice a general decline in rigor.  Maybe it is a general phenomenon, but you notice it clearly on TV.   Instead of trying to evaluate evidence and sources, the programs sort of throw it all out there with equal credibility.   This would be okay with a written source or among scholars, but the television images don’t provide enough background or references for the viewers to evaluate veracity, even assuming most audience members had the background or inclination to do so.

It is bad enough when we have dueling “experts” but it gets worse when many programs seem to put oral histories on par with real ones.   All histories are subject to interpretation and just because something is written down does not mean that it is true.   But oral history must be even more carefully evaluated because it is literally subject to change w/o notice. 

The strength of written sources is that they freeze impressions and the facts at the point of writing.   Facts don’t improve with age.   An earlier recollection is more factual than a later one and a primary account is better than a secondary one.  An investigator can compare a written record against subsequent ones to detect enhancements or omissions.    It makes it harder to change the story.   It is also possible to nail down the assertion, so that you can check them against other evidence.   

Oral histories do not suffer these constraints.  When confronted with disconfirming evidence, an oral history can just change.   The danger to the integrity of the story comes not only from deception, but also from innocent rationalization.   People tend to want to fit their stories into current realities.   They smooth the edges to make them conform to the present needs.    

This story changing is most often a social process.   Stories change in the telling and retelling and in a short time they come to reflect the aspirations, interests, prejudices & desires of the group more than reality.  Oral history has great value because it tells you a lot about the people telling the story; it tells you less about the actual historical events on which is it ostensibly based.   It has to be handled carefully. 

Of course all history starts off as oral.  It is the raw material.  Beer starts off as barley and hops, but it requires some processing before you drink it.  The same goes for oral history.  If you take oral history from those who actually experienced an event, you can check facts.   It is helpful to compare stories of individuals who have not communicated with each other much since the events in question.   It gets harder when you get into the second or third generation of the story.     At that point it has probably become myth.  It may be based on the truth but it is not truth.

Myth is usually more interesting and plausible than actual historical events.  Heroes are stronger and braver.  Villains are scarier.   Causes are more just.  Events make more sense and often presage big developments of the future.   They make better narratives precisely because they have been edited and enhanced by the people who have told and retold the stories. 

The compelling nature of oral history and the resulting myths makes them especially dangerous on history television.   They are almost always more interesting and more easily recreated in dramatic reenactments.   It gets worse in our PC world.  Many historical programs these days portray the confrontation between literate and pre-literate societies.    The literate societies have historical records that can be critically evaluated and parsed.   You get the warts and all portraits.   Given the critical nature of this inquiry, we often end up with a mostly warts portrait.  On the other side, we have the myths property altered in light of subsequent events.    

Below are Alex and Chrissy at “America’s Stonehenge” in New Hampshire.  We visited it when we lived nearby in Londonderry.  It is worth seeing but not worth going to see.   The History Channel featured it as a “mystery”.   It is a mystery – a mystery why some clown would pile those rocks, but otherwise it is clearly not ancient.   But a TV show with lots of cool angles and suppositions can make it seem so.

Modern historians are understandably frustrated.  They want to write about pre-literate societies and they want to write about conditions of the common people in all past worlds.   Unfortunately, pre-literate people don’t write at all and the common people didn’t write much until recently.    I don’t know a precise number, but I doubt that more than 5% of all the ancient Roman texts still exist, so we start out with a small sample.   None of the authors are representative of their societies, in that most people couldn’t write, so you already have an elite enterprise.   There are no significant female historians from the Roman period and the Romans were unenthusiastic about letting their subject people write critical accounts of their rule.   Beyond all that, most the writers were not interested in the doings of the common people, male or female, Roman or not.  When the sturdy yeomen are featured, it is usually just a didactic example.  Victor Davis Hanson wrote a good book on people working the land, who always made up the vast majority of the population, called “The Other Greeks,” but there just are not many good sources.  You can learn a lot about physical conditions from archeology, but you still don’t have the narrative.   The stones and bones don’t tell you much about the people’s motivations, imagination or aspiration.   That is unsatisfying.   Imagine if a future archeologist could reconstruct your television set but had no record of any of the programs.  So historians extrapolate and move the historical narrative into the realm of conjecture, as with other forms of oral history telling us as much about the extrapolator than about the subject itself.   

All the specialty cable channels (history, discovery, military, science etc) are spreading information wider than ever before.  That is good … I guess.

Particular parts of the programming that I think is very good are some of the “current” history features.   I have seen several good programs on Iraq.   They tell the story and interview the people involved.    My belief is that the U.S. public currently has a very biased view of the events in Iraq and the news media is unlikely to clear it up, since they have largely moved on.   Fortunately, a lot of lessons learned type programs are being made now.     These are essentially primary sources and when historians get around to addressing events in Iraq more dispassionately, I believe these will be the key sources.

