I don’t know if it is true, but several people told me that air bases are required to have golf courses, the idea being that all that flat, grassy space is available in emergencies for landing or at least the storage of aircraft. It sounds a little glib, but who knows? Home owners in some arid regions sometimes get a discount on their fire-insurance policies if they have swimming pools that can serve as reservoirs. We got a discount on our insurance from USAA in New Hampshire because our house was within a convenient hose length from a pond. I thought that was just a specious reason until the condominium clubhouse caught on fire and the fire department did indeed tap the pond water. Their attempt to save the structure was futile but they did prevent the fire from spreading to the neighboring woods and homes.
On the left is pond in New Hampshire.
A surprising number of people hate golf courses. They are evidently offended by them and work themselves into a frenzy saying things like the land and resources devoted to golf courses could be used to feed poor people. I suppose if we were close to subsistence, this would be true and if we plowed up all the golf courses we could feed a few more people. Of course, there are lots of other places food is wasted that would come first. We have all sorts of fruit trees we don’t harvest and all kinds of unused land. I think the real problem is that luddites associate golf course with affluence. I don’t golf, never have. But golf courses are usually attractive. They provide nice vistas and often good places to run -around the peripheries; golfers get annoyed if you get to close to them.
Maxwell Air-Base features another luxury item – horses. Even the luddites rarely object to horses because they are graceful and beautiful. I would not want to own one, since I don’t know how to care for them, but I am glad to have them around. Mariza is very fond of horses. If she (and we) lived nearer to the tree farms, we could buy one for her.
Grazing animals are good management; of course a couple horses are not enough. It is good to have different types of animals, such as sheep or cows or goats to rotate in the pastures. Animal species have different digestive systems. The sheep help slow the spread of horse parasites and vice versa and tend to favor different mixes of greens. Healthy pastures are diverse because of the different habits of species and the different characteristics of their manure.
They have lots of nice trees on base and Alabama is a big timber state. Slash, Loblolly & longleaf pine together are called “southern pine” and they sustainably supply around 58% of American timber needs.
We are starting to notice the remarkable, game changing development in energy. Scientists have discovered a new way to get natural gas out of shale. They call it hydraulic-fracturing. And there is a lot of potential. This new technique has increased American gas reserves by something like 39% in the last couple of years. Experts estimate that we have as much usable gas in the U.S. as the Saudis have oil and if only half of our coal powered plants converted to cleaner burning natural gas we could easily reach our greenhouse gas reduction goals.
Gas is cleaner than oil and much cleaner than coal, both in terms of actual pollution and in terms of greenhouse gases such as CO2. Another important consideration is that WE have our own vast new supplies of gas. Most exportable oil is under corrupt, unfriendly or unstable countries. It is better not to send American money to some of these guys. Our gas, on the other hand, is in peaceful, pleasant American places like Pennsylvania, New York, Maryland and West Virginia. Many of these rural areas could use the jobs that domestic natural gas could bring.
I traveled though much of the area where the gas is when I drove from Syracuse to Virginia. It is the same area where we did a lot of coal mining. This is no coincidence. The same forces that turned Paleozoic plants into coal also made gas. The gas is trapped in shale formations and you can easily see how the roads were cut through the shale formations.
But I noticed something else about the geography of natural gas. It is also the geography of the Chesapeake Bay watershed and much of the water that isn’t running off into the Chesapeake flows into the Great Lakes. We worry about these bodies of water. While listening to local radio driving near Wilkes-Barre, PA I heard reports of firms extracting gas were asking permission to discharge water into the local streams. The HYDRO part of hydraulic-fracturing has to go somewhere. I don’t know the details of the process, nor do I know about the quality of the water discharge, but I do know that any discharge in large enough amounts is going to create disruptions in the local ecosystem, in this case the Chesapeake Bay watershed. Some people are already raising concerns. The process may turn out to be benign. It could even be beneficial if the water is clean, but we will have to think of this as a balancing among priorities.
Yesterday’s solutions are today’s problems and it follows that today’s solutions will be tomorrow’s problems. Abundant American natural gas will help free us from nasty foreign oil suppliers and help us reach climate change goals, no doubt at the cost of something in the future. This is not necessarily a failure of wisdom or judgment. It is an ordinary consequence of making choices, setting priorities and doing these things in the context of imperfect information. All these things are part of the definition of decision making.
Future critics with access to much more information as well as the experience of the past can easily attack earlier choices, but the comparison is usually unfair, as it is always unfair to compare hypothetical solutions with a real ones.
For now the smart move looks like going for the gas.
