Between Science and Politics Lies the Environment.
I hear babies cry. I watch them grow.
They’ll learn much more than I’ll ever know.
And I think to myself: what a wonderful world.What a Wonderful World by G. Weiss, G. Douglas, and B. Thiele
It’s photos such as these, time Lapse views of Earth from space, that makes one grateful to be alive today.
Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.
Again, there is no one right way to farm. By its very imposition on a piece of land agriculture disrupts the local ecosystem.
Last month, famed primatologist Jane Goodall was quoted on the Huffington Post as saying, “The world is in a horrible mess … We need to starting changing (sic) the way we live, from the clothes we buy to the food we eat. We need to change our greed and materialism. We need a critical mass to realize that we need money to live, rather than to live for money.” Or, to put that another way, “Live simply, so that others (including non-human species) may simply live.”
Now I have enormous respect for Dr. Goodall; her studies into the habits of chimpanzees shifted our thinking about primates, but I disagree with her assertion. As counterintuitive as it sounds, it is because we want to buy more stuff that our world even becomes ever more sustainable.
Dr. Goodall may base her statement in logic and The Litany: that is, we are killing ourselves because the more of us there are, the faster we consume the natural resources we humans depend upon for our very survival.
We have heard The Litany for so long it becomes almost calming.
“The water is polluted and the air is worse. We’re washing away topsoil from our farmland; and what we aren’t washing away, we’re paving over. The more technology we manufacture, the less livable becomes our world. Humans produce too many babies. Our exploding population increases poverty and misery and decreases habitat for every other living thing that we share this tiny and fragile world with.”
The only thing is, The Litany has been with us for thousands of generations. Consider this second-century quote from the early-Christian writer, Tertullian, “We are burdensome to the world, the resources are scarcely adequate for us…”
This is not to say that, collectively, we do not affect our world significantly–we do–in good and bad ways. I am only saying that our impact is decreasing due to our acquisitiveness.
You see, the more we trade goods and services, the more we trade ideas as well. Matt Ridley, author of “The Rational Optimist,” says ideas “have sex.” Like DNA recombining to make unique individuals, bits of ideas cross-fertilize with others to make better ways of doing things. “In a nutshell,” Ridley writes [PDF], “the most sustainable thing we can do, and the best for the planet, is to accelerate technological change and economic growth.”
It will be technological change (caused by trade) that makes the world more habitable for all its species, and not a decision to spend less on luxuries. History bears this out:
While logic and The Litany tell us that we will run out of resources very soon, humanity’s track record for thousands of generations shows the world has become less polluted and more resilient. Prophets have preached “the end is near” since the dawn of man–they still do. But, far from being the world’s executioner, globalization and the consumerism it cultivates, are its salvation.
So, will living simply help save the world? In a word, no.
Living simply will simply not save the world. But globalization will.
In the movie, Fried Green Tomatoes, Cathy Bates waits for a parking space only to have it taken by two female twenty-somethings who blow her off with, “Face it lady, we’re younger and faster.” She rams her tank of a car into their tinier VW convertible. Bates’ parting shot is, “Face it, girls. I’m older and I have more insurance.”
If one lives long enough, one can gain perspective from living and observing. It may boil down to “been there, done that, and I have more insurance.”
I was eighteen when the Apollo 11 astronauts walked on the moon and photographed an earthrise.
Their iconic photo taken from the moon, with the earth looking like a blue-green spaceship, galvanized my Boomer generation around the environmentalist cause.
That photo shows how finite the world is, and it sounds counter-intuitive to argue that anything on it is limitless. Resources and energy need to be conserved if we are to survive on this small orb spinning in the vastness of space, do they not?
What cannot be seen in that photo is the unlimited collective intelligence of the people that inhabit that amazingly beautiful place.
“The availability of almost everything a person could want or need has been going rapidly upwards for 200 years and erratically upwards for 10,000 years before that,” Matt Ridley points out in The Rational Optimist. “This generation of human beings has access to more calories, watts, lumen-hours, square feet, gigabytes, megahertz, light years, nanometres, bushels per acre, miles per gallon, food miles, air miles and, of course, cash than any that went before.”
The counter-argument says our resources are part of a zero-sum game, if we humans become better off, other species are worse off—this is the “Environmentalist’s Paradox.”
Bear with me; I’m going to argue that the trend Dr. Ridley extols will continue, and our non-renewable resources are nearly limitless. As a result, I am not a “live simply, so others can simply live” kind of guy. Not that I am against living simply or witty aphorisms, but that it is wide of the mark. To paraphrase P.J. O’Rourke, our resources are not like a pizza, if I eat too many slices you won’t have to eat the Domino’s box.