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Hail to the Chief

Below is George Washington on Boston Commons. Washington set the tone for the presidency. He was the indispensable man, so often talked about but actually so rare in history.

Most Federal employees working in DC don’t have to come in tomorrow, inauguration day.   It would be literally impossible for most of us to get to work anyway.   I don’t know how many people will come in for the inauguration, but it will certainly be enough to clog the Metro.   I thought about going down to try to get a glimpse of the activity, but decided against it.   I would just become part of the crowd problem.  Besides, I figure I will get a better view watching TV.

Below is the stone wall in Fredericksburg.  The battle that took place there in 1862 was bloody, with the Confederates shooting from behind the stone wall.  Nevertheless, two years later, during a terrible civil war, we held our elections on schedule.  Lincoln won a second term.  Lincoln was another indispensable man.  He was remarkable not only for winning the civil war, but for his profound generosity at the end.  Read his Second Inaugural Address.

People who know me are aware of my leanings and I don’t talk about politics on this site, but I can voice support for my president.   All Americans wish President Obama success.   I am glad that he seems to be so popular worldwide.  Although I think that anti-Americanism goes beyond our political leaders or our policies, it doesn’t hurt to have a leader who is personally popular. 

I listened to an interview on NPR this afternoon with a guy whose parents were Black Panthers.    He said that he distrusted Martin Luther King when he was a young man because he thought that such peaceful and respectful tactics couldn’t work.    But as he got older, he saw the error of his ways.   Still, he said, he was surprised when Obama won in almost completely white Iowa and he was astounded when he won the presidency of the United States.    If you think back to 1968, it is truly astonishing. 

Below is the old fashioned train in Durango, Colorado.  The genius of our Constitution allowed our republic to expand from sea to sea w/o compromising our democracy.  The railroad and telegraph helped tie the continent together.

It makes me wonder how much better the world could be if some of the violent militants around the world had chosen a more peaceful strategy of change. Some of these generations long armed struggles make no objective sense if you are looking for real results.  Of course, I think the difference may be that King was trying to help his followers become part of the American dream. Non-violent tactics require a fundamental respect for and belief in the humanity of your opponents.  Many international militants have more bloody revolutionary aims and are less loving of their opponents.  They are not really looking for mutual solutions.

Each new president is a new beginning.   That is another astonishing thing.  We have become so accustomed to it that we forget how astonishing it is – 220 years of successful transitions, even during the civil war.   Few governments in world history have that kind of record of success.  The U.S. is considered a young country, but we have the second oldest government in the world and the oldest living constitution.   I expect the best is yet to come.

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Improving the Species

NPR Talk of the Nation Science Friday had a feature about how hunting and fishing rapidly affect the evolution of the species in question in a negative way, since hunters and fishermen like to take the big fish or animals.    Well bang the drum.  How obvious is that?   In forestry, we see that in high grading/selective cutting, when people cut out only the biggest trees.    The young man did a good job of describing the problem, but the program in general did a bad job of prescribing a solution.

Nature is profligate.   That is the basic assumption of evolutionary theory.    Many more individuals are  born than can survive.   Human activities rapidly select for particular characteristics and we have been doing it for a long time.    That is why a miniature poodle doesn’t much look like a wolf or a cow has only passing resemblance to aurochs.  (The last recorded wild auroch, BTW, died in Poland 1627.) 

Game keepers and river keepers have long recognized the problem with taking the biggest and best and leaving the runts to reproduce.   The same goes for forestry.    The way to go about managing for this is to make sure you take out the undesirable traits too, or in greater numbers.  It requires more work and understanding.  In forestry, for example, the biggest trees are not always the oldest.   You have to harvest the small ones too or maybe even more.    Down on my tree farms, the hunters are members of Quality Deer Management association.   Fortunately, their task of improving the deer herd is made much easier by the deer population explosion.    In the case of deer, for example, the worst thing you can do for the health of the herd is to limit hunting. 

Not all species are as common as deer, but some of the same management principles apply.   You don’t improve the total herd/forest/school by protecting all individuals equally.   In a wild population, you are probably looking to increase genetic diversity.   This makes the species more robust.   Remembering the nature if profligate maxim, you might improve the genetic diversity AND in the long run the numbers of a species by disproportionately eliminating individuals with particular sets of characteristics.   This creates room for the others.   

When dealing with the natural world, many things seem counter-intuitive.

