Humans and the Environment

Spirituality, Ethics and Natural Resources II

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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?

Exploring Environmental Despair

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This is an "image" of space junk.
This is an “image” of space junk.
I’m taking a break from posting the Festschrift paper to do some reflection on the topic of how people perceive the environmental situation. It’s interesting to me for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that humans have lots of problems to work on and yet some seem to be uniquely pessimistic about the environment (not violence, hunger or disease, bullying, war, etc.) Since I am now in a business that seeks to do away with all bad things, I feel that the gloomy cloud that has settled around our perception of humans and the environment could use some further exploration.

There was an interesting article in New Scientist this week here about changing to a more sustainable future… I hope you can see all of it without a subscription, but below is an excerpt andhereis the essay in Word.

Still, that doesn’t tell us how to get there from here. Again there’s no shortage of ideas. Ecologists, economists and politicians have proposed many initiatives to foster sustainability. Most repurpose tools we are familiar with – international agreements, laws and regulations, taxes and subsidies, plus new technologies. Others are more radical, advocating structural changes to key institutions such as banking and finance, corporations, land and resource ownership, and government. Many individuals, grass-roots groups such as the Transition Network, businesses such as Unilever, universities, cities such as Vancouver, and a few nations, including Iceland and Bhutan, are putting these ideas into practice.

Of course, most of us are not green crusaders. Yet we are already changing our lives, our work patterns and what we consume in ways that suggest the drive for sustainability may be pushing at an open door. For a start, we are driving less. The annual distance travelled by UK car and van drivers fell by 7 per cent between 1995 and 2012. Germany, Australia, Japan and even the US all report the same trend. Why is that? Cost is a factor: young people are learning to drive later, put off by the price. We are also driving less to see friends and making fewer trips to the shops and to work by car – the rise in urban living, social media, online shopping and digital homeworking are seeing to that.

Driving less, and walking and cycling more are seen as positive lifestyle choices these days and are increasingly a feature of city living. Dense urban populations make recycling and other resource use more efficient, too. That doesn’t mean a return to slums. If building materials can be produced sustainably and houses can be designed to be carbon-neutral, people can still live in ample and comfortable homes, says Mary Ritter, head of the European Union’s climate innovation centre Climate KIC.

Porritt believes that the biggest changes will come in response to large popular movements galvanised by droughts, floods, famines and other crises. “Suddenly there’s a shock to the system, and re-evaluation kicks in big time,” he says. Yet some changes just happen and we hardly notice, such as putting out the recycling or insulating our lofts.

One of the most important is that we are having fewer children. Today the average woman has 2.43 children, fewer than half as many as 40 years ago. There is big population growth still to come in some places, especially sub-Saharan Africa where there is less access to contraception. But after quadrupling in the 20th century, the world’s population, currently at 7 billion, is unlikely to rise by more than 50 per cent before settling down. So we can think about how we do sustainability with a stable population, rather than one that is continually growing.

Population is only one part of the equation, of course. Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, points out that the amount of stuff people use and the resources needed to produce that stuff are the other issues we need to worry about. In the developed world, at least, there is growing evidence that we have reached “peak stuff”. Individuals and society have got richer, and the rate at which we use resources has levelled off. Homes and factories are becoming more energy and water efficient and much of our new technology is smaller and lighter, reducing the amount of materials required to make them. So in many ways, the developed world is already dematerialising. The challenge is breaking the historic link between prosperity and energy and resource use fast enough.

This week I happened to spend a great deal of time organizing my electronic entertainment so this article highlighted some things I noticed… I used to drive around and shop, now I don’t. If RS is closer and has price match with BB, I won’t be driving to BB. Shelves of CDs are now on a jump drive. Shelves of sheet music are also on a jump drive.

But there are a couple of assumptions I would argue with.. 1) “cities are better for the environment and people” and 2) “meat is always worse” for the environment. If indeed transportation becomes based on renewable energy sources, I guess we would be reducing it by living in cities because.. (?) And locally meat may be the only food able to be locally produced due to cold or dryness or both.

