Humans and the Environment

Scientific Assertions That Muddle Ecological Policy- Bob Lackey

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lackey 2013We have posted other work by Bob Lackey here before (you can search in the box to the right).
Scientific Assertions and Ecological Policy – Keynote – Lackey is a keynote address presented at the 58th Annual Meeting of the Great Lakes Fishery Commission, Montreal, Canada, May 29, 2013.

It’s all worth reading, as Bob’s work usually is. Still, I felt the need to extract something to pique your interest, and given the planning directives and rule discussion about plans needing to promote “ecosystem integrity”, I thought that this second assertion is relevant. Here’s one of a series of posts on the concept of “ecosystem integrity” and how it is used in the new planning rule and directives. (Recursive question: if you don’t use the “best science” in developing a rule about how to develop plans, then can you require it in the plans themselves? How can you do the “best science” based on a “not best science” concept? Perhaps a judge will illuminate this apparent contradiction when the time comes…

What happens is that if you think that this is a fact (“natural” is best), then you just need scientists to tell you how not to change them from what they used to be. You also need armies of scientists to study exactly how things “used to be” because even though the climate was different then, and Native Americans were impacting the landscape, somehow that will tell us .. something.. about what we “should” (normative) do in the future.

If it’s simply a values choice, then scientists can be helpful about figuring out how to get there, or reducing negative impacts, but they are not in the driver’s seat. Since I was trained by the “helpful to society” school of science and not the “we know more than the rest of people, so we should tell them what to do” school of science (this came later), it’s not a big loss to me. Because people might even listen to scientists more if they trusted us not to be following their own agendas. IMHO.

Second Scientific Assertion
Now let’s move to a second scientific assertion that needs to be hauled to the nearest landfill, and the sooner, the better:
“Natural ecosystems are superior to human altered ones.”

Who says that natural ecosystems are superior to human altered ones?
This assumption is so pervasive, so commonplace, that some scientists just take it as a self-evident fact.
Perhaps even some in this room.
Let me illustrate how this assertion actually plays out in the scientific enterprise.
From the perspective of a scientist, think about the question of whether or not to dam a river to produce electricity. There is absolutely nothing in science that implies that an undammed river is more, or less, valuable than that same river dammed to generate electricity.
Free flowing rivers, and dammed rivers, are different ecologically, most definitely different, but neither is better or worse until a policy preference is endorsed, until a value judgment is applied.
Applying value judgments, choosing between competing policy preferences, is beyond the scope of science.
But is it common for science to be biased toward the unaltered state of ecosystems, toward natural? Most scientists will answer unflinchingly “no way” — or perhaps “well, at least not my science.”
Let me counter with some data.
For many years, I have surveyed students who take my graduate level policy class. They complete a survey on the first day of the term, a survey to determine inherent policy bias. The result?

There is absolutely no question that, among these students at least, all with bachelor’s degrees and many with master’s degrees in some field of science, there is a strong feeling that natural ecosystems are inherently superior, just somehow better than human altered ones.

Further, most of these students describe unaltered ecosystems as “healthy” and highly altered ecosystems as “degraded.” The implied conclusion: a “healthy” ecosystem is clearly in better shape than a “degraded” one. And further, human alteration is a bad thing, perhaps necessary for providing food or shelter, but still not really a good thing.

Therefore, my conclusion, the term ecosystem “health” presupposes that natural is preferred to human altered. But, and we scientists need to remember this, whether society wants a fish community dominated by Chinook salmon and alewives, or one dominated by lake trout and ciscoes is a policy choice, informed by science, yes, but a policy choice nevertheless.”

“Walkable” communities driving Western mountain housing market

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The south main neighborhood in Buena Vista, Colorado.
The south main neighborhood in Buena Vista, Colorado.

Travis’s post reminds me of this story in the Denver Post business section a few weeks ago, which was deep in my pile of “to be posted.”

Here’s the link to the Post story.

Here’s an excerpt:

BUENA VISTA — Homes within walking distance to shops and restaurants are forecast to drive the housing markets and economies in mountain communities of the interior West as the recession’s effects wane.

That’s according to a recent study of high-country housing trends over the past decade by the Sonoran Institute, a nonprofit public-policy group that advocates for better management of growth in the West. The group’s 60-page study — “Reset, Assessing Future Housing Markets in the Rocky Mountain West” — shows that while homebuyers are willing to pay an average of 18.5 percent more for a house in a walkable mountain neighborhood in the Rocky Mountain West, the supply of homes in or near downtown commercial areas is too small.

“There is growing demand for walkable neighborhoods, and it’s an untapped market opportunity,” said Clark Anderson, director of the Sonoran Institute’s Western Colorado Program.

Looking at homebuying trends in six Western mountain communities from 2000 to 2010, including Eagle, Buena Vista and Carbondale, the group identified a number of trends driving demand for what it called “compact walkable neighborhoods.”