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Burn the Brush but Save the Soils

Different sorts of fires are prescribed for different purposes.    The variations usually depend on the wind direction and topography.    A backing fire goes against the wind and spreads slowly by conduction.   It is the safest fire and consumes most of the fuel, but it is slow.   A head fire goes in the direction of the wind and/or uphill.   Flames are carried by the wind, so things burn faster, but it tends to be a less complete burn.  The fire jumps over some fuel.  That jumping also makes this fire more likely to get out of hand.   Other variations are flanking fires, as the name implies along the sides and strip fires.  The strip fire is a series of head and back fires.   They run into each other.  The strip fire is faster than other fires because you light several places at a time.  Similar to a strip fire is a spot fire, where you light a series of spots that come together.   The spot fires work well in theory, but they very often turn into strip fires anyway, just because it is hard to keep the spots apart.  The challenge with all multiple fires is when they come together.    They rise up and can scorch the trees or even provoke a crown fire.

The time of the year when you set your fires depends on your management goals.   A dormant/winter season fire will consume the surface vegetation but won’t usually kill it.   In fact it will create a lot more sprouts and shoots, especially with understory hardwoods and blueberries.    This kind of fire produces a lot of good browse for deer, but it will not yield the herbaceous growth for other species.    A growing season burn will often kill much of the woody vegetation and over time it will produce the savannah-like open forests with a herbaceous forest floor.    It produces more flowering, legumes and releases nutrients to the soil.  If a forest has not been burned for a long time, a winter backing fire is probably smarter.   It cleans up the debris at a cooler temperature that is less likely to damage your trees.   After that you can do the growing season fire as appropriate.    May/June is a good time.

In a loblolly rotation, it makes sense to wait a year after thinning and then do a winter season fire to clean up the slash.  After that, go with a spring time burn every 2-3 years.

Loblolly pines usually survive scorching.  The biggest danger to them is in October, after they have finished growing for the year, but before they have gone dormant.   A scorching will probably kill them at this time, so you should never burn in October.   The State of Virginia bans outdoor burning until after 4pm from February to April.   This is the time when conditions are dry and the leaves are off the trees.  There is significant danger of fire escaping. 

A major concern in fire management is its effect on the soils.   An intense fire burns hot.  A severe fire burns down more of the soil.   Sometimes you want to expose mineral soil since some plant communities require that to regenerate; most of the time you don’t.    Usually it is best when you see black.  The vegetation has been carbonized but much is still intact.  White is ash.  Too much white means you burned a little too severe.   It is bad when orange is exposed.    If the soil gets burned bad enough, it can become impervious to water.   The fast run off caused by the impervious soils can create mud slides.  

Burning off too much soil litter can lead to erosion in general.   Summer rains in Virginia can be torrential.   The water hits hard and washes the soil downhill.   All land erodes.  An intact forest in Virginia loses from .05-.1 ton of soil per year on average.  By contrast, field crops can lose 3-15 tons a year.   After a burn, a forest floor loses more than the intact forest, but less than plowed field, depending on how severe the burning was.   But repeated small burns create a stabile herbaceous layer that helps build a healthy soil that mitigates erosion in the longer run.  Good forest stewardship means thinking in the long term.  Be aware of how what you are doing now will be in years or decades. 

Of course, erosion is an eternal process that never stops.   The Appalachians were once as high as the Rockies and in the future the Rockies will be as low as the Appalachians.  Erosion & time will flatten Mt Everest. Everything washes down and everything has to go somewhere.  If a ton of soil flows from one acre to the one down hill and that one loses a ton of soil to the one below that, it is really not much of a problem.   Each acre “loses” a ton of soil, but not really.  It becomes a problem when too much soil is lost and when it flows into watercourses.   The water from my farms flows eventually into Albermarle Sound via the Meherrin and Chowan rivers.  An important duty is to protect the waterways from too much silt.  That is why we don’t cut near the streams (stream management zones) and generally tred lightly near them.  Beyond that, you just don’t want to lose your dirt, on which all prosperity depends.

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Burning Questions

Alternatives to fire, such as mechanical, mowing, grazing or chemical do not have the same ecological effects.  For example, none of these things can properly kill diseases and pests on the ground, nor do they consume all the combustible materials.  

There is a general rule that big fires decrease biological diversity, since only a few species can stand being totally annihilated.   Big fires will also tend to impact areas where fire is less useful.  A beech forest, for example, will be destroyed by a big fire, but the moist conditions of such a stand will usually resist or limit small fires.  Small regular fires lead to greater diversity, since they prevent to domination of a few species while not destroying too much and opening the landscape to some sunlight. In any case, you really cannot avoid fires; you can only postpone them.  When combustible materials build up in wild lands, you eventually get a much bigger and more disastrous fire.   These are the kind of thing we saw in Yellowstone back in the 1980s.   Years of fire exclusion made the place a tinderbox.

An unplanned fire is significantly more dangerous than a prescribed fire, but fire is dangerous no matter what.  A prescribed fire can get out of hand and even if it goes 100% according to plan, it will create side effects, principally smoke, that will annoy the neighbors.    They say an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.   In the case of prescribed fire, an ounce of prevention is sometimes worth a ton of blame, as people weight the tangible effects they see from the prescribed fire with the much greater, but unspecified effects from a true wild fire.