That evening I was listening to WNYC (the Jonathan Channel, my favorite radio program) and ran across this:

Turn away from factory farmed meat. Instead of trying to get everyone to become a vegetarian, which is an impossible goal, Martins focuses on improving our food system and getting rid of factory farms. “It’s better to construct an action-based result.” Martins said. “ I believe in creating a solution rather than creating a utopia that will probably never exist.”

It seems like many things are getting better due to people’s awareness and economic drivers. Note the question at the end of the essay is whether the link between prosperity and energy and resource use will be broken “fast enough”. We have moved from worry about the ultimate condition being bad to worrying about the speed at which we approach a positive outcome, isn’t that something to celebrate. It does leave the question “not fast enough” for whom or what?

Bipartisan poll finds broad support for public land conservation in Montana

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Not sure what to make of this –

“Of those polled, 48 percent listed conservation issues as the primary factor in supporting elected officials and 38 percent they were somewhat important. Conservation issues were less important for 9 percent and not important to 4 percent.”

“When asked if protecting public lands in Montana has generally been more of a good or bad thing, 78 percent responded “good” and 15 percent “bad.””

“A slim majority of 51 percent favored protecting more lands as wilderness.”

But of course, “it probably will not affect how legislators vote …” 

Natural amenities, “the creative class” and economic success

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This map got my attention because of the disproportionate amount of “green” in the rural intermountain west.  In this case it means counties have a disproportionately high number of employees in jobs like management, finance, technology, engineering, science, sales, entertainment and non-primary education (and of course lawyering).

“The creative-class thesis holds that communities that attract and retain more workers who are in creative occupations will fare better in today’s economy.” 

From the background paper linked to this article:

“Richard Florida’s Rise of the Creative Class makes a compelling argument that urban development now depends on novel combinations of knowledge and ideas, that certain occupations specialize in this task, that people in these occupations are drawn to areas providing a high quality of life, and that the essential development strategy is to create an environment that attracts and retains these workers. While developed with urban areas in mind, this thesis may be particularly relevant in rural areas, which lose much of their young talent as high school graduates leave for college, the armed forces, or “city lights.”  Our analysis of recent development in rural U.S. counties, which focuses on natural amenities (for which ERS has also computed county-level scores) as quality-of-life indicators, supports the creative class thesis.”

So, perceived natural amenities attract creative workers who improve local economies.  With a caveat that “growth and success among creative-class workers doesn’t necessarily extend economic benefits to other parts of the economy, such as blue-collar and service workers, at least in metro areas.”  (All wages go up, but housing costs go up more.)

So maybe all this is saying is to get the right kind of education so you can do well and live in a nice place, but it might also paint a promising picture for these rural “green” counties.

 

New Dogwood Alliance Video Exposes Wood Pellet Industry Impact on Rural Communities

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The following is a guest post from the Dogwood Alliance’s Scot Quaranda. mk

We thought you might be interested in our new video…

Dogwood Alliance is proud to release our investigative video Our Forests Aren’t Fuel: Injustice in Northampton

While Southern wetlands are going Up in Smoke so European Governments can meet their renewable energy targets, our forests and communities are hit the hardest. From Virginia to Florida, along the Mississippi River and throughout the South the negative impact on our communities has become clearer every day, and the Injustice in NorthamptonCounty in northeastern North Carolina is no different.

Residents in this rural community close to the Enviva Northampton plant now face 24/7 extreme noise and lights, dust that coats cars, buildings and lungs in just a few minutes of exposure, along with dangerous, heavy truck traffic. The Northampton community quickly rallied and are working with Dogwood Alliance and Clean Water For North Carolina to bring the attention of local officials to the conditions that Enviva forces them to live with every day.

For more information on the Our Forests Aren’t Fuel campaign visit here.

To read more about the situation in Northampton and how locals are fighting back visit here.

Best,

Scot Quaranda
Dogwood Alliance

Southern Pine Beetle in New Jersey: NY Times

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spbnj

In Book Club we have been talking about whether scientists still refer to the balance of nature, and equilibrium kinds of conditions. So for the purposes of NCFP, I think it’s interesting to pursue this mystery with stories in real time. Thanks to Dan Botkin for sending this NY Times article:

Notice that “scientists say it is a striking example of how.. are disturbing the balance of nature”. But no actual scientist is mentioned saying this.