The end of our resources has been foretold before. In 1865, the British economist, Stanley Jevons predicted the end of coal. In his book, The Coal Question, he wrote that Britain’s easy ride was over and soon coal, which, powered their industrial revolution, would be gone. It was “physically impossible” to continue. Therefore Britain needed to decide “between brief greatness and longer continued mediocrity.” William Gladstone, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, found Jevons’ argument so compelling he begged Parliament to pay down their national debt while they still could.
The ink had barely dried on Jevons’ book when the output of coal rose and the price fell. The first oil well was sunk in Pennsylvania six years later. Today, Britain still produces coal.
Jevons assumed it was coal that was needed to fuel their industrial revolution, rather it was energy, and because the human mind knows no limits, there’s a lot of energy in the world. For instance, right now, in the United States, natural gas in shale deposits holds the promise of energy for another 250 years at present consumption levels. Each year, the world will “use about 450 exajoules (about 1250 billion kilowatt-hours of energy) of fossil fuel,” Matt Ridley wrote in the Times of London, “Total oil, gas and coal resources in the Earth’s crust are estimated at more than 570,000 exajoules.” In other words, we have over a millennium’s worth of energy left in just fossil fuels.
I may not change your mind to believe that the world will continue to have enough energy and resources. As the late Julian Simon said, “First, humanity’s condition will improve in just about every material way. Second, humans will continue to sit around complaining about everything getting worse.”
But for me, not only is the glass half-full, there’s evidence that it’s fuller than ever before and everyone will have more to drink soon. Think about that the next time you hear someone say, “Our current rate of consumption is unsustainable.”
Trust me; I’m older and have more insurance.
Footnotes
[iii] According to “The Shale Gas Shock” by Ridley, “World energy consumption is less than 500 exajoules per year, equivalent to approximately 500 TCF (trillion cubic feet of natural gas). Thus recoverable shale gas resources of, say, 8,000 Tcf (i.e., 20-30% of in-place resources) would last at least a century if their consumption displaced half of conventional gas use (which is 23% of total energy use). In January 2011 the International Energy Agency raised its estimate of how long world gas reserves will actually last to quarter of a millennium.”
[iv] Ridley, Matt. Wrong about running out. http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/wrong-about-running-out
[v] Lomborg, Bjorn. 2000. The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World.
During June, two items hit the news involving unsavory (to some) food options.
The first was a letter to the Record-Bee from a local organic grower taking me to task for my column, “Something Fishy This Way Comes.” The grower accused me of being against “choice.” She contended, if genetically modified (GM) food is not labeled, how can people choose not to eat it?
The second was a story about Japanese scientists developing a technique to make food from poop. You can imagine that a number of news outlets, including Fox News, were all over this story like stink on…well…you know what. According to the reports, human excrement is supposedly packed with protein and carbohydrates. All the Japanese scientists need do is combine poop with a “reaction enhancer,” then put it in a “magical machine…and artificial steak comes out the other end.”[i] Okaaaay, that sounds really appetizing.
Even though the second story is actually just a resilient urban legend,[ii] let’s run a thought experiment and pretend it is true. (“Thought experiment” sounds so much brainier than daydreaming, doesn’t it?). Let’s pretend a fast food chain has entered into an agreement with the nearby community sewage treatment plant to harness the culinary potential of its solid waste. Our (of course) fictitious fast food chain uses the magical Japanese machine and voila, s**t sandwiches, turd tacos, s**t burritos and even s**t on a stick.
Should the fast food’s products be labeled to say that they came directly out of someone’s colon? The argument to require labeling says yes. It goes something like this: We do not want to eat that stuff, and we have a representative government, so our government (federal, state, or local) should require such unappetizing food to be labeled for what it is.
You might think you want the source to be labeled, but I don’t think you do.
But, you may be saying, without labeling we might eat s**t! That’s true, but if you do not properly prepare organic produce, you also might eat s**it. According to the conservative think tank Center for Global Food Issues, using 1999 data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, while only one percent of the United States food supply is organic, it accounts for eight percent of food related disease in the U.S. primarily due to a deadly new strain of E. coli bacteria (O157:H7)”[iii] found in cow excrement which may be used as organic fertilizer.
At present, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requires labeling for specific reasons. If a food is significantly different than its name, the food’s name must be changed to describe the difference. If it has a significantly different nutritional property from its counterpart, its label must reflect the difference.[iv] And, if a food has a potential safety issue, there must be a statement on the label describing the issue; such as if a new food includes an allergen that consumers would not expect to be present based on the name of the food, the presence of that allergen must be disclosed on the label.[v]
The inconvenient truth is that GM products are as safe as any other food products; whether poop meat would be we might never know. The World Health Organization (WHO), the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, and food agencies in the United States and Europe say GM foods currently on the market pose no health risk.