A form for a burn plan is included at this link.

Fire has several simple characteristics.  We all know about them, but it is useful to think about what that means.  Fire usually rises.  You should always avoid getting above a fire.  Fire will move up hill more readily than it goes downhill.  It will also climb if there is a burnable ladder of brush or branches.   Flames will also rise when two fires come together.  This may scorch tree branches or even set them on fire.  Fire more easily spreads to loose and dry material, but it burns longer in denser materials.  You can see that with a campfire.  I have seen people trying to light big logs with matches.   It doesn’t work.  You need to go from the small to the large.   Of course, if you light a pile of pine needles with nothing else, you will just have a short flash and then ash.

The behavior of a fire on the ground depends on lots of factors, none of which can be predicted with absolute certainty.  The most capricious is the wind.  Wind directions can change and local conditions can change the direction locally.   The fire itself changes wind conditions.   A fire draws in air.   If the fire is going up a canyon, it might create an effect much like a chimney. 

Other factors include humidity, temperature, air stability and time of day.   Higher humidity dampens fire.  The key factor is not humidity itself as much as relative humidity.   Warm air hold more water than cool air.   The same amount of water will be a lot less dense in warm air.  Roughly speaking, for every 20 degrees in temperature, the relative humidity decreases by half.   That is one reason time of day makes such as difference.   You might have dew in the morning (relative humidity is 100% and the air cannot hold the water it has, so dew forms), but as the temperature rises, relative humidity falls.  That is why fires burn faster and stronger at 3pm than they do at 3am.  Temperature makes a difference independent of humidity, since the cooler the temperature, the more heat a fire needs to generate to maintain and spread.

Fire weather forecasts are available at this link.

You can sometimes see stable air at a distance because may be clearly demarcated layers of air.   Stability makes a bigger difference for smoke.  In stable air, smoke rises and then flattens out.  It doesn’t blow away.  Smoke rises higher and disperses easier in unstable air, but unstable air has its own challenges in that it usually has stronger and more variable winds, making fire control more of a challenge.  The tradeoff is between smoke problem and fire control problems.

Fire escape used to be the big concern for burn bosses;  now it is smoke.  As more people w/o country experience move into the countryside, the complains and problems of smoke increase.  

Smoke doesn’t always rise.   In stable air or in humid condition, it tends to drain.  Like water, it drains into valleys and gullies, where it might sit a long time.   Unfortunately, valleys are often places where we have roads and homes.  Smoke can be a health and a traffic hazard.  The worst is “super fog”.  Super fog is a combination of smoke and fog that makes visibility almost zero.  The fog helps hold the smoke near the ground and the smoke helps keep the fog from evaporating off.   It is bad all around.

We used to have lots of super fog in Krakow.   We would often unwisely drive in it, following the taillights of the car in front.   Such behavior sometimes led to spectacular accidents involving many vehicles.  One vehicle stops and the others blindly drive into it, sometimes for miles.

Anyway, those are some of the concerns about prescribed burns.   Tomorrow I will talk a little more re how and why we burn.

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Restoration

The question in any historical renovation is when.   What period should be restored?   In some cases the answer is fairly obvious.   I stopped off at Montpelier, the home of James Madison. They just finished restoring it to what it was like when Madison lived there.  Madison’s grandfather started the farm.  His father built the house.  Madison added a lot.   Other people owned after that, including some of the Duponts, who greatly added and updated it.    The restoration stripped away everything done after Madison owned it. That makes sense to me, but it is a value judgment. 

Madison was the youngest of the founding fathers.  He came prepared to the Constitutional Convention and is justifiably called the father of the Constitution.  He deserves to have his house restored.

Hagia Sophia in Istanbul is one of the most interesting places I have been. It was the biggest Christian church in the world for more than 900 years until the Turks conquered Constantinople, killed or drove off the natives and turned the building into a mosque, which it was for almost 500 years.  Now it is a museum.  Should the Turks restore it to its original Christian splendor, when it had those beautiful mosaics or to the Islamic period when they were plastered over?   The same sorts of questions go for almost any historical structure.  But humans create more than buildings that change over time.

Below is a changing made-made landscape with non native animals (horses) near James Madison’s house in the Virginia hills.  Not so bad.

When Henry David Thoreau talked about wilderness, he meant the kind of mixed forest and farm communities around Walden Pond.   Today the forest has taken over much more of the landscape than in Thoreau’s time.   Should historical sites in the Eastern United States restore the non-forested landscapes of the past?   If you look at old photos, you notice that the landscapes have changed a lot.  