In an infestation that scientists say is almost certainly a consequence of global warming, the southern pine beetle is spreading through New Jersey’s famous Pinelands.

It tried to do so many times in the past, but bitterly cold winters would always kill it off. Now, scientists say, the winters are no longer cold enough. The tiny insect, firmly entrenched, has already killed tens of thousands of acres of pines, and it is marching northward.

Scientists say it is a striking example of the way seemingly small climatic changes are disturbing the balance of nature. They see these changes as a warning of the costly impact that is likely to come with continued high emissions of greenhouse gases.

The disturbances are also raising profound questions about how to respond. Old battles about whether to leave nature alone or to manage it are being rejoined as landscapes come under stress.

The New Jersey situation resembles, on a smaller scale, the outbreak of mountain pine beetles that has ravaged tens of millions of acres of forest across the Western United States and Canada. That devastation, too, has been attributed to global warming — specifically, the disappearance of the bitterly cold winter nights that once kept the beetles in check.

But the same bark beetle outbreaks have been seen in the past and we have been told in Colorado (by scientists) that bark beetles and fires are “natural disturbances.” Also, fire suppression must have a role or there wouldn’t be so much prime old lodgepole habitat. Perhaps it’s the location and magnitude that are different, but that’s a bit of a finer point.

Now there is an identified scientist, who says…

Dr. Ayres, one of the nation’s top beetle experts, has studied New Jersey closely for several years and has published research saying the rising temperatures have made the invasion possible. “I think the scientific inference is about as good as it gets,” Dr. Ayres said. “This is a big deal, and it’s going to forever change the way forests have to be managed in New Jersey.”

Ah.. here is the overstocked argument; my italics on “unnatural.”

Long ago, fires would have helped keep the forest more open, but they have been suppressed across much of the country for a century to protect life and property. That has left many forests in an overgrown, unnatural condition.

Experience in the South has shown that such “overstocked stands,” as foresters call them, are especially vulnerable to beetle attack because the trees are too stressed fighting one another for light, water and nutrients. Control of the pine beetle has been achieved there by thinning the woods, leaving the remaining trees stronger.

Mr. Williams, who is critical of New Jersey’s government, advocates a similar approach, involving controlled burns and selective tree-cutting. Mr. Smith, whose college degrees include one in environmental science, pushed through a bill that would have encouraged the state to manage its forests more aggressively. But several environmental groups were suspicious that large-scale logging would ensue.

“We saw this legislation as an excuse to come in under the guise of ‘stewardship’ to open up our forests for commercial operations,” said Jeff Tittel, the director of the state’s Sierra Club chapter.

I like the Guv’s attitude:

To allay such fears, the senator included a requirement that any state forest plan receive certification from an outside body, the Forest Stewardship Council, which is trusted by many environmental groups.

That approach has been followed successfully in other states, including Maryland. But Gov. Chris Christie vetoed the bill, saying he could not allow the state to “abdicate its responsibility to serve as the state’s environmental steward to a named third party.”

Below is my bolding:

Dr. Ayres said that if climatic warming continues, nothing would stop them from eventually heading up the coast. That means forest management is likely to become critical in many places where it has been neglected for decades.

“It’s hard for some people to accept — ‘What, you have to cut down trees to save the forest?’ ” Dr. Ayres said. “Yes, that’s exactly right. The alternative is losing the forest for saving the trees.”

Well, I would only argue that the only thing stopping them would be hosts.. which are relatively fewer to the north.

So we have an article in which the quoted scientist is pragmatic about “things used to be different, now they have changed and we have to deal with it.” But we have only the writer’s claim that

“scientists say it is a striking example of the way seemingly small climatic changes are disturbing the balance of nature. They see these changes as a warning of the costly impact that is likely to come with continued high emissions of greenhouse gases.

