Author: JohnMatel

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Do I contradict myself?

I recently wrote a post that included criticism of how AP classes study American history. I have been thinking about that since and noticed the persistent negativity. America became great by Americans doing great things. Every great thing, however, no matter the magnitude of benefit, will also create problems. The greater the total affected, the greater will be the total of negative effects, like a larger circle of light touches a larger area of darkness. We should certainly consider the negatives, but need to balance.
I was especially thinking about this as I am about halfway through “Water to the Angels,” a biography of William Mulholland and his bringing water to Los Angeles. I knew there was a lot of controversy about this water project, so I did a little general background research. Among the things I found was a PBS series and a lesson plan. The segment concerning this was called. “Water Use: Tragedy in the Owens River Valley.” That is kind of a loaded title, don’t you think? And it is a good example of the negativity I am talking about.
Most of the landowners in the Owen Valley lost water rights. This loss, BTW, was more potential than real. It could be called a tragedy, I suppose. But in compensation, the Los Angeles and the valleys around it got water they needed to grow. The Owens Valley was, and still is, remote. When the water project was built, there were only around 4000 people living there. It would not have supported many more. Most were able to sell the land or water rights for more than the market value. Although this was less than they would have/could have demanded had they known the magnitude of what was about to happen, but it is hardly a tragedy. In fact, IMO, it would have been a little unfair for them make all the money on the work others were contemplating.
Some people love to hate Southern California, but everyone has to admit that it is a miracle of engineering. The possibilities created by William Mulholland were truly remarkable. There were costs. There remains an alkaline dust problem in the Owens Valley. But if you compare that to all the innovation, industry and wealth created in Southern California over the past century, it is like holding a candle to the sun. If the water had not been “stolen,” growth in Los Angeles region would have essentially stopped. Of course, we could have irrigated land in the Owens Valley and produced more alfalfa.
Were I writing the lesson plan, I would title it something like, “The Miracle of Southern California” and put it in context of other projects, such as the one in New York about the same time that was supplying water to NYC, or later big projects such as Hoover Dam or Grand Coulee. W/o the energy and materials produced as a result of these projects, our country may not have prevailed in World War II. That would have been a tragedy of worldwide proportions.
Challenges overcome and costs paid say a lot about great people doing great things. We should taste both the sweet and the bitter but can choose which to emphasize. Lots of things are true at the same time.
“Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself; I am large — I contain multitudes.”
― Walt Whitman
Reference http://www.amazon.com/Water-Angels-Mulholland-Monumental-Aqueduct/dp/0062251422
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Moynihan’s Mistake and the Left’s Shame

Interesting book review. Yesterday I posted a “Freakonomics” podcast talking about using data and experimentation to understands social problems. The empirical data often contradicts easy assumptions and may make it possible to make actual improvements. Too often in today’s debates about social issues opponents demonize and attach morality to what should be differences about what to do. For example, I have never met anybody who hates the poor or wants to maintain people in poverty. But there are legitimate differences in what to do. Sometimes, in a complex environment, things do wrong because of and not in spite of our best efforts.

Reference – http://www.city-journal.org/2015/bc0403fs.html

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Regulatory humility in practice

It is easy, maybe even stylish, and certainly popular to dismiss our government officials as self-serving, incompetent or both, but it is not true. Sure, as in any human endeavor, there are those who are just in it for the prestige, power and/or promise of future gains.

However, most, in my experience, are good people trying to do a good job. I try to listen to what they say, beyond the sound bites, when they are trying to explain the basis for what they do. I was impressed, for example, with Interior Secretary Sally Jewell and her understanding of energy, especially fracking, and her commitment to managing our lands.
Yesterday I attended at talk by FTC Commissioner Maureen Ohlhausen with what seemed like an unlikely title: Regulatory humility in practice.   In fact, the title is what drew my interest.   The moderator joked that many thought it must be an April fool joke.   Since when is there humility among regulators? She gave a good talk. Starting with a classical allusion, which impresses me.

She talked about Procrustes. In Greek mythology, Procrustes was an innkeeper who liked things orderly. He had a bed that was exactly the right size. If guests were too short for the bed, he stretched them until they fit. If they were too tall, he cut off their feet. Regulators, she averred, were too often like Procrustes. They forget that the purpose of regulation is to improve conditions, not make people fit their preconceived notions of perfection.