We talked a bit about landscape restoration in my forestry and prescribed burning seminar.   Most people think the eastern U.S. was naturally covered with heavy forests in 1607.  This is wrong.   The landscape of pre-European was not natural and the forests were not so thick.  Native Americans were enthusiastic users of fire for hunting, warfare and to manage landscapes, in addition to fire escape from cooking and campfires.  Human induced fire shaped the ecology of North America for tens of thousands of years.    The native populations, after all, had no comprehensive way to put fires out and there were no roads to act as firebreaks.  As a result, grasslands and prairies extended well into regions of N. America that today support forests and forests were open and park-like.   John Smith of Jamestown wrote that he could ride through the Virginia tidewater piney woods on horseback.   You couldn’t do that today. Elk and bison flourished almost to the Atlantic coast because there was lots of grass for them to eat.   The forests of 1607 were not like those we see today.  

Settlers from Northern and Western Europe had less experience with fires as a tool for clearing land because Europe had been cleared long ago and their land was much more densely populated and intensely used.   European peasants constantly searched the forests for firewood.    They were not allowed to cut living trees, but could get any dead branches that they could reach by hook or by crook.   They didn’t leave much fuel on the ground to burn.  It was too valuable. 

They quickly learned the native fire techniques.    But with the denser populations, fire got out of hand.   After a series of disastrous fires, such as Peshtigo fire in Wisconsin and the big blowout in Idaho and Montana, fire was stigmatized and it was government policy and popular preference to exclude fire from the woods.   We pursued fire exclusion goal until around pursued until around 1970 and we still have not welcomed it back as a tool we should.   Fire exclusion changed the landscapes, to include very thick forests and very different species compositions.   These ecosystems were not being restored, since they had never been there.   The Native Americans “immigrated” to North America before the most recent ice age.    They brought fire with them and the continent has been burning ever since.    Remember that nature starts fires in only two ways: lightning and volcanoes.   There are no volcanoes in eastern North America and lightning tends to come in the summer, when humidity is high and plants are lush.  It also usually comes along with heavy rain. In other words, natural fires are much rarer than the regular burns we find in the natural and archeological record over the last 10,000 years.  Humans accounted for most of the burning.

So the question about restoring the American landscape is when – what period?  What period should we restore?   Should we restore at all, or maybe strive for a richer, more diverse landscape?   We have lost some species and gained some others. (Most of us like horses, sheep and cows, all non-native.)   We have a better understanding of ecology than any of our ancestors and we have improved tools.   There are some natural places with special value.   These we should choose the appropriate period and “restore” them as possible.  However, overall we cannot restore how it was and probably don’t want to.  There is no ideal past.  We can do better.

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Good Government by Extension

On left is our CP forest in 2004, right after a clearcut on the pines.  You can clearly see the stream management zones with intact hardwoods and the boundaries of the property.  On the south is Genito Creek.  We own both sides of that creek on that little hump.  You have to look closely to see that;  We also own both sides of the road, but not very deep on the north-east side.

The best parts of government are those you hear the least about.   It is because they are less controversial and somewhat apart from politics.  They don’t overreach and they do the things government is designed to do, i.e. things people cannot reasonably do for themselves, things that have payoffs beyond the lives of individuals and things that promote the common good.   Most of us don’t know how much our well being depends on these under-the-radar activities.   You know, the ones that predict the weather, secure public health, keep track of our records etc. 

Since I bought my forest land and tried to learn how to manage it well, I have been very much impressed with the activities of the U.S. and Virginia forest services and the several extension services, especially Virginia Tech.  You might think I am a little self serving, since this part of government serves my interests, but I think it goes beyond that.

Land use affects all Americans and most of what happens on the land is the responsibility of private landowners.   It is in the general public interest that grasslands, forests, wildlife habitat, watersheds etc be well managed.    It makes perfect sense for government to help landowners do a better job of stewardship.   Beyond that, land stewardship is an excellent instance of something that individual people cannot reasonably do all alone.   Even the largest landowners don’t own whole watersheds or wildlife habitats and air, water, bugs and weeds don’t pay attention to property lines. There is a need for common goals and cooperation.  But how?

There are many ways to work toward the common good in land use.  Of course, the government could own or control all the land.   This is a thoroughly discredited system, as anybody with even a passing knowledge of the abysmal ecological conditions in the Soviet Block can attest.    Common ownership of land is a good idea only in theory.    Whenever anything becomes everybody’s responsibility, it becomes nobody’s.    On the other hand, complete freedom for land owners is also a mistake.  As I wrote above, there is too much interrelatedness.    

We need environmental regulations, but they need to be flexible.   We have recognize the different generations of environmental regulations and how success can change the problem set.   Forty years ago we needed some tough regulations to clean up big pollution.  Command and control worked back in those days because we could easily identify pollution sources, which tended to be particular sources and often very toxic.  As we eliminated most of the really bad pollution, it got harder to get each successive step.  It doesn’t take a genius or any subtlety to find and shut down one big pipe.  Finding a thousand little ones, no so easy.  Beyond that, it is generally easier to solve the first 90% of any problem than the last 10% and it gets harder and harder to get at that last 1%.   As you have to address more diverse and difficult to assess sources of environmental damage, you need to empower more people and engage their intelligence and imaginations to work toward solutions.   Incentives work a lot better than coercion.   If you order people around, you take away their responsibility and their dignity … and they take their innovations somewhere else. You cannot coerce someone into being creative.    Under coercive conditions, people use their intelligence and imaginations to figure out how to avoid blame and do the minimum.   If you want creative solutions, you need incentives.  They need not be only monetary.   Most intelligent people want meaningful things where they can be committed.    The search for meaning.