Bobwhite quail used to be common in Virginia. Their population began to crash about forty years ago because of changes in their habitat. Some of this was obvious. Farmers became more efficient and in the process eliminated lots of the bugs and weeds that quail need. Suburbs expanded and suburban dwellers are probably even less tolerant of bugs and weeds. Both suburban lawn owners and rural landowners also got new and better techniques to achieve their goals, which usually involved creating a “neater” landscape. The thick green lawns, beautiful but ecologically barren, are widely possible only because of chemicals and techniques developed in the last generation.
Wildlife habitat in general and quail habitat in particular is ragged and messy from the human perspective. Above is an early succession field, a lot of goldenrod and ragweed. A lot of people would feel the urge to mow. Even the gardens of “wild” flowers many of us plant are NOT really natural. Ideal Virginia quail habitat consists of the weeds and debris that comes the year after a clear cut. It is the disturbance itself that is the key to success. Many of us demand that this kind of thing be “cleaned up” or avoided in the first place.
My friend Mike Jones led the wildlife habitat field day to discuss ways landowners could create places for quail and other desirable animals. This is Mike just above. He is a landowner who recently retired from the NRCS and smartest person I know when it comes to the practical creation and protection of wildlife habitat. Mike has tried out all of what he talks about on his own land and seen the results over a lifetime. The State of Virginia is wise to take advantage of his expertise and his credibility when explaining programs to landowners.
These field days are a sweet deal. It cost me only $10, which probably didn’t cover much more than the lunch. The lunch line is pictured above. But field days are really a kind of advertising and education. Landowners make decisions about what happens on their land and it is in the best interests of everybody in the state if they make good ones. I didn’t really comprehend how important this was until I bought the farms. I have spent thousands of dollars and many hours of time making improvements to protect wildlife and water resources. I am eager to do that, since I consider improving my land a long-term investment, but I need advice about what to do. But there is no right way to do anything. We need to learn from scientists and experts, but they also need to learn from our experience and we have to learn from each other. These field days are part of the extension outreach done by the State of Virginia and our universities such as Virginia Tech and a great way to share practical knowledge.
You can make improve the environment and make profit from your land at the same time, but everything is a trade off. Wildlife tends to thrive in a less dense forest with more space between the trees and some of that ragged and messy weed patches I mentioned above. Of course, different animals favor different environments too. All life is trade-off. You can see the open woods at the top of this post and you can easily see how this does not maximize timber production, but most people like it better on their land and they may be able to make back some of the money with hunting leases. I lease both my farms to local hunt clubs. They provide a local presence and take care of boundaries.
Hunting is a virtuous circle. What is good for wildlife habitat is usually good for the environment, so hunters have an incentive to protect the environment. Above is a wildlife corridor Larry Walker, a member of one of one of our hunt clubs, made for me on our land. It will provide diverse edge community AND it allows me to get down to the creek w/o bushwacking. He cut it through a couple of weeks ago and planted the cover that you can see coming up. The hunters on my land have been there for a long time, in some cases for generations. They make the effort to understand the land in a way that almost nobody else does. They have to understand and provide for the needs of deer, turkey or quail. Hunters pays for a lot of wildlife conservation. They also control numbers. The deer population has exploded in the last twenty years. In places w/o enough hunting, they are destroying the forests and preventing regeneration. Of course, we don’t have that problem with quail.
Above is part of Genito Creek that crosses our property. Larry’s path makes it much easier for me to get down there and it is a nice place to visit. The creek meanders around, moving sand around the bed. The water undercuts banks and brings down the trees periodically. The creek used to be the boundary of the property, but around 1960 the whole thing moved around 100 yards in, so now both sides are on my land … for now.
I mentioned some of the reasons for quail decline. A habitat is only as strong as its weakest link. When they are chicks, quail need lots of bugs to eat, so they need the mix of plants that bugs like. This included weeds like goldenrod and especially ragweed, grass not so much. When they get older they need seeds to eat. They also need places to breed under cover, which is why they like blueberry thickets and they need brush and trees to hide from predators. In other words, they need a great diversity of habitat type, with a lot of it in the early stages of natural succession. By definition, the early stages of natural succession pass quickly, so we need a fair constant cycle of disturbance and recovery.
The State of Virginia wants to bring quail numbers back up. They have devoted $9 million over the next five years and will hire five regional biologists to study the problem and provide advice to landowners. They have some cost share programs for landowners targeted to five Virginia counties in order to focus efforts rather than spread them out and lose benefits too thin to do any good. Brunswick is not among the counties. Besides, they are aimed at crop land conversions, so I cannot get my forest lands in on any of them.