Still, old pine trees will still die, with or without the pine beetle. And if we can’t burn them to get rid of the tree corpses, they will hang around and ultimately fall over and decay, quicker in hot climates than in the Rockies. Is that what the people of New Jersey want from their forests?

And the Sierra Club guy seems a bit ideological. Local sourcing of things is good but making money from dead trees is bad, because it’s “commercial.” I thought the Sierra Club’s antipathy for selling dead trees was just for federal lands, but maybe not?

Aerial view of the 1987 Complex Fire Salvage

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I took this shot while flying with a Forest Service buddy in 1989.

Aerial-1987-complex-web

I am pretty sure that this is Forest Service land, near the Groveland Ranger District office. When I worked there in 1990, the Timber Management Officer was still angry at the less-than-aggressive post-fire salvage efforts that allowed so many “brain dead” trees to die and add to the fuel loading. I’m sure that all those dead trees had some green needles on them as salvage logging was proceeding. As you can clearly see in the photo, there are PLENTY of snags left in this HUGE wildfire zone. This isn’t even where the fire burned hot. The subsequent bark beetle bloom spread northward, chewing up forests more than 100 miles away. On the Eldorado, our Ranger District harvested 300 million board feet, between 1989 and 1992, of dead and dying timber from the severe bark beetle infestation. We were lucky, able to slide our EIS into place before the litigators could gather their case together. The Tahoe National Forest was too slow, and lost 2 years worth of salvage logging opportunities, turning merchantable dead trees into future wildfire fuels.

The Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit was also hard hit, and slow to react. Here is a 1990 view of the north end of the Lake Tahoe Basin. My first two summers in the Forest Service were spent at the top of that mountain as the Martis Peak fire lookout. Of course, there are a LOT more dying trees up there than just the brown trees. So many of those trees became unmerchantable before they could be salvaged, as the public and eco-groups hoped that “nature” would take care of the problem. Since fire suppression in the Tahoe Basin is ensured, most of those dead trees are now horizontal, and perfectly preserved as fuels for the next big, destructive, erosion-causing, lake-polluting disaster.

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Plantation Thinning Success on the Rim Fire

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Derek tipped me off about the new BAER fire severity maps, yesterday, and I was happy to see that the efforts to thin plantations has resulted in lower fire intensities. Here is the link to both high and low resolution maps. It is not surprising that fire intensities outside of this thinning project I worked on were much higher, and I doubt that there was much survival in the unthinned plantations. Those plantations were the within the 1971 Granite Fire, and is yet another example of forest re-burn. This part of the fire has terrain that is relatively gentle, compared to the rest of the burned areas. To me, it is pretty clear that fuels modifications reduced fire intensities.

This photo below shows a boundary between burn intensities. The area east of road 2N89 was thinned and burned much cooler than the untreated areas to the west. The areas in between the plantations had moderate to high burn intensities, due to the thick manzanita and whitethorn. Those areas were left to “recover on their own”. The SPI lands did not fare as well, as they didn’t thin their plantations.

Rim-Fire-plantations

The highest burn intensities occurred in the old growth, near the Clavey River. Activists have long-cherished the areas around this river, and I am assuming that these were protected as spotted owl/goshawk PACs. As you can see, this area has very thick old growth, and it shows on the map as high intensity. This same scenario is one that Wildlife Biologists have been worrying about for many years, now. These wildlife areas have huge fuel-loading issues and choked understories. Prescribed fires cannot be safely accomplished in such areas, without some sort of fuels modifications. Last year, I worked in one unit (within an owl PAC) on the Eldorado where we were cutting trees between 10″ and 15″ dbh, so that it could be safely burned, within prescription.

Clavey-old-growth

Nearly all of the Groveland Ranger District’s old growth is now gone, due to wildfires in the last 50 years. What could we have done differently, in the last 20 years?

Moon and the Nautilus Shell VBC II. The Ecosystem Idea and O’Neill’s Critique

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oneill

As I read it, the key question in Botkin’s book is found on page xii on my Kindle..

“Whatever the scientist’s knowledge of the dynamic, changing properties of nature, the formal representations of these remove such considerations in most cases…whether or not environmental scientists know about geological time and evolutionary biology, their policies ignore them. It is strange, ironic and contradictory.”