Younger residents are entering the homebuying market and able to work remotely from hamlets formerly occupied by agricultural or service-sector workers. Older people are retiring in the hills and often downsizing. Household incomes are getting smaller and so are household sizes. Limited land supply in recreational mountain valleys is fueling buyer and municipal interest in denser housing projects.

“These are trends that are happening in small communities, large communities, resorts, towns and cities across the Rocky Mountains. Consumer preferences and choices are creating a different-looking housing market from what we have known in the past,” Anderson said.

The Womb of Time: Bill Cronon, Teddy Roosevelt and a Sustainable American Future

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SONY DSC

The following is a guest post by Travis Mason-Bushman

During the first week of my tenure as an impressionable Student Conservation Association intern in the R10 Regional Office’s cube farm back in fall 2010, I was subjected to a mandatory screening of The Greatest Good, the Forest Service’s centennial documentary. In that film lies one of the reasons I ultimately chose to pursue a career with the agency – the summative words of William Cronon:

The work of the Forest Service can and should and must continue into the 21st century and beyond. Because in a way, the issues that this agency has been struggling with since its creation are at the very core of what it means to be a human being on the planet and what it means to build a sustainable human society. And it is the struggle, not just of the United States. It’s the struggle of humanity.

Maybe sappy – check that, combined with the rousing music and soaring visuals, definitely sappy. And yet Cronon’s words rang true. As Jack Ward Thomas noted earlier in the film, we are a species on this planet and like every species, we have to exploit our habitat to survive. We cannot have zero impact on the land. Sarah Gilman is right to point out the hypocrisy trap of NIMBYism, which has too often loomed in the background of environmental debates – “as long as you don’t drill next to my house, I don’t care.” Arguments that we shouldn’t log a single stick from the national forests run headlong into the fact that we do need lumber, we do use paper, we must utilize trees – and if we don’t produce what we use and instead export our environmental damage elsewhere, it is little but NIMBYism writ large. There is and must be a place for sensible, sensitive resource production.

But I was struck by the angry, dismissive responses to Matthew Koehler’s comment that “I, for one, don’t continue to insist on Americans continuing to live as we do now,” as if it is somehow an American birthright to profligately use and abuse the planet’s finite resources far out of proportion to our numbers. This is the true entitlement crisis: the belief that we are entitled to exploit and use up every resource we can possibly get our hands on or our drilling rigs into.

A growing number of Americans, and particularly those of my generation, are recognizing that what modern humans have been doing – “our way of life” – is entirely unsustainable. There is not oil enough on this planet, forest enough on this planet, carbon capacity enough on this planet, for humans to live exactly the way we lived for the last 100 years for the next 100 years. Infinite growth on a finite planet is, quite simply, impossible.

Does that mean we have to go back to the Stone Age? I don’t think so. But does that mean we might rethink decisions about our way of life that were made in the last 50-100 years, often without a full understanding of their impact on ecology and resources? Does that mean we should perhaps reconsider what we need and what we want? Does that mean we ought to view our activities as a species through a much longer frame of perspective? Yes, yes, and yes. (A rare acceptable use of the Oxford comma.)

As I have been fond of pointing out in interpretive talks at the Tongass National Forest’s rapidly-retreating Mendenhall Glacier – perhaps the Forest Service’s single most frying-pan-in-the-face obvious example of climate change – I don’t own a car. In fact, I’ve never even possessed a driver’s license. I biked to work every day, rain or shine (and if you know the Tongass, it was mostly the former.) That has been a conscious decision, that I will be one less internal combustion engine on the roads of the United States. And I am far from alone – studies have shown, time after time, that Millennials are driving 20% less than our parents did at similar ages. Cost, convenience, environmental sensibilities, culture – for all those reasons and more, my generation is car-sharing, using transit, walking, biking and generally using any number of forms of transportation that are far more energy-efficient and less carbon-dependent. We support high-speed rail, view climate change as a real threat and are eschewing suburban sprawl that has consumed precious land and energy.

Will these changes alone solve our collective human challenge? Of course not. But they are, unmistakably, a sign that my generation recognizes that challenge – the challenge of adapting a way of life left to us by a generation apparently unwilling to confront the limits of geology and ecology that we are rapidly approaching. We must be wise stewards of our natural resources, because these are all we have or will ever get. We must have concern for the planet’s ecosystem, because there is but one in the universe.

And yet this view of a planet with limits, a civilization built for the long run, is hardly new and ought not be controversial. After all, it found one of its most eloquent defenses nearly 100 years ago from one of the men responsible for creating the Forest Service in the first place:

The “greatest good for the greatest number” applies to the number within the womb of time, compared to which those now alive form but an insignificant fraction. Our duty to the whole, including the unborn generations, bids us restrain an unprincipled present-day minority from wasting the heritage of these unborn generations.