But my farms do have a lot of good edge habitat, even if they are not part of the program. The wildlife plots we established last year are doing well and the pre-commercial thinning has done a good job of establishing biological diversity. I visited the CP farm after the wildlife field day. As I walked down the road just before sundown, I spooked a covey of quail. At least a half-dozen exploded out of their cover as I slowly walked by. I took a picture of the spot and posted it above. I can be plenty ragged and messy w/o cost share from the state, thank you. You can see that it has the goldenrod and ragweed. It has the cover trees and the bramble blueberry and the combination of edge communities. The edge is plenty weedy and ragged. Not bad. I should hold a field day on my farm(s).
This is the draft of an article I wrote for the next issue of “Virginia Forests.” It is substantially based on a post I did a couple months ago, so regular readers might get a feeling of déjà vu. IMO, this one is somewhat improved and the editors will improve it even more.
Wood in the Ecological Value Chain
A chain is only as good as its weakest link, as the old saying goes, and you have to look at the whole chain from start to finish. This is true in any business and it is even more crucial when talking about something’s impact on the environmental affairs. Some products may look very green when you look at the finished product, but are not so environmentally friendly when you consider where they are coming from or where they are going, in other words when you look at the whole environmental value chain.
Tree farmers can take satisfaction from knowing that wood is the most environmentally friendly building or structural product available when you look at the ecological value chain from start to finish.
Start at the beginning. Growing trees is an environmental friendly thing to do. A growing forest removes pollution from the air, sequesters CO2, keeps water clean, provides wildlife habitat and makes the world more beautiful. Think of the forest as the factory where wood is made. Is there any more beautiful factory than the one on our timber lands? The raw materials to make plastic, concrete or metal must be pulled from the earth and processed in noisy, dirty and energy intensive factories. Wood is good.
It is true that harvesting of trees requires the use of fuels, which will emit CO2 and may result in particulate pollution released into the air, and even the most well-managed forest harvests will impact local water quality to some extent. These are serious issues, but they can be minimized and serious Virginia loggers are very careful to tread lightly in the woods. Beyond that, these activities occur only once in many decades on any particular piece of ground and are much more than compensated by the many years of beneficial growth in between harvests. If you look over a thirty-five or forty year pine rotation, it is clear that the net environmental benefits of producing wood are overwhelming.
If you compare forestry to almost any other land use, forestry wins out as the most sustainable and environmentally friendly activity. No other ecosystem better protects and enhances soil and water. Water that flows through a forest usually comes out cleaner than it went in. Compared to the land use for other products, the difference is so extreme that we might actually miss it. Twenty years after operations are completed, a mine, quarry or oil well is still only a hole in the ground unless costly reconstruction has been done.
Twenty years after a harvest a forest is … again a forest with young trees growing robustly.
This renewal is what always impresses me when I interview the Virginia Tree Farmers of the Year. These guys have usually been in the business for many years and they have pictures from many years past. I am astonished to see the old pictures and hearing about the changes. I recall standing in a mature pine forest in Greenville County and talking to Mike Jones (2007 Tree Farmer of the Year) about his land. He showed me an old photo of his grandfather standing in the “same” grove of trees where we stood as we talked. But these were not the same trees. This land had been harvested TWICE since the old man stood proudly among his pines. His grandson could stand among his pines and future generations would still have the chance to stand among their pines. That is what renewable means. Wood is completely renewable and renewable is even better than recyclable.
Let’s complete the ecological value chain. We have seen that wood is ecologically good in its production, sustainable in its harvest and completely renewable, but what happens after you are done with a piece of wood? We like to think our houses will last forever, but they won’t. Wood may be with us for centuries but when its usefulness to us is done it is easily disposed of or cycled back into the natural world. It can be burned as fuel. It releases CO2 at that time, but this is the same CO2 recently absorbed. That is why burning wood is recognized as carbon neutral. If thrown away, wood decays. It doesn’t take long before yesterday’s wood is fertilizer for tomorrow’s growing trees. This again is in striking contrast to other materials. Steel can be recycled at a high energy cost. If thrown away, it will rust away after many years. Concrete also can be recycled with much effort. If you dump it, it will lay until the next ice age. Plastic is the most persistent product. Some plastics will remain in the environment almost forever. Recycling is a good when possible, but it really only postpones the problem. The plastic water bottle may be turned into a carpet or a computer keyboard, but eventually it will end up in a landfill where it will stay … forever.