My feeling is that the locus of these contradictions may lie in the competitive forces among scientific disciplines and ideas, competing for power and funding. When I was a graduate student at Yale, I shared an office with the Hubbard Brookians..they had a way of looking at the world measuring N P and K and applying systems thinking. But there were others around who simply observed or did experiments in manipulating organisms. At the time, these were all equally legitimate approaches to studying Nature- in our minds, if not those of the Big Funding Agencies, such as NSF. Since I had taken History of Science, I understood their (the BFA’s) peculiar attraction to the Mathematical and Abstract; and understood that the rest of us were little more than flower collectors in the hierarchy of Science. And that was OK with us, because our science was more of an interplay or conversation with Nature.. in population genetics we looked for mathematical equilibria but never found them. Ideas, measure, more ideas, more measurement, that was our conversation with Nature. We used math to explore ideas, but we did not have external ideas that we tested Nature against.

To clarify, I do use the term “ecosystem”; if we had talked about “prairies” in the past , the “prairie ecosystem” is handy because it denotes all the critters, plant, animal, insects, fungus, bacteria, viruses, water, soil- all of which we had studied before. We had studied them and their interactions with the environment, but at the time we might call ourselves “wildlife or fish biologists” “plant physiologists” “soil scientists” “entomologists” or “silviculturists”(applied vegetation ecologists). We even had a course at Yale called “genecology” but what else would creatures adapt to other than the environment? My point is that we were all studying things and their relation to the environment, which would make us all “ecologists,” I guess. Except that our language was not about equilibria, attractors, functions, etc. These are all abstractions that came from systems theory. It’s legitimate, I think to question how helpful these abstractions have been and continue to be.

But don’t believe me. Check out this 2001 piece.. Is It Time to Bury the Ecosystem Concept? (With full military honors, of course) by Robert V. O’Neill. The ideas he raised in 2001 are as current as the “ecosystem integrity” requirement in the 2012 Planning Rule.

The term ecosystem was coined by Tansley in 1935. But as Botkin (1990) points out, the underlying concept goes back at least to Marsh (1864). Nature was viewed as relatively constant in the face of change and repaired
itself when disrupted, returning to its previous balanced state. Clements (1905, 1916) and Elton (1930) offered plant and animal succession as basic processes that permitted relative constancy by repairing damage.
Forbes (1925) described the northern lake as a microcosm, a relatively closed, self-regulating system, an archetypic ecosystem.

Science emerged from the Second World War with a new paradigm, Systems Analysis (e.g., Bode 1945), which seemed uniquely suited for this ‘‘balance of nature’’ concept, and fit well with earlier work on the stability of interacting populations (Nicholson and Bailey 1935). Systems Analysis dealt with complex systems as interconnected components with feedback
loops (Hutchinson 1948) that stabilized the system at a relatively constant equilibrium point. Systems Analysis can be seen underlying E. P. Odum’s (1953) definition of the ecosystem as a ‘‘. . . natural unit that
includes living and nonliving parts interacting to pro duce a stable system in which the exchange of materials between the living and nonliving parts follows circular paths . . . .’’

The machine analogy, inherent in Systems Analysis, became a central paradigm for many ecologists (Odum 1971, Holling 1973, Waide and Webster 1976). The paradigm offered a practical approach to the enormous
complexity of natural systems (Teal 1962, Van Dyne 1969). The paradigm helped harness the power of the computer in ecosystem models (Olson 1963). The paradigm permitted a holistic view of system properties
such as nutrient cycling (Webster et al. 1974). The familiarity of the machine analogy facilitated the communication of ecological concepts to the public.
If the ecosystem concept has held such a central place in ecology and been so productive of new ideas, why call it into question? The simple fact is that the ecosystem is not an a posteriori, empirical observation
about nature. The ecosystem concept is a paradigm (sensu Kuhn 1962), an a priori intellectual structure, a specific way of looking at nature. The paradigm emphasizes and focuses on some properties of nature, while ignoring and de-emphasizing others. After a half century of application, the paradigm is showing some rust. Limitations in the concept are becoming more apparent and leading to a vigorous backlash toward ecosystem concepts in particular, and ecology in general.