Involvement v Commitment

You can understand the difference between involvement and commitment by looking at your bacon and eggs breakfast.  The chicken is involved, but the pig is committed.  A lot of involved people think they are committed because they feel passionately about an issue, but they wander off when passion cools, styles change or sustained hard work is required.

Responsibly should be as close as possible to the ability to makes decision and the likelihood to suffer or benefit from the results.     It always annoys me when somebody tries to tell me what to do with my land.   But I actively seek out the advice and experience of those who can help me make better decisions.   I take my stewardship responsibilities very seriously.    The Virginia DoF and Virginia Tech have been very helpful with advice.   I have taken part in several courses and field days where I learned about things such as biosolids, water protection, invasive species, wildlife protection and much more.  They usually cost me around only $20-50, which doesn’t cover the costs.   But in return, I apply my knowledge and skill, improved by the courses, to managing my land well, which benefits all the people of Virginia, or at least those that breathe air, drink water or like wildlife. 

I appreciate what the Commonwealth does to empower me to be a good steward of my forests and they seem to appreciate what educated landowners can do with the proper information and incentives. Everybody does their parts.  It is a win all around.   I bet most people don’t even know about this part of government.   I suppose that is why it works well.

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Setting the Woods on Fire

I am in Charlottesville for the prescribed burning course sponsored by Virginia Department of Forestry.   It has given me a lot to think about.   I am entering the various threads as separate posts.   (BTW –  I used to come to Charlottesville to visit Mariza when she was at UVA.  Now that Mariza is graduated it is the same, but different and a bit lonely.)

The Science of Forestry

When you try to change any single thing, you find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”  John Muir.

Below is the view from the forestry building in Charlottesville.  It was cold, but no wind, as you can see from the flags.

Forestry is probably the most scientific of all the environmental fields in that it is one of the only ones where people with boots on the ground actually do something like controlled experiments.   They usually take a long time to get real results.   Time is needed to let all the various small connections and causes to be manifest and many times unobvious factors are the real drivers of the process.  But the time lag and complex causality usually revealed mean that forestry is usually behind the curve on the big news scares and hopes.  The news media has moved along to the next crisis by the time the forest science comes in. 

For example, we only recently got the word on acid rain.   You remember acid rain?    It was a big deal during the 1990s.  It threatened to destroy many of the trees in our Eastern forests.  I admit that I got a little hysterical about that prospect and there was indeed a serious problem with sulfur dioxide etc emitted by coal fired power plants.  We addressed the coal/acid rain problem with a cap and trade program.  It worked well enough that it is one of the great environmental success stories that we mostly have forgotten about.   (BTW – the things that worry me more are invasive species.  In my lifetime and those of my children, this problem will impact our forests more than global warming or acid rain or almost anything else I can think of, but that subject seems to get only local traction.)

But much of the acid rain hysteria was misdirected.  There was a lot written about lakes and streams that were too acid to allow fish to survive.   This was true.  Acid rain, however, was not the most important cause of this.   The root problem was change in land use and the ultimate irony was that acidification of lakes and streams was related to the ostensibly good factor of re-growth of forests and the prevention of forest fires.   Until the early part of the 20th Century, burning was very common in Eastern forests.   When burning virtually stopped, this changed and so did the chemistry of lakes within the forests. 

Fires change the chemistry of the streams and lakes in the forests by changing the chemistry of what runs off the land.  Everything is a trade off.  The fires burn away the C and N but the remaining ash and silt that pollutes the water also raises the pH.   If you stop burning the forests on the shores and/or they grow back thickly, the pH of the nearby lakes drops (i.e. they become more acidic) because the surrounding soils are naturally acidic.  Burning has always been part of N American ecology and the more frequent burning has been a factor ever since humans brought fire making skills to the new world.   Until recently, that is.  The forests in the Eastern United States are thicker than they have been at any time since the Native Americans “immigrated” from Asia and altered the landscape with regular burning.   When we talk about restoring the natural environments, BTW, we are usually talking about restoration to the pre-1607 levels, not the pre-human levels.    This makes sense.   It would be too hard to figure out what the “original landscape” was like, anyway.   That was a couple of ice ages ago.  Who knows?