We need to use all sorts of materials: metal, plastic, glass, stone, concrete, various composites and wood. They are all appropriate for some uses. When you look at the total ecological value chain, wood deserves to come out on top in many cases. Our Virginia tree farms can grow wood, sustainable, now and forever. That beats the alternatives most of the time.
The top picture is a spruce plantation in the kettle-moraines in Wisconsin. The bottom picture shows turning leaves along US 50 in West Virginia.
Our Virginia Tree Farm delegation met with staff members from the offices of Jerry Connolly (my congressman), Mark Warner, Jim Webb & Eric Cantor. The ATFS convention was held in Washington this year and they wanted to take advantage of the presence of hundreds of tree farmers in the capital (how exciting!). We had tree farmers from most states in our nation’s capital. I suppose our meeting with only staffers shows our relative lack of political clout. Tree farmers are not a feared interest group. Two actual members took the time to meet with us personally: Robert Wittman & Robert Goodlatte. I was impressed with both, and not only because they were nice enough to talk with us.
All politicians are charming. That is how they get and keep their jobs. In addition, however, these guys really seemed to understand forestry issues and were genuinely interested in protecting the environment. I suppose that is one reason they talked to us. I think it may also be because they both come from rural districts, where get some real experience with agriculture, forestry and hunting. They were really on top of some of our esoteric issues, such as the use of woody biomass in energy and biosolids applied to the land.
And we are interested in some esoteric issues. For example, forestry prefers a broad definition of biomass to include woody biomass. The woody biomass we are talking about, BTW, is mostly the branches, bark and odd pieces left after forest harvests. Biomass is already used to fuel mills that make paper or process wood, but more could be done. The advantage of woody biomass is that it is produced widely and could be used in small plants. This is also a disadvantage. It tends to be locally available and heavy to move.
This is a bigger issue than it seems for the Federal government, because government picks winners and losers in the energy market. Other sources of alternative energy get privileged by government money and programs. Woody biomass makes a lot of sense for Virginia and the Southeast, where there are lots of forests and would be used more widely if other forms of energy didn’t get direct and indirect government favors and subsidies and/or if the government “help” was applied evenly. Anyway, that was one of the things I explained. I also emphasized that forestry in Virginia is sustainable, now and forever. That is simple and true, but it must be repeated.
Most of the real work of the Congress is done by very young staffers and those are the kinds of people we met. They are really smart, but I worry about their lack of experience. Maybe ferocious intelligence coupled with lack of experience can actually be a disadvantage. I don’t know. They seem to do okay. They need the energy of youth to cope with their daunting schedule. You only have a short time to make your point and then get out. It seems like a superficial way to get constituent input. Of course, Otto von Bismarck warned that you should never watch either laws or sausage being made.
We also met the famous Joe Wilson. One of our colleagues used to rent a house from Joe Wilson in South Carolina so when we passed him in the hall, he stopped to talk. It was a short meeting and I didn’t ask about the Obama comment. He seemed a nice guy. But, as I wrote above, all politicians are charming in person.
IMO, politicians don’t get the credit they deserve. Most are smart and motivated – at least initially – by the desire to do good. And it is a hard job, maybe a job that has grown too big as the reach of government has expanded into parts of our daily lives where it may not belong. Too many people come around asking too many things. And if others come, you have to be there too. Even if you don’t want to ask anything directly from government, you have to have lobbyists to protect yourself from what others who have lobbyists asking government to do that impact you.
One consultant told us that we could be either, “victims of public policy or engaged players in the system.” He implied there was no third option. Pity. A citizen is free to the extent that he can safely ignore politics. That sphere is shrinking.
I don’t know when politicians really have time to think, what with all the tight schedules and need to posture for the media. The wealth of activity has created a poverty of attention. When good people don’t have time to do a good job, maybe the system is overloaded, overextended and overreaching. If you can’t do more well, maybe it is best to choose to do less better and expand that sphere where citizens can ignore politics. But thinking that could happen is probably the triumph of hope over experience.
Anyway, we played our part. We “deployed our talking points,” so now everybody in Congress understands forestry, supports all our legitimate positions and will do the right things. But I wouldn’t like to be a full-time lobbyist. I couldn’t take the constant shallow dives. I enjoyed the experience of doing it for one day. That is enough. The Constitution gives me the right to petition my government, but I don’t much like the drive by fashion such petitioning has acquired.
Climate change is not something we face only today. Warmer temperatures helped during the rise of the Roman Empire and cooler ones probably contributed to its downfall. It was warm around the year 1000, when the Viking colonized Greenland and they were later wiped out by the advance of the Greenland ice. Interestingly, archeology in Greenland is now revealing Viking settlement patterns that were buried by ice for hundreds of years. Yes, it was as warm back then as it is now with our warmer temperatures.