The reasons for a government to require special labeling should be for safety issues, not lifestyle choices. In areas of simple choice, it is not the government’s responsibility to require labeling of the provenance of a food’s origin.
Let’s be clear: the eating of GM food is not a safety issue. GM food falls into the same category as Jewish Kosher or Moslem Sharia law food: that is, that labeling is important to the followers of that ethic. Producers of non-GM, just as producers of Kosher or Sharia food, are free to label their food as such. But, if you really feel that you want to avoid GM, you can eat organic food exclusively.
The call for labeling implies that GM food should be avoided because the food is “unnatural.” This is the “ick” factor that happens with new technology; a 1969 Harris poll found a majority of Americans believed in vitro fertilization (“test tube babies”) was “against God’s will.” In less than a decade, those against had dropped to 28 percent with 60 percent pro-IVF.[vi] Because beliefs evolve, the FDA requires labels on food to safeguard our health, not our beliefs. That is the straight poop.
Here is the bottom line: you are free to follow your beliefs; that is your choice.
[i] Japanese Scientists Create Meat From Poop – FoxNews.com. http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/06/17/japanese-scientists-create-meat-from-poop/ (accessed July 17, 2011)
[ii] It appears to be one of those urban legends that crop up from time to time that sound crazy and, given our accelerating pace of technological advance, plausible at the same time. See: The mystery of the Japanese “poop burger” story. http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2011/06/23/japan_feces_meat_viral (accessed July 17, 2011)
[iii] Wallace Institute Got it Wrong. http://www.cgfi.org/1999/02/wallace-institute-got-it-wrong/
[iv] Guidance for Industry: Voluntary Labeling Indicating Whether … (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.fda.gov/food/guidancecomplianceregulatoryinformation/guidancedocuments/foodlabelingnutrition/ucm059098.htm
[v] Guidance for Industry: Voluntary Labeling Indicating Whether … (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.fda.gov/food/guidancecomplianceregulatoryinformation/guidancedocuments/foodlabelingnutrition/ucm059098.htm
This is an op-ed piece that William Wade Keye* submitted to the Sacramento Bee at the beginning of July, in response to two articles (“State to assess Battle Creek logging activity and effect on salmon” and “Troubled waters of Battle Creek“) and an editorial (“Governor needs to keep pledge at Battle Creek”) they published highlighting purported environmental damage in the Battle Creek watershed. It is published here with his permission.
Recent Sacramento Bee articles pitting clearcut logging against salmon recovery efforts in the Battle Creek watershed whittle complex resource management issues down to a false, if convenient, dichotomy. Such eco-populism is understandable, but its assumptions need to be challenged.
To foresters, clearcutting is the dreaded “C word”. If there ever was a candidate to lose a sylvan popularity contest, that would be clearcutting. It’s ugly and widely viewed as environmentally destructive.
Even most loggers don’t like the look of a fresh clearcut, which typically appears as if a bomb just went off.
Clearcuts are disturbing. Hence, the “C word”.
Why would any landowner in their right mind choose this apparently abominable practice? Yes, I know the stock answer: greed, short-term profits and all that. Rape the land and leave nothing for the future.
I’m not going to argue that people who own working forests aren’t in it for the money, although I think there’s much more to it than that. But sure, they want to make the land pay.
Farmers don’t farm just for their health, or for somebody else’s aesthetic pleasure. They do it to live, to make the land pay.
Forest landowners are the same. Wood, like corn, soybeans or pork bellies, is a valuable commodity. We use forest products in almost countless ways, everyday. Our wood has to come from somewhere, which leads us to forest management and the pros and cons of various silvicultural practices.
The Bee articles critical of clearcutting contain implicit assumptions driven by aesthetics. Dominant is the view that more aesthetically pleasing practices, such as selection timber harvest, are preferable for fish habitat because they produce less sedimentation.
Evidence-based science does not uniformly back this intuitive belief. The reason is that even-age management (including clearcutting) impacts a given piece of forestland much less frequently than uneven-age systems (such as selection). Impacts are greater (KABOOM!) but less recurrent.
Forestry is a uniquely long term enterprise. If a clearcut is prescribed, the “bomb” goes off, seedlings are planted and the site may not be disturbed again for decades. Access roads and skid trails can be put to bed and remain so until the stand is ready to harvest again – typically in 50-80 years.
It is said that “nature abhors a vacuum”. Tree growth that follows successful (and legally required) reforestation after a clearcut illustrates this principle perfectly. Young trees reach for the sky, drinking up abundant sunlight and soil nutrients.