Forestry, being a practical science, can analyze the problem practically and propose practical solutions.   Change what you have on the land and how you manage it and you change other results.  Everything is connected to everything else, often in unexpected ways.  If you want to raise the pH of land or lakes, you can do that by changing land use.  Controlled burning can help.  Or you can apply lime.   We did that when we established our wildlife plots because the soil was too (naturally) sour.   You can do the same with water, at least smaller bodies.

Land use is a really important factor.  In fact, it is often so big that we overlook it.  I also think land use issues are a little too diverse and prosaic to attract the sustained attention of the media and the public would prefer to turn a blind eye since almost everybody is complicit in this problem.   It is more fun to blame big industrialists or feckless government than to change your own habits and aspirations.

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Great Books … At Least Useful Ones

Below are CJ and the boys near Mt Washington in NH in 2003.

I found this while going through some old emails.  I wrote this to Mariza when she was off to college.  My “great books” for her first year are a little idiosyncratic.  Some books are influential because of the things you are going through in your life when you read them.   When you reread the book, you realize that it is important to you because of what you read into it. 

You have to interact with ideas.   Nobody can be right all the time and I have never come across a book that is good through to the very end.  The authors that influenced me gave me good starts, but none of them lived in my circumstances and I had to modify them accordingly.    That gives me an ideal escape clause.  When I recommend books, I assume that you will interact with the ideas.  Some will be useful; others not.  And even best author or philosopher will say at least a few really stupid things and sometimes a fool can have a useful insight (even if he doesn’t recognize it himself.)

Anyway, I left the note as it was in 2003.  I would make a few changes and additions if I wrote it today.   I personally find it interesting because I can remember some of the things I was thinking about and going through when I wrote the note.  For example, in 2003 I was studying pragmatism, so it was more prominent in my thoughts than it would have been before or since.  Everything depends on contexts, times and places.

Books

Now that you are off to your education, I want to share some of the books that have influenced me for the better.  Few of these things were assigned to me in school.   But I think they formed the basis of the education I use today.

“In Search of Excellence” – Formed the basis of my management and leadership style.  Also influenced my view on human relationships in general.   I bought my copy in 1983, when just before I started my MBA at the University of Minnesota.  It just hit the right chord.  I still have the book I bought, with my underlining and notes.  It is amazing how much I internalized those thoughts.  

“The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” – This is the “execution” book of my life and provides the “how”.  It helps me know how to act with integrity and purpose when I might not be sure what to do.  I read this book in 1990 and compared the ideal to the best bosses I had known.  (I worked for a guy called Brian Carlson at the time and he was a great example.) I tried to be like them and like the person the book made me want to be.

“Two Cheers for Capitalism” by Irving Kristol – I found this book by chance in the University of Wisconsin library in 1978.  It made clear to me that I believed in the free market. It set the dominos in motion that sent me to business school with vigor and enthusiasm and then into the Foreign Service to fight world Communism.  On a related item is “The Communist Manifesto” and excerpts from “Capital”.   One of my leftist professors made me read them in 1977.  It had the opposite result from the one I think he wanted to achieve.  I found them to be such unmitigated crap that I was permanently soured on socialism. 

“The Bible”, especially Mathew, St. Paul and Ecclesiastes – I am not strongly religious, but the Bible provides the foundation of faith that I need in my life.  It is the essence of things hoped for; the evidence of things unseen.   I have never read the entire Bible, but have read several times the parts above and heard it in church more times than I can remember.  I am not sure how Ecclesiastes got into the Bible, since it seems a little cynical and world wise, but I like it.  It is a good antidote to things like Amos. 

“The Peloponnesian War” by Thucydides.  Thucydides was my favorite historian when I was an undergraduate.  I read his work in English and part in the original Greek.  It is the classic tragic view of history and one I regrettably share.  His account of the Syracuse campaign actually has all the aspects of tragedy in the technical sense and the Melian dialogue is a classic of power politics.  I would add Polybius and Tacitus and everyone should be familiar with the Iliad and Odyssey.    Although I have long since forgotten the particulars, I recall the sweep.   As for classic philosophy, I can’t recommend Plato or his ilk, except the “Apology of Socrates” which is short and well worth reading.  It was the first work I read in Greek.

“Decision Traps” – In this book I learned about how decisions are made in the real world and how to factor inevitable error into my own decisions.  I learned a little humility and at least one valuable technique for learning from experience:  make specific written predictions; put them aside; later analyze them in the light of how event transpired in fact and improve the decision making process.   I read this book for the first time in 1990.   I would add another book to this one as an influence in the same direction, “Against the Gods”, which I read first in 1997.  As I write this (April 19, 2003) I am reading another book, “The Blank Slate” which seems to be supplemental to many of the things I learned in “Decision Traps.” 