North and west of Milwaukee are the kettle-moraines. This is where the last ice age stopped. The ice sheets dithered over the land here making sort of waves in the landscapes. Where glaciers stopped are moraines, long hill waves. An ancient glacial river, where sediment settled, is called an esker. These snake around like raised rivers across the farmlands. Where there was a depression in the glacier and dirt accumulated is called a drumlin. These are now round hills. Finally there are kettles, depressions carved by ice as the glacier retreated. What happened was that shards of ice got stuck in the ground, like glass in tar. When they melted they left holes. Some became lakes or marshes; others are just holes.
Most lakes are the gift of the glaciers, which is why you find so many in Wisconsin and Minnesota and not so many farther south. Over time, all lakes fill in and unless glaciers, man or an earthquake makes a new one, there are no more little lakes. I used to really enjoy the study of this stuff. Natural succession occurs when a lake fills in and gradually, through a succession of plant communities, becomes a forest. This can take thousands of years, which is why the lakes are still here.
The ice retreated from Wisconsin only about 10,000 years ago and the last ice age is called the Wisconsin glaciation, since there is so much evidence of it in Wisconsin. Besides the kettle-moraines, the area around Lacrosse, where Chrissy is from, is called the driftless area because the glaciers did not cover it and leave glacial dirt, also called “drift.” It was like a hole in the ice, but it was much affected by the glaciers. As the glaciers melted, water raced down forming long narrow valleys called coolies. Grand Coolie in Washington State is a really big example of the phenomenon. It was formed when a giant ice dam broke and washed away pretty much everything in its path. The area of Western Wisconsin is clearly different from the East. Rolling hill give way to a more ragged landscape.
I road my bike from Lacrosse to Milwaukee a couple of times and felt the geography. It is hard going, up and down, until you get past Reedsburg. Then you go down a long hill, which I understand is the Baraboo Ridge, and the peddling gets easier. There are hills, but they are not quite as steep or abrupt.
Anyway, talk about climate change! 10,000 years ago is not really that long in the great scheme of geologic time. The glaciers also created the Great Lakes and are formed the basis for that great fertile soil you find in the Upper Midwest. I suppose you could blame them for the poorer soils farther north, since that is where it was pushed from. All changes produce winners and losers. Climate change is no different. All things considered, we are better off now than during the ice ages.
Ice Age Trail
The Ice Age trail follows the edge of the glaciers throughout Wisconsin. I went to the Waukesha part, the Latham district. Latham was a naturalist of the 19th Century. He was instrumental in founding the national weather service.
I feel very at home in the Kettle-Moraines. That was my first contact with natural communities. We went out here on field trips from school and when I could ride my bike far enough I made my own visits. The landscape meshed well with my childhood love of natural history. The soil on the terminal moraines tend to be rocky and gravel and not so good. Ironically, that is one of the reasons we have ice age parks. The soil was not good for farming, so the land reverted to state ownership when the owners just walked away or else sold it cheap.
The natural cover in the Waukesha kettle-moraines is oak-savanna, locally called “oak openings.” The trees are spread apart in a park-like setting. The trees do not get very big because of the poverty of the soil, so a century old tree might be only thirty feet high, but they get very picturesque. Until settlement, the oak savanna was maintained by fires, set naturally by lighting or more often set deliberately or accidentally by Native Americans. I wrote about that in a series of posts about fire in the woods. Indians burned the land to improve hunting and once a fire started it could burn for a long time. Since there were no roads and few clearings to stop it, a fire burned until the next heavy rain. For a long time after the European settlement, we excluded fire from the landscape and a lot of brush has grown up. According to signs I saw along the trails, the State of Wisconsin is trying to reestablish the “natural” or at least the pre-settlement ecosystems. This means the judicial use of ecological fire.
I think I should say something about natural succession, since not everybody is as familiar with it. Basically, there is a succession of natural communities that establish themselves on any piece of land. Each natural community creates conditions that allow the next stage to prosper while, ironically, creating conditions where its own continuation is disadvantaged. For example, pine trees fill in a field, but as they grow together they create shade where young pines cannot grow, but the sheltered forest and the improving soil is a good environment for maples, which come to replace pines.
If you start with bare dirt, the first things that come in are weeds, then perennial grass and so on. In a reasonably fertile piece of dirt in Eastern Wisconsin, you will get the weeds, perennial plants, box elders and ash and finally maples-beech-basswood if there is sufficient moisture and soil depth, otherwise oak-hickory. But in some places you won’t really get forest at all. Wisconsin has a lot of prairie ecosystems. Of course, we really don’t know what the “natural” succession would be because no human has ever studied one. The Native Americans burned too, as above.