Regulatory humility is simple to postulate but hard to practice. Regulators need to know their limitations, prioritize to protect against real, not hypothetical harm, and use the appropriate tools to correct the problem. As I wrote, simple to postulate, but making it work violates many of the laws of bureaucratic physics. Nobody gets rewarded for knowing their limitations and acting on that knowledge. I know from my own experience that more credit comes from “great ideas” and project beginnings than from successful conclusions. It takes real effort and significant self-abnegation not to play the game.

Ms. Ohlhausen pointed out some of the reason why you have to be careful with limitation.   One is that you cannot know all the factors involved.   Regulators do not have the time to collect and analyze all the information and even if you did you probably could not understand it. Furthermore, in a fast changing industry, information is quickly out of date. If you knew everything there was to know about Internet in 2010, you would be pretty much useless today.

Some knowledge is being created by those doing the stuff and much of it is “tacit knowledge,” i.e. the people doing things cannot explain exactly how they do it and nobody can learn it sufficiently in theory. I ride my bike all the time.   Yet I have no idea how to explain how I stay up.   I could look up a physical explanation, but that would be unhelpful and it is obviously unnecessary for a bike rider to know. A rule based on that physics that tried to tell me how to ride would be just as useless and unnecessary.

Even with all these caveat, however, regulators like to regulate. It is what they do. They need to identify places of real harm AND place where regulation can produce real good.  We can identify many bad problems that do not have workable solutions. It is tempting to take action, to do something, but that could be wrong. Regulators should work incrementally and transparently, correcting when things do not work as planned or when secondary consequences make the whole enterprise a net loser.   This is the hard part. People understandably want certainty, or at least the appearance of it. A system that adapts to conditions and allows learning usually works better than a rigid one, but it is by its very nature uncertain.   Regulation may create certainty by freezing in place the current situation. This may be okay, even desirable in some places, but certainly not in others.   It would not have been a good thing to freeze the Internet in place ten or even five years ago.   Innovation is unpredictable and usually messy, but we do need it.

BTW – these lectures feature a modest free lunch. I sat down in a good seat and introduced myself to the others around me.   One guy just mumbled and gave me a furtive look as he continued to eat.   Just before the start of the talk, he picked up his stuff and walked quickly away, never to return. I know that there are those who attend events mostly for the free lunch, but it is churlish to take the food and not listen to the talk, especially because the guy took a place at the table. Others, of course, could fill in, but it is somewhat awkward to get up and move in like that.

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Empirical studies for social problems

Only recently have researchers been able to do something that approaches empirical studies. The data is showing some new things but also confirming some old wisdom. Most things are done by a very small percentage of the people. It applies to good things like innovation and bad things like crime or consumption of medical care. For example, 1% of the patients is 30% of the payments to the hospitals, and that 5% of the patients is about 50% of the payments to the hospital. You can address half your costs by targeting a very small part of the population.

Reference – http://freakonomics.com/2015/04/02/how-do-we-know-what-really-works-in-healthcare-a-new-freakonomics-radio-podcast/

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Big bad wolves

Wolves and other animals do not attack people because they are afraid based on their experience with people. This is good. I prefer that animals be afraid of humans. The problem is (and will be worse in future) that we no longer threaten or harass these animals. As they learn not to be afraid of humans, they will become dangerous to humans. Therefore, it is beneficial to both man and beast that we humans occasionally assert our dominance, and, yes, harass them. So next time you see a coyote or a wolf, toss a rock in its general direction. You cannot tame them, but “kindness” may make them dangerous enough to harm humans and thus “need killing.”

Reference – http://www.wsj.com/articles/some-germans-really-are-afraid-of-the-big-bad-wolf-1428077944?mod=WSJ_article_EditorsPicks_3

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Liberal arts

This is one of the reasons why many people distrust modern liberal arts educations. I have read arguments on both sides. Those in favor of leaving out the optimism and great leaders in American history often claim that students get that elsewhere. But they do not.
I thought the story below might be an exaggeration, so I got the test. It is indeed negative and it leaves out most of our triumphs. For example, innovation was a big part of U.S. success. Nothing. America was a magnet for immigrants because of the opportunity offered, i.e. the pull factor. The tests emphasizes the push factors. I will include a link to the test in the comments, so that everyone can come to his/her own conclusions.