One more story. When I was working for the FS in R&D we did a review of one of the Research Stations. One of the administrators there was a big aficionado of systems thinking. One of the scientists had done this fascinating study (to me) of how fish move around in streams and discovered something very useful that hadn’t been known before. I thought it was great work. This administrator, though, felt that “organismal biology is passe, it’s all about systems, now.” In arguing that this scientist should be better appreciated, I stated “you can’t understand systems without understanding their components” to which he replied “oh, yes you can.. it’s about flows among boxes and you don’t need to understand what’s in them.”

So you may say “this guy was off the wall, and not in the mainstream.” Well, that could be true. Still the reason I’m telling the story is that to point out that people can cross the line from systems being 1) one way of conceiving of how nature works, to 2) the best way of conceiving how nature works, to 3) how nature works. And somewhere along that line, the empiricism that “science” claims as its basis for legitimacy gets left behind.

To comment, please go to the Virtual Book Club site here.

Floods, Climate and Fires- Front Range, Sept. 2013

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BOULDER_FLOOD

The history of flooding and economic and social hardships is related, of course, to ideas of Nature and to Book Club topics. However, in the interest of topical and timely information, I thought that this piece by Roger Pielke, Jr. is relevant and worth posting outside of Book Club.

Here’s his blog post, titled “Against the 100 year flood.”

He cited his paper the Nine Fallacies of Floods (apparently peer-reviewed, for those who watch that). It’s well worth a read, and a comparison to the western wildfire situation.

No matter what the climate future holds, flood impacts on society may continue to get worse. A study conducted by the U.S. Congressional Office of Technology Assessment concluded that ‘despite recent efforts, vulnerability to flood damages is likely to continue to grow’ (OTA, 1993, p. 253). The study based this conclusion on the following factors, which have very little to do with climate:
1. Populations in and adjacent to flood-prone areas, especially in coastal areas, continue to increase, putting more property and greater numbers of people at risk,
2. flood-moderating wetlands continue to be destroyed,
3. little has been done to control or contain increased runoff from upstream
development (e.g., runoff caused by paving over land),
4. many undeveloped areas have not yet been mapped (mapping has been concentrated in already-developed areas), and people are moving into such areas without adequate information concerning risk,
5. many dams and levees are beginning to deteriorate with age, leaving property owners with a false sense of security about how well they are protected,
6. some policies (e.g., provision of subsidies for building roads and bridges) tend to encourage development in flood plains.
At a minimum, when people blame climate change for damaging flood events, they direct attention away from the fact that decision makers already have the means at their disposal to significantly address the documented U.S. flood problem.

I also thought his cite of the hydrologist and climate change science communities’ discussion of stationarity was interesting. If hydrologists and climatologists disagree, how can we point to “science” as a path forward? Maybe we have to gird our loins, use our own brains and experiences, and talk to people (and their elected officials) about what they think are the best approaches to policy choices.

Here’s the link to the stationarity paper… only have the abstract due to lack of open access.

After 2½ days of discussion it became clear that the assembled community had yet to reach an agreement on whether or not to replace the assumption of stationarity with an assumption of nonstationarity or something else. Hydrologists were skeptical that data gathered to this point in the 21st Century point to any significant change in river parameters. Climatologists, on the other hand, point to climate change and the predicted shift away from current conditions to a more turbulent flood and drought filled future. Both groups are challenged to provide immediate guidance to those individuals in and outside the water community who today must commit funds and efforts on projects that will require the best estimates of future conditions. The workshop surfaced many approaches to dealing with these challenges. While there is good reason to support additional study of the death of stationarity, its implications, and new approaches, there is also a great need to provide those in the field the information they require now to plan, design, and operate today’s projects.

I have a good deal of sympathy for the hydrologists; getting dam management wrong can have more serious and life-threatening implications in either drought or flood conditions than planting trees. If we don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, we need to be flexible and pay attention to what’s really happening on the land. And not so much models. Just a thought.