You can see above a field that might be in the process of becoming an open forest. When I studied natural succession, we talked about climax forests. That was the ecosystem that supposedly was the ultimate goal. Once established, the climax forest would remain until disturbed by nature or man. This implied permanence unjustified by the evidence. We now have a more subtle understanding of ecology. There really is no “goal”. Everything is just becoming something else.
I spent a lot of time at the Milwaukee Museum as a kid. It was a big part of my education and many of the images have stuck with me, so I was happy to see significant continuity in the exhibits. The familiar animals stare out of their dioramas. I went down to the museum with my sister and saw the old friends.
The one that stuck in my mind the most was the cougar, frozen in time about to jump on a couple of mule deer. When I hike in the west, in places where there is a resurgent cougar population, I think about that image and unfortunately cast myself in the role of the deer. The cougar is a stealth hunter. He is literally digging his claws on your back before you are aware of his presence.
Cougars were once common throughout North America. Our ancestors wisely drove them out to the lonely places of the continent and I am unenthusiastic about their return to settled areas. I understand that there is an established population now in the Black Hills and sooner or later some fool will reintroduce them to the Appalachians, whence they will infiltrate into place where I walk. I know they are beautiful and graceful, but I don’t favor any animal sharing the forest with me that can easily kill me and might have incentive to try. I don’t believe, as some deep green environmentalists imply, that it would be ennobling for me to become “one with nature” by becoming big cat food and ultimately being converted to cougar sh*t.
I am indeed a “speciesist” in this sense. I want to stay at the apex of the food pyramid. Let big, dangerous cats stay in the North Cascades or other special ranges where we can be on the lookout for them. It has been more than a century since any of their kind snarled their defiance in the Eastern Mountains. Good. Let’s keep it that way.
I have no similar problem with wolves, BTW. Little Red Riding Hood notwithstanding, they may be a threat to livestock, but just don’t attack people. At least they have not done so in North America in our 400 years of reliable record-keeping. The wolf has suffered mightily from bad public relations. In Europe, where they lived in intimate contact with dispersed and technologically less sophisticated human populations I suppose they may have been a threat on occasion, but not here and now.
So to sum up in simple terms, IMO, MOST carnivores – wolves, coyotes, bobcats, lynx, fishers, martens, badgers and such like are good and should be encouraged on your land unless you have livestock or small pets that might be endangered. Large bears and – especially – cougars are bad anywhere near where you want to live, hike or take a nap.
Above is “Sambo”. He was a gorilla in the Milwaukee Zoo. He died back in 1959 (I think of lung disease) and soon appeared in the Museum as the “lowland gorilla”. I never saw Sambo alive, but got to know him in the flesh, so to speak, later. Below is “Sampson”. He was Sambo’s zoo-mate (I think he might have been his brother), but lived a lot longer. Sampson died in 1981 of a massive heart attack. He was evidently overweight. I don’t recall if he smoked or didn’t exercise. He was one of the most popular residents of the zoo, with a lot of mourning fans when he died. Now he also stands in the museum. My own goal, BTW, is to become a museum exhibit someday. They can make a diorama with me as a character.
I went to a discussion of the costs of cap & trade. There were experts from Brookings, CBO, EPA, Energy Information Agency, the National Black Chamber of Commerce & Heritage Foundation, so we got the full spectrum of analysis. Lots of the assumptions were different and the ideology was contrasting, but they all came up with the same ballpark conclusions: cap & trade as it is now formulated in the House bill will cost a lot and probably will not work very well to control climate change.
As I have written many times before, I favor a broad carbon tax, which is why I could never run for office. I support cap & trade BECAUSE it is a type of carbon tax, albeit a less efficient and possibly corrupt way to do it, but it looks like there is enough inefficiency in corruption in the House bill to question it.
One flaw in the bill is that it includes almost nothing about nuclear power. In the long run, we will need to go with renewable power. In the medium run, there is no way to achieve the needed carbon reductions w/o nuclear power, which emits no greenhouse gas. Many environmentalists stupidly reject nuclear power. No form of power is w/o risks and costs, but if you believe that global warming is the existential threat some people say it is, doesn’t that almost certain risk of climate change trump the hypothetical risk of nuclear power? Not one person has died in the whole history of nuclear power in the U.S. Nobody was even seriously injured in the worst “disaster” in nuclear power history at Three Mile Island.