I got my MA in history, but it was mostly Europeans and ancient history. I learned most of my American history as an FSO. I thought that I should know about my country if I wanted to represent it well, so I studied, visited historical places attended lectures and read a lot. I have doing this now for more than 30 years now. Maybe because my view is based on this, my view of America is optimistic. I have been drawn to accomplishments and innovations. That doesn’t mean that I ignore the dark periods, but they do not define our country; overall the pluses far outweigh the minuses. I do not think this is a patriotic view; it is a realistic one.
It takes an intelligent person to be cynical but a wise one not to be.
In that sample test, I do not find things that are wrong, but if you knew all those things you would have a very incomplete view of America. It emphasizes the negative. You would miss the heroic taming of a continent, the innovation that created great prosperity for lots of people, the achievements in science and technology and the successful struggles against totalitarian communism, fascism and Nazism.
I suppose I would not be happy not matter what. There is so much that needs to be there and so little space to hold it.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/lynne-cheney-the-end-of-history-part-ii-1427929675?mod=hp_opinion
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Understanding great structures

I just finished this course. I generally prefer the audio to the video because I can listen while walking, but this one needs to be video so you can see the structures. I have been watching while using the climbing machine at Gold’s Gym. It is perfect, since I have no place else to go and have to give it my full attention. When I tried to watch these courses before, I always tried to “multitask.” I suppose running while watching is multitasking, but when you get in the rhythm the body goes auto-pilot. I recommend the course. Next time at the gym, I will start one on geology.

Reference – http://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/science/understanding-the-world-s-greatest-structures-science-and-innovation-from-antiquity-to-modernity.html

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Urban Waterways in Anacostia

I attended the Urban Waterways Symposium to better understand urban environmental issues. They are very different from the ones I am used to. A big difference is that the people involved do not own the land they are trying to conserve. There are lots of rules and lots of other stakeholder. If I notice some erosion that could use some rip-rap, my only concern is how much the rocks will cost and if I can get the kid to move them. It is not so easy in an urban environment.

Former DC Mayor Anthony Williams was the keynote speaker. He was very interesting and funny, but maybe more cerebral than lots of politicians. He joked that it was strange for him going from being a big wheel to an ordinary guy. He jokes that people used to come out to meet him; now he has to be careful not to get a ticket when he parks and walks in by himself. He talked about the need to plan for the 21st Century, pointing out that cities had often shunned their waterfronts in the past but now they embrace them. The Anacostia was still not very embraced. He also contrasted the type of conservation advocated by guys like Theodore Roosevelt (maybe my tradition) and the needs of an urban population. The Roosevelt model conserves nature. People are visitors or living from the natural resources. An urban model has people in but not of nature. They need to be integrated.


I also attended a panel discussion on gentrification. This is an interesting subject with lots of points of view. One of the concerns of people in Anacostia is that if they make it too nice they will be displaced by rich people. One of the speakers talked about gentrification the way I might talk about invasive species. It is a different point of view from mine. I suppose I would be the gentrifier if I moved in and Mariza is doing that with her house in Baltimore. I thought about how close Anacostia is to downtown DC and how the parks are really nice. I could become an invasive there.

I thought about my old neighborhood in Milwaukee. Growing up there, I thought it was the way it was always and would be. I still feel a little possessive about it, although I have not skin in that game anymore. It is only a landscape of memory. Neighborhoods are much more transient than we think. Few of the old neighbors are left. The new people think it has always been that way. Parts of Bay View are gentrifying. It is funny that relatively rich people move into the old worker housing and consider it a step up. I suppose the difference is that they have only a couple people in these houses that used to have families of five or ten kids.
It makes sense to reach out where you go. When I bought the tree farms in Brunswick County, I tried to get to know people so that I could fit in better. I found people were welcoming. They knew things I wanted to know and would share information. It must be as true in the urban environment, maybe more so because there are so many more people around. I want to learn more about this environment and will attend more of these conferences.
My picture up top shows the Thurgood Marshall Academy, a public charter school, where the conference was held.   It was a old building but very well maintained.   Next is the panel on gentrification.  Below that is MLK Avenue right outside the school and at the bottom is Anacostia Metro.  It is difference from all the other stations I have seen. It does not have the high, vaulted ceilings (although they tried to keep the general look with cross arches) and it barely underground.  Sunlight comes in from upstairs.
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Forest restoration

Longleaf pine restoration is the topic of articles in other parts of this magazine and I will leave the details longleaf cultivation to experts. Adding longleaf back into the forest mix encourages diversity and I want like to talk more about the general changes and the benefits of diversity in our forestlands.

Encouraging species diversity is a good strategy when faced with uncertainty, complexity and change. Forest landowners face these conditions and the effects are accelerating. Forest planning must look at least several decades into the future. We cannot predict the future in detail, but we can be reasonably sure that conditions thirty years from now will be significantly different from what we have today because the factors that will create the changes are already here.

