The latest multiple-use

Pop-up shops!  What is a pop-up shop?  They are defined by someone who provides them as “temporary retail spaces that sell merchandise of any kind … Pop-up shops are taking over the retail world and rethinking traditional brick-and-mortar and big-box stores…”    The National Forest Foundation apparently had to jump on this bandwagon with Busch beer.  So here you go …. ,  a pop-top pop-up shop, coming to a national forest near you.

Conservation lands in many places have been overrun by crowds attracted by social media.  This seems like it has the same potential.  It would be interesting to look at the NEPA analysis for these permits.  (Do you suppose it’s in grizzly bear habitat?)

Maybe they should just sell this national forest land?

Steve Sanders addressed the board on the issue of the landfill nearing capacity. Sanders stated the landfill is expected to meet capacity sometime in the summer 2018. The plan for expansion has been on the books for a number of years. The expansion will cap in 5-7 years and then will require Gila County to have a new site to continue to collect municipal solid waste to dispose of for the northern part of the county. They have already started discussions with the Forest Service to acquire land around the Buckhead Mesa Landfill as it’s on a special use permit from the Tonto National Forest.

When someone argues that the Forest Service isn’t complying with the Multiple-Use Sustained Yield Act because a particular use excludes others, show them this example.  I suppose you could camp here … or how about a shooting range?

Spirituality, Ethics and Natural Resources II

gaia
Bob’s first question was:Are there any spiritual values associated with natural resource management?
If not, should there be?

Bob’s second question is:
If so, what’s the fundamental legal/moral/ethical basis?

My favorite summary of the issue of thinking about using natural resources ethically is a book by Rushworth Kidder called “How Good People Make Tough Choices.”

What I liked about the book is the direct, down-to-earth language, and his idea that many ethical choices are,
in the words of his preface (2009), “right vs. right” :

The toughest choices lie not in deciding whether to comply with the law, but in choosing what to do when both sides are right. As the world shrinks and complexity grows, those choices provoke the most intellectually challenging and socially significant conversations of our time.”

I’ve attached here about six pages from the book, with his discussion of what he calls “conservation vs. consumption” Below are a couple of excerpts.

Here Kidderkidder on conservation describes different ethical approaches to the problem, ends-based, rule-based, and care-based:

How do our resolution principles help us? Ends-based thinkers, brooding upon consequences, layout sober prophecies of future doom and gloom-on both sides of the issue. Global warming vies for our attention with prognostications of future job losses and welfare increases. To the ends-based thinker, a dose study of such figures, and the methodologies behind them, is essential: How else will we know what “the greatest good” will be? Not surprisingly, then, the policymakers’ well-known penchant for utilitarianism plunges modern society into endless rounds of expert testimony, scientific debate, and statistical saber-rattling-the assumption being that whoever gets it intellectually right will also have captured the moral high ground.

Rule-based thinkers look on all this with wry detachment. The moral sense, to them, has little to do with such arcane debates. What rule, they ask instead, should be universalized? If it is to save species at all costs, then that must be done regardless of consequences. If, on the other hand, it is to honor every individual’s basic human dignity by supplying food and shelter, that must take precedence, no matter what happens. What gives these thinkers the shudders is the spectacle of moral inconsistency, a waffling set of policies that change every few years depending on scientific fashion or public whim. Get the rule right, they argue, and carry it out in full trust that it will produce the highest sense of goodness.

The care-based thinker may well dismiss both these views-the first for its cold disregard of suffering, the second for its rigid demand for consistency. What, they ask, would I want to have done to me? Living in a Dhaka slum, I would want a meal, an education, a job, a sense of hope-not a lecture on saving the whales. Living in a Los Angeles suburb, however, I would want a set of policies that would compel my entire community-myself inc1uded to support alternatives to the gasoline-powered cars whose exhausts once engulfed me in smog.

Placing my highest emphasis on caring for others-and observing that there are more slum-dwellers than suburbanites- I might finally come down more in favor of supporting the former than the latter.

This dilemma also gives us a dear look at another part of the resolution process: locating the trilemma options. Among the most encouraging signs of progress has been the growth of coalitions that involve both environmentalists and developers. From a past filled with the strident animosities of stark opposition, we seem to be moving toward a greater recognition of the fact that like all true dilemmas, this one has a lot of right on both sides. The trilemma goal-saving the environment while at the same time providing economic development-is being met in some areas. Already supermarkets are offering reusable fabric bags as an alternative to plastic ones. The once-ubiquitous water bottle is becoming increasingly unpopular as it becomes clear that not enough people are recycling. Hybrid cars, compact fluorescent light bulbs, and four-minute showers are looking more attractive and affordable as energy prices go up. Ecotourism is on the rise, helping travelers visit unspoiled areas with damaging them. In these and other ways, a resolution process as old as Aristotle’s Golden Mean is on the twenty-first century’s agenda.