But a probably more serious problem is the phenomenal growth of emissions from developing countries such as China or India. China is the world’s leading emitter of CO2 and their emissions are growing rapidly. China adds the equivalent of two 500 megawatt coal fired plants EVERY WEEK. In one year it adds the equivalent of the whole British power network and by 2030 China alone could emit as much CO2 as the whole world does today. In other words, if everybody else cut to zero, it wouldn’t matter.
Talk is cheap, BTW. China has promised to cut emissions relative to GDP. That is good. But the U.S. has been cutting emissions relative to GDP since 1973 and in 2006, the U.S. was the only nation to cut emissions in absolute numbers during a time of economic growth.
So my conclusion is that we are cooked. We should think about adaptations to a warmer world. And we should be working on alternatives AND building nuclear power stations. Congress should go back to work and enact a true carbon tax that would get the government out of the business of picking winning and losing companies and technologies. Government has an abysmal record in doing this (consider the recent debacle re ethanol) and there is no reason to believe it has gotten any better. The current bill doesn’t inspire confidence. I like the idea of markets for environmental services in general. I was tentatively in favor of the climate bill. It has some good aspects, but it needs smarter leadership and some hard thinking.
BTW – the picture is Union Station from the window of Heritage Foundation, where the panel was held.
We make a lot of distinctions w/o even thinking about it. One of the most prevalent and potentially pernicious is the idea that some things are natural – almost sacred and untouchable – while others are profaned by human contact.
I think the goal should be sustainable, not “natural.” Natural is a slippery, arbitrary and often arrogantly used term. It is a chimera that assumes also that an environment that results from random chance and the interactions of non-human animals and plants is somehow qualitatively different than one with human influences. This is just not true. Some of the most productive, beautiful and sublime environments are the resulst of long term human interference and management. They are not “natural” if that term implies human free. But they are sustainable
That is why I quibble with words like “recovery,” “damage” or “natural” used too freely when talking about human interactions with the environment. They can sometimes be appropriate, but they too often imply that something is broken and that we have identified a problem that we need to fix. Some radical misanthropes who call themselves environmentalist actually believe that somehow the earth would be better off w/o humans. Of course, this is a very short-sighted and ironically very human-based point of view.
In fact, we would not want most human-influenced, human created, environments to revert to their pre-human state, even if that was possible and even if we could determine what non-human influence means, since there has not been such an environment in most of the world since the end of the last ice age or before. The wonderful “natural” environments of pre-Columbian America were by no means natural, BTW. They were created by Native American activities, especially fire, for example. Humans have changed the environment ever since there have been humans. Other animals have done so too, BTW. It is the nature of all life.
Sustainable is clearly the better concept. It provides a wide variety of choices and modulations of human influence. We will always have human influence as long as we are here, who cares after that, so why even talk about anything else? So let’s go with sustainable, which is achievable and good, rather than some hypothetical “natural” state, which is – BTW –itself an artificial human philosophical creation.
(I have long contributed to the Nature Conservancy and I recommend everyone do it. What I like about the Nature Conservancy is its do something good perspective. I like it that my money helps conserve and restore places to sustainable nature. Read some of what they are doing for sustainable grasslands at this link.)
I read a three articles today that touch on these concepts. The first talks about how quickly ecosystems will revert to a sustainable “natural” state when humans move away. The truth is that it takes a lot of human effort to PREVENT nature from obliterating the works of humans. Some would argue that the new state is not “natural” and it is not pristine or natural in the purist or religious sense, but it is sustainable, which is what we should really care about.
The next article talked about new environmentally friendly processes that can make softwoods as hard and resistant to the elements as tropical hardwoods. This is important because we and do grow softwoods (such as pines) sustainably. Tropical hardwoods tend to be essentially mined from rainforests, often illegally. Replacing tropical hardwoods with sustainably grown temperate wood would go a long way to slow or even stop deforestation. It seems almost too good to be true, but many really big changes pivot on small improvements in technologies and techniques.
The last article is about an unsustainable, well intentioned hubris. Spain has been subsidizing solar power, but it has proven unsustainable, i.e. it is not viable w/o subsidies; it doesn’t look like it soon will be viable w/o subsides and Spain can no longer afford to provide subsidies. The whole worldwide market for solar is affected.
This is a good example of why governments should not try to favor specific technologies. Solar does work, but not as well everywhere. The kinds of decisions must be made on local levels to allow the greater variety and localization. The Spanish debacle might well have a desired effect, just not in Spain. Prices are dropping because of the Spanish withdrawal. The lower prices will encourage adoption, maybe in places and applications where solar actually makes more sense.