Leave aside for a moment the big uncertainty of climate change, more about that below. We have enough change drivers without it. For the last century, Virginia land area covered by trees was expanding as forests regrew naturally or were reestablished on former agricultural fields. This trend is finished, as conversion of land for development more than balances forest growth. Urbanization will continue to take up forestlands and, maybe more importantly, divide and fragment them. Twenty ten acre tracts separated by roads and houses are not the same as one unbroken 200 acre one. Beyond that, with the new roads and houses will come new species of trees and plants. Deodar cedar and metasequoia are beautiful in the Virginia landscape, but they are not from around here.

Invasive species are challenging. Some have been around for a long time, such as tree-of-heaven, kudzu or multiflora rose. They are nuisances, but we are used to them. However, new ones are constantly coming and they can be disruptive. The emerald ash borer may eliminate forests of ash. Sometimes big changes come from familiar insects, animals or plants in new association, as seems to be the problem with white pine in the western mountains. Moreover, sometimes it is hard to tell what is going on without looking closely, as with dogwood anthracnose. Researchers tell us that dogwoods dying out in their traditional places in deep forests and becoming a tree of the sunnier forest edge where the fungus spreads slower. We see dogwoods along the roads but may fail to notice their absence deeper in the woods. Dogwoods play an important role for wildlife, shading waterways and recycling nutrients. How do our forests respond when they are gone?
Let’s return to the big factor of climate change. While we cannot precisely predict the effects in any particular place, we can make some general assumptions. Climate change will open opportunities for some species, maybe invasive ones, and make life harder for others. We may see novel ecological communities, with species associated in ways they were not before. This may affect longleaf pine. The natural range of longleaf pine extends into Virginia, but not very far north or west. In most of the state, if you establish longleaf pine you are creating a new association, not “restoring” it. However, in a time of climate change and disequilibrium this may be exactly the right thing to do, as changes may open opportunities to expand the longleaf range. Conditions thirty years from now may be very kind to it.

This is not the first time we have gone through big changes. Walk around your land, look at the witness trees, the boundary trees, and read the descriptions on the old deeds. If your land is like mine, you will notice significant changes in the types of trees represented among the witness trees compared with those growing up now. It speaks to a different sort of forest when those old trees were young. The forest we leave to our grandchildren will be different again. It is our task to make it sustainable for ourselves and for them.

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Earth history: temporate forest ecosystems in North America

http://prism2.si.edu/Pages/SI-WideArchive.aspx
I attended a symposium on temperate forests ecosystem at Smithsonian. Much of it was about earth history, deep earth history. When you want to look forward, it is a good idea to look back. Almost everything you can reasonably expect could happen in the future has happened in the past. Earth has been much warmer and much cooler in that past than it is today.

Climate change will bring ecosystems with associations of plant and animal that nobody has seen before, but it has happened before. We call them “novel” ecosystems. We can get an idea of the novel ecosystems of a potentially warmer future by looking at what was around during similar periods in earth history.

Emergence of flowering plants
Angiosperms, flowering plants, the plants and trees we are used to seeing around us today, developed in the early Cretaceous period around 160 million years ago. (BTW – the famous movie should probably have been called “Cretaceous Park” instead of “Jurassic Park,” since the lead dinosaurs were from that period, but that is another story.) Flowering plants developed in the tropics and then moved into temperate regions, first along riverbeds and in disturbed areas. Today we might call them invasive species. By the middle Cretaceous, they were globally distributed and often dominant and by 70 million years ago, many of our now familiar families of trees were well established. The details and relationships among species were different, but these ancient forests would look broadly familiar to us. This was one of the golden ages of temperate forests.

Then we had the mass die offs at the end of the Mesozoic, the same one that killed the dinosaurs. Around 50% of all plant species went extinct. The fossil record cannot tell us exactly how long it took, but it was quick in terms of geological time. Forests quickly recovered their diversity as the world got warmer, with tropical rain forests spreading up to 40 degrees North, about where Colorado would be and it got even warmer still with a boreal-tropical forest, where today we have cold northern forests. There were forests north of 80 degrees and paleontologists found fossilized stumps that indicate dense forests of trees resembling metasequoia (dawn redwoods now common in Virginia gardens) on Ellesmere Island, a place of permafrost & tundra today where nothing grows more than a few feet high.

Sudden greenhouse warming
A sudden greenhouse event brought rapid warming of 4-8 degrees C about 56 million years ago. This warm period lasted around 200,000 years, a long time to us, but not very much in the great scheme of geological time. Tropical vegetation moved far into what are now temperate or even cold regions. South America had vast eucalyptus forests.