In another place, he says:

“To be sure, there are environmentally “clean” jobs in IT,… But even those depend upon the prosperity generated somewhere in the world through a manufacturing base, which almost always involves some exploitation of natural resources. To refuse that exploitation, then is to condemn the world’s poor to continued poverty- a condemnation that seems all the more inequitable when promoted by those in the developed world who already enjoy significant prosperity.”

The idea that “we already exploited our natural resources, and we think you should not exploit yours” can exist within one country, as well as between countries. This can occur anywhere that one location or group of people holds power over another.

Exploiting resources can have health effects and effects on the environment. Poverty can have well-known health effects as well (hopefully I don’t have to cite them). And if we are trying to find a place where use of resources and protecting the environment can coexist, to me it is to be found locally (or at the state level), where the rubber meets the metaphorical road.

Which leads us to the discussion on this blog in 2010 on the ethical approach called “environmental pragmatism” as described by desJardin in his experience with a local environmental issue in his book I linked to here.

I do kind of disagree with Kidder from my perspective as a person who dealt with on-the-ground issues..you can get into vast debates about science and with experts regardless of the ethics behind your choice. Because you have to understand impacts if you care, and because following a rule doesn’t mean that you will get the desired outcome. What do you think?

Spirituality, Ethics and Natural Resources I

Vision of the Earth Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179)
Vision of the Earth Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179)

It’s hard to believe that I didn’t put Bob Berwyn up to this.. but Spirit moves in mysterious ways, especially where this blog is concerned.

Anyway, Bob sent me a message with three questions about this yesterday and wanted to hear from you all in NCFP-land.. I’m going to take each of questions and make a separate post since I think they build on each other. But this whole topic is fundamental to the discussions and perhaps the disagreements we have, and it should be fun to dive in and see where we go.

I’ll start with his first question and my thoughts to kick it off.

Question 1. Are there any spiritual values associated with natural resource management?
If not, should there be?

Yes, there are many spiritual values associated with natural resource management.

A major spiritual value is that we are all one.. connected and connected to a Higher Power (no, not the WTO). This is basic in our nature traditions, in many religions and certainly in Christianity. So I am Matthew and Matthew is Gil and that Best Ferret Forever, and the prairie dog it is eating, and the ticks on the prairie dog, and the viruses on the ticks on the prairie dog, and we are all a part of God and God is a part of all of us (this is a simplification, if you are interested in a theological morass, check out Wikipedia on panentheism here).

A second value, related to the first, is compassion and love. As mushy as this sounds. For people who want their homes protected from wildfires, for fish, for people working in fire suppression, for wolverines, for loggers. Natural resource management has tended to be run by a male-dominated culture (let’s be frank here) so this probably will not be articulated in quite the same way (love) in most of the natural resources literature ;).

There are others.. justice, for example. But take, Jesus for example, if we used KISS theology (thanks, Andy), it’s always about loving your neighbor. And your neighbor can include creatures other than humans.

Spiritual values slide over into ethics, so here are my Ethics and Natural Resource Management Helpful Hints (from when I taught Environmental Ethics at Virginia Tech).

1. Ethics is (are) not a sledgehammer to be used to attack people when you disagree with them. This violates the principle of compassion. I have seen this way too often as a drive-by attack. One reason I decided to learn about it was that, in my experience, people can use it to justify things that don’t make sense on any rational or other basis. And if they’re academics, they can wrap it in a cloak of impenetrable verbiage, but it still doesn’t make sense.

2. Ethical discussions about NRM need to take into account the environment AND people. At the same time. Otherwise, frankly, it’s not very helpful and separates (what Gaia has joined together, let no ethicist put asunder ;)). I think that’s one of the reasons that academic environmental ethics can make practitioners’ eyes glaze over.

3. If you look at the literature, you will find lots of talk about the below values in a) but very little about those in b) and c). I don’t know why. Except that perhaps people who spend their time analyzing can imagine outcomes ,but not so much the details of how these things come about.

a) There are spiritual values associated with outcomes on the land..positives and negatives for different species including humans.

b) There are spiritual values associated with how decisions are made (for example, whose voices are heard?)

c) There are values associated with treating people well who do the work on the land, people in the office, and people who use the land and care about it, and of course people who live in communities on the land.

So there is Bob’s first question and my responses.. your thoughts?