We should take the lesson for our own environmental legislation. The best regulation is one that gives people and firms incentives to use their intelligence and imagination to create innovations appropriate to their needs. General directions are better than detailed instructions.
We humans are going to be on this earth for a long time to come. We are part of nature. We should not pretend we can separate ourselves. Our task is to live sustainably on this planet. Trying to establish a pre or non-human perspective is just plain stupid. Human interventions can be good or they can be bad. Sometimes plants and animals do better around human “footprints.”
The news carries reports that some people are still living in FEMA trailers and many homes are not rebuilt four years after Hurricane Katrina.
When a big tragedy hits, we feel the natural human desire to reach out and help the victims. We certainly should. But after the “first aid” and the flood waters have receded, it is time for everybody to get back to work as usual. After four years, it is past time for the victims to be on the other side, i.e. willing and able to help others. And it is not the government’s duty to offer indefinite help. It starts to get abusive. If my house burns down tonight, I don’t expect to be living in a FEMA trailer at all, much less still be there four years later. Beyond that, I learned that many of the victims were renters. If you lose your rental home, you move and pay rent somewhere else. The landlord takes the loss.
I like to watch nature and science programs on TV. Going back many years, I have seen programs about the Mississippi River, New Orleans, global warming, sea level rises or all of the above. They all said the same sorts of things. Much of New Orleans is below sea level. Everybody knew that it was only a matter of time before a big hurricane would come and do what Katrina did. And everybody knows it will happen again. It is not “if” it is “when”. And there is nothing we can do about it no matter how much we spend. Those low-lying parts of the city should not be inhabited at all today or tomorrow and they should not have been occupied yesterday. It was a mistake. The destruction of the wetlands to build these areas was a slow motion tragedy. The clock was set ticking a century ago. We just didn’t see it until the big one hit. Actually, we did see it, as all the nature show programs said; we just didn’t care, sort of like today. It gets worse. Global warming will cause sea levels to rise. Those lands currently below sea level will be even further below sea level. Building/rebuilding is just a waste of time and a cruel hoax on anybody living there.
Let’s say it plainly. Start with the good news. Those parts of New Orleans that are above sea level (including many of the historical areas) can and should be preserved. The port areas can be rebuilt and enhanced. BUT New Orleans must become a smaller city. The parts of the city that are at or below sea level should not be rebuilt.
The best use would be to make some of these erstwhile flooded neighborhoods, such as the 9th Ward, into wet forest or “walking” wet land used for agriculture. Letting these places return to a more natural state will serve to protect the salvageable and more valuable real estate. There is really no other practical or ethical course.
We should stop promising or implying that people will be returning to their homes on these once and future swamps, bayous and lakes. It makes absolutely no sense from either the ecological or the economic point of view. This goes beyond New Orleans, BTW.
Decisions about where to build should be local decisions. In most cases, I would not deny someone the right to build on his own property, even if I thought the choice was stupid. But we should not help. Much stupid development comes down to subsidized insurance. If no private company will insure your new home, maybe there is a reason. The risk is too high. We certainly should not subsidize your bad decision. W/o the unnatural public subsidy for insurance to live on unstable places, most people would not build on barrier islands, flood plains, loose slopes … or below sea level in New Orleans.
We need to be realistic. Some places are just not suited to some uses. It is a tragedy if your house is destroyed by a flood … once. If it starts to become a habit maybe you are just stupid. Stupidity is not against the law and maybe you have a good reason to keep moving back, but stupidity shouldn’t receive government subsidies.
The U.S has a lot of land. We are not like Holland. We don’t need to build billion dollar levees to protect hundred dollar real estate, nor should we sacrifice nature to our hubris. We should help our fellow citizens in such situations, but we should help them move to higher ground.
There is an old joke about a preacher and a flood. During a big flood, a preacher was trapped on the roof of his church. A boat came by. They said, “Reverend, get in. It is still raining in the hills and the whole town will be covered.” The preacher said, “I trust in the Lord. He will save me.” A second boat comes and it is the same. Then comes a third boat. The guy in the third boat tells the preacher, “Listen, this is the last boat. Everybody else is out. It is still raining. Get in!” The preacher just responds, “I trust the Lord. He will save me.” The last boat leaves. Finally the preacher is up to his neck in water. He looks toward heaven and says, “I trusted you to save me. Why have you forsaken me?” The Lord answers, “I sent three boats; why didn’t you get into one of them?”
Victims cannot always dictate the terms of their salvation. Sometimes there are more important considerations.