Followed by a slow cooling
Eucalyptus in South America died out in during subsequent cooling phase. They are back in South America today, but the new ones are from Australia. A slow cooling began about 44 million years ago and we are still in that colder age. About 6 million years ago, we started to see periodic ice ages, as the Greenland ice sheet formed and glaciers advanced in the Himalayan highlands. What exactly caused the cooling is a subject of speculation. The leading theory is that it had to do with movements of landmasses that isolated the Arctic Ocean and allowed ice to form, the movement of the Antarctic continent to the middle of the polar region, where it could freeze more or less solid and the up thrust of the Tibetan Plateau, which cooled of the heart of Eurasia.

Data from the past is hard to get; data from the future is impossible. Natural history provides a rich mine of information about how forests will respond to rapid climate change.
The next speaker talked about associations of plants and animals. In times past, distributions of tree and plant species was sometimes different from what we see today. For example, today the ranges of ash trees and spruce trees do not much overlap. But in the Ice Age their distributions overlapped to greater extent. There is no natural association like that today. Difference in climate was not the only cause.

Strange relationships
Many “strange” mixes occur when there is a disequilibrium caused by big changes. The change in climate was one such cause, but not the only one. In this time in the past, large mammals (woolly mammoth, American camels, stag-moose, woolly rhinos, giant ground sloths and horses.) largely disappeared, probably because of humans showing up and hunting them to extinction, but there were a variety of factors at work. Although there is some dispute about the exact cause, (some scientists refuse to blame humans), there was clearly a disequilibrium created and it happened rapidly, in the course of less than 1000 years. Large herbivores play important ecological roles in that they eat and trample lots of vegetation. They are important in keeping open forests or grasslands free of trees and brush. When they disappear, forests close. And there is another knock off effect – fire. Fire is an herbivore. If animals do not eat the brush, it accumulates and eventually catches on fire. Humans would have increased the incidence of fire. There have always been fires, but the intensity varies. So what you see is greater variation, since the fires were more destructive when they came, but less constant than the grazing or browsing of the large herbivores.

The forests of 14,000 – 12,000 years ago were different from those of today for both climate and other land use reasons mentioned above. During the Ice Age there was greater seasonal variation than today with relatively hotter summers and significantly colder winters. For plants and animals in the environment, what matters is not the average, but the extremes. Something can be perfectly adapted 360 days of the year, but if the extreme weather of those last five days kills it, it will disappear. When you get extremes, then, it simplifies the environment, i.e. fewer species can find niches and so the forests are dominated by only a few species. You see that today in the difference between tropical forests, with thousands of species on every acre and boreal forests with only a few types of trees dominating vast swaths of land.

End of the last ice age, still changing
The Ice Age ended and the world warmed rapidly. Forests in North America again spread north to about where they are now. Our last speaker, Jonathon Thompson from Harvard Forest talked about more recent history.

The last 400 years has been a story of disturbance and recovery in the forests in Eastern North America. In Massachusetts, for example, deforestation peaked about 1850 and forests recovered rapidly until the 1970s, when urbanization started to equal or slightly exceed the rate of forest regrowth. The regenerated forests are similar to the old ones, but different in details such as age and precise composition. Newer forests, for example, are younger and earlier on the stage of succession. This is no big surprise. They just are not that old and more likely to be recently disturbed.

The composition is different
Researchers tried to get an idea of the former forest composition by looking at “witness tree” records. Witness trees were those used to mark property lines. They are described in some detail in old deeds. Usually, they would set down a marker and then describe the trees in all directions, in order to discourage someone moving it. Using these trees introduces some bias, since witness trees would more likely to be big and easy to spot, not a random distribution, but it gives some idea.

In the last centuries, there have been changes. Chestnuts are gone entirely. The chestnut blight explains this. Beech declined significantly, by around 15%. This is maybe explained by the age of the forest. Beech trees are late succession species, i.e. they are shade tolerant and start to come in when the forest is well established. Maples are more common now. The researchers went only to genus, and not to the species level, but they think there has been a big change among maples, with red maples displacing sugar maples to some extent. Oaks have declined, but not by that much and the same goes for hemlock, when not affected by the woolly adelgid. Hemlocks have been declining for 5000 years, however. They were once more common and evidently got some kind of stress thousands of years ago. The decline of the oaks may be an artifact of the study. Oaks are large and long-lived trees. They would be natural candidates as witness trees, so maybe they were just chosen more often.

Anyway, I learned some things I did not know and remembered other things that I had forgotten. Being able to attend such symposiums is one of the big advantages to working at Smithsonian.