Pragmatism – Various things by and about people like William James, Charles Pierce and John Dewey, especially “the Metaphysical Club” This is the most recent wrinkle in my ideological skin.  I find many pragmatic ideas very useful, which is itself pragmatic.  I especially like the idea of the evolution of ideas and the concept that ideas are creations in a human context.  I found many of these ideas embedded in concepts I got from other places, such as the decision traps complex or the “Seven Habits”.   I will also lump into this category Emerson’s essay on “Self Reliance”.  It is not pragmatism, but James et al read it.  It influenced them.  

Biography – this became my favorite form of literature in the middle 1990s.  I guess it comes with age.  I can’t cite a particular book, but in general, seeing history though the lives of great people has been instructive.   It shows how much can hang on an individual decision and how fast failure can turn to glorious success or the reverse.  The biographies that stand out in my memory are: Truman, Eisenhower, Robert E. Lee, Ben Franklin, and the joint biography “Founding Brothers”, which is interesting because it shows how individual human flaws can actually enhance the performance of a group.  It is sort of a portfolio theory of human events.

Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu – I loved these guys when I was an undergraduate.  I always like to try to act logically.  Taoism provides the non-logical basis on which a logical edifice can be built.  In the same vein, I would cite “Emotional Intelligence”, which I read in 1997.  Logic can provide the “how” (that I got from the Seven Habits), but preference in based on emotion.  Emotion can never be fully suppressed and we should not try to do so. 

Declaration of Independence, Constitution Preamble, Gettysburg Address, Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, Four Freedoms (FDR).  America’s contribution to world literature is in the language of freedom.  These are some of the best.   

Anyway, these are a good start.  You will find a lot more.  Never stop looking. 

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A Study of History

Washington Post featured a report from a guy who toured the world of Herodotus.    This is the link. 

Herodotus was the world’s first historian.    Of course people wrote about historical events before his time, but they didn’t think in the historical sense of trying to connect disparate events into a meaningful whole.   For the ancient pre-Greek civilizations, history was just a series of bragging press releases, with pharaohs, kings and warlords exaggerating and sometimes completely fabrication triumphs.  There was no understanding of greater causality.  They also looked for supernatural explanations to all human affairs and/or are accounts of the work of God on earth.   That is, BTW, is what differentiates Herodotus’ work from the Book of Samuel, which some scholars have called the first history, or from something like the Iliad, which has a narrative and talks re historical events.    

Herodotus was often not accurate. That is not why he was the “first historian” He accepted all sorts of hear-say and outright myths. His was also a very intensely personal work and he makes little or no attempt to screen for his own bias.  This is one reason it is so much fun to read his work. But he did seek to understand the context of his events in his inquiry, which is the more precise translation of his word history. 

Herodotus is great literature, but my favorite ancient historian is Thucydides.   His Melian Dialogues and the book about the Syracuse campaign should be required reading for anyone trying to understand world affairs.   It is interesting how you can see progress in the writing of history.   I like Thucydides better, but Polybius is a better historian, because he had the advantage of the experience.   (Polybius put the rise of Rome in the greater context.)  Today, standing on the shoulders of these giants and others who came after, the average graduate student is a better historian than any of them.    We have the gift of being able to take the best of the past.    We should never squander that gift. 

Improvements in how historians could assess events are examples of technologies of the mind or technologies of thought.  

We easily recognize technologies of the physical world.  Using technology, a weakling driving a bulldozer can do more than the strongest man working by hand.  We all remember the story of John Henry and the steam drill.   But we overlook the more important technologies of thought & mind.   The most obvious are in hard sciences and subjects like math.   The greatest mathematicians of any time before around 1600 could not pass an introductory statistics and quantitative methods class.   The tools we use today just were not yet invented.  But this goes for others things as well.  

It is also true for cultures.   Culture is a form of technology in the broad sense.   It gives people the package of techniques and skills they need to adapt to the world and its challenges.  Some packages work better than others.    I am talking about “small c” culture too.  Firms have cultures.   That is why some companies can consistently outperform others.  

Below is Jarash in what is now Jordan.  The Romans knew how to bring in water.  The skills were lost and it went from thriving city to impressive ruins in a couple of generations.

Culture is the mystery ingredient that frustrates the predictions of the data-obsessed analysts.   It is usually the explanation why the same sorts of investments in plants and equipment prosper in one place and flounders in another. And an unwillingness to address the problem culture lies at the bottom of most failures to institute meaningful change.   You can supply all the physical technologies you want; they are worthless and even harmful without the technologies of the mind to integrate them into the cultures.   I talked in an earlier post re the various sorts of barbarians unable to figure out the Roman technologies that made it possible for cities to prosper in arid or hostile environments.     This is a lesson of history we should learn.   The great thing about taking lessons from ancient history is that much of the politics and passion has dissipated so we can be a little more objective. 

Anyway, Herodotus is truly entertaining.   I would love to do study tour like the one described in the report.   I used to read Herodotus to the kids as bedtime stories.   There are lots of good lesson that go with the good fun.