In contrast, the classic selection harvest requires the forest to be managed on a fairly continual basis. Periodic light harvests are generally spaced 10-15 years apart. During each entry, access roads and trails must be reopened – triggering new potential bursts of sediment delivery to aquatic systems.
Although counter-intuitive, it is possible that if even-age management were prohibited in the Battle Creek watershed, the cumulative effects as far as soil transport and sediment delivery would actually be greater. Uneven-age management would be considered more pleasing to the eye, but could mask impacts potentially more damaging to salmon recovery.
Finally, the Battle Creek articles did a disservice by pitting timber harvest against fish, a zero sum duality that ignores the many factors contributing to our difficulty in restoring anadromous salmonids. Those threats include dams and water diversions, in-stream habitat loss and degradation, polluted runoff, oceanic factors including predation, fishing, poaching – the list goes on.
I believe forestry belongs on that list, along with urbanization, agriculture, industry – all of us. It’s just too easy to single out clearcutting, ugly as it is.
Because nature really does abhor a vacuum, one really should visit a forest plantation a few years, or a few decades, after a clearcut “bomb” has gone off. It’s impossible to deny how impressive a vigorously growing young forest can be, how amazingly regenerative nature really is especially after a clearcut – which in some ways mimics the effect of a wildfire.
These kinds of images don’t seem to show up in the media when the “C Word” comes up.
And remember, regardless of the aesthetics of any given silvicultural system, we get to use the wood fiber that flows off a managed forest, creating homegrown wealth, jobs, tax receipts, energy and valuable products.
*William Wade Keye is a California Registered Professional Forester and former Chair of the Northern California Society of American Foresters
Stewart Brand provided a synopsis of Peter Kareiva’s talk given at the Long Now Foundation.
In general, environmentalist have earned the reputation of being “misanthropic, anti-technology, anti-growth, dogmatic, purist, zealous, exclusive pastoralists.”
Kareiva gave several examples of how that reputation was earned. In Green rhetoric, everything in nature is described as “fragile!”—rivers, forests, the whole planet. It’s manifestly untrue. America’s eastern forest lost two of its most dominant species—the american chestnut and the passenger pigeon—and never faltered. Bikini Atoll was vaporized in an H-bomb test that boiled the ocean. When National Geographic sent a research team there recently, they found 25% more coral than was ever there before. The Deepwater Horizon oil disaster last year caused dramatically less harm to salt marshes and fisheries than expected, apparently because ocean bacteria ate most of the 5 million barrels of oil.
The problem with the fragility illusion is that it encourages a misplaced purism, leaving no room for compromise or negotiation, and it leads to “fortress conservation”—the idea that the only way to protect “fragile” ecosystems is to exclude all people.
“When things are fragile, and you’re convinced that they’re fragile, it puts you in a position where you do not negotiate. Because, if you just give a little–because it’s fragile–it’ll be broken, like that.” – Peter Kareiva, Chief Scientist & Director of Science at The Nature Conservancy.
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Matt Ridley spoke in March 2011 at the Long Now FoundMatt Ridley spoke in March 2011 at the Long Now Foundation. Dr Ridley was the science editor for the Economist and has written several books. The latest is The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves..
Ridley makes compelling arguments that for me made sense, and for the first time I could see how economics, evolution, and ecology fit together. Economics is primarily the study of incentives. Ecology and evolution are the results of incentives.
This video is 100 minutes, and well worth the time. If you would prefer a podcast, the Long Now Foundation has them on iTunes.
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ation. Dr Ridley was the science editor for the Economist and has written several books. The latest is The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves..
Ridley makes compelling arguments that for me made sense, and for the first time I could see how economics, evolution, and ecology fit together. Economics is primarily the study of incentives. Ecology and evolution are the results of incentives.
This video is 100 minutes, and well worth the time. If you would prefer a podcast, the Long Now Foundation has them on iTunes.
http://fora.tv/embedded_player
Related articles, courtesy of Zemanta:
Peter Kareiva, the chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy is well worth listening to. He recently gave a seminar at the Long Now Foundation. Stewart Brand, who hosts the Seminars About Long-term Thinking, noted this from Kareiva’s talk:
In Green rhetoric, everything in nature is described as “fragile!”—rivers, forests, the whole planet. It’s manifestly untrue. America’s eastern forest lost two of its most dominant species—the american chestnut and the passenger pigeon—and never faltered. Bikini Atoll was vaporized in an H-bomb test that boiled the ocean. When National Geographic sent a research team there recently, they found 25% more coral than was ever there before. The Deepwater Horizon oil disaster last year caused dramatically less harm to salt marshes and fisheries than expected, apparently because ocean bacteria ate most of the 5 million barrels of oil.
http://longnow.org/static/djlongnow_media/widgets/jw_player/player.swf
Nullius in Verba 