That man, of course, was Theodore Roosevelt. And it is to his view of the “greatest good” which I believe our future society must adhere – one that considers most important not profitability next quarter or GDP growth next year, but the ecosystem’s next decade and the climate of the next century.

Travis is a Tongass National Forest SCEP trainee/Pathways intern/whatever they’re calling us this week, and worked for the last two summers as a ranger-interpreter at the Mendenhall Glacier Visitor Center. He just completed a master’s degree in recreation at Indiana University, with his thesis being a study of visitor experiences and interpretive outcomes at Mendenhall Glacier Recreation Area.

Using and Producing Natural Resources: Sarah Gilman Essay in High Country News

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sarahHere is a thoughtful essay by Sarah Gilman of High Country News.

Now, thinning forests is not as “industrial” as oil and gas development. And thinning forests is not always done to produce wood products. Still, if the alternative is to burn it in piles..as with hazard trees.. one has to wonder..

Here is the link.

Below is an excerpt:

At an environmental film festival in Paonia soon after the BLM’s decision, the audience booed throughout a Google Earth tour of the parcels still up for lease. When a staffer from the conservation group who hosted the event noted that the mountain biking parcel had been withdrawn, discontent only grew. Many refused to accept any leasing whatsoever.

Opponents believe, as do their counterparts in many communities facing oil and gas development, that some places are too special to drill. It’s a valid view; I often share it. But that raises an uncomfortable question: Are there any places so unspecial that they should be drilled? Mr. ConocoPhillips knows well that few of us in Paonia or elsewhere can say we don’t rely on these fuels — for heat, for transport, for electricity, for the fertilization of food. Every place matters to somebody. And what patch of Earth isn’t habitat for at least a few wonderful somethings?

As Bobby Reedy, who runs a local auto shop in Paonia, told Heller: “I wanna flick the light switch and know the lights are gonna come on. If it’s not in my backyard, whose is it gonna be in?”

If we continue to insist on living as we do now, maybe we need to see drill rigs from our kitchen windows and hiking trails, even our school playgrounds.

How else can we truly understand the costs of something we use unless we’re confronted with them daily? This isn’t just the machinery of corporate greed; it’s the machinery of our vast collective energy appetite. And if we can’t look directly at it, and can’t accept what it does to our water and air, then it’s time to do more than just fight drilling. It’s time to go on an energy diet.

University of Calgary Study on Human Impacts on Ecosystems

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An article from Bob Berwyn’s blog here.

‘Even in protected areas, the influence of humans might be greater than we previously thought … ‘

FRISCO — As much as we’d like to believe in nature unbound, a new Canadian study suggests that human impacts are more widespread than we realize, even extending well into protected areas.

The five-year study by University of Calgary ecologists, included monitoring wolves, elks, cattle and humans. The resarchers concluded that human activities dominate all other factors, even in protected areas.

“Our results contrast with research conducted in protected areas that suggested food chains are primarily regulated by predators. Rather, we found that humans influenced other species in the food chain in a number of direct and indirect ways, thus overshadowing top-down and bottom-up effects,” said lead author Dr. Tyler Muhly.

In one sense, the findings are a “well, duh”. As many have stated previously, air pollution, climate change, effects of neighbor’s fire policies, and invasive species aren’t limited by “protected area” designation. Here’s a link to the university press release.

I wish there were a rule that every time a press release says “different from what was previously thought” they refer to at least one publication that asserts what they are refuting.

When I went to a website to find this I also found this study
“New research challenges assumptions about effects of global warming on mountain tree line” here. Here’s my unrefutable science about treelines; we don’t know what the H. will happen because it’s too complex to predict. We can study it until the cows come home but no one knows. It makes me wonder if there mightn’t be something more useful to study.

But I guess utility is a bad word, to a fellow named Phil Plait from Boulder who wrote an op-ed here in the Denver Post critiquing Canada’s R&D policy.. (you and I both wonder if there isn’t something more relevant for the Post to publish than a critique of a neighboring country’s science policy). The title of the piece was simply “Canada Sells Out Science.”

And that’s OK, because it’s not like the money is wasted when invested in science. For one thing, the amount of money we’re talking about here is tiny compared to a national budget. For another, investment in science always pays off. Always, and at a very high rate. If you want to boost your economy in the middle and long run, one of the best ways to do it is invest in science.

But the Canadian government is doing the precise opposite. If proposed and immediate economic benefits are the prime factors in choosing what science to fund, then the freedom of this human endeavor will be critically curtailed. It’s draining the passion and heart out of one of the best things we humans do.

By doing this, the Canadian government and the NRC have literally sold out science.

I don’t mean to pick on the “tree line modelers” here, it’s a gig and we all need them. But it’s good to know that somehow that this and future investments in modeling will “pay off” because Phil Plait says so..

Here’s another quote:

John MacDougal, president of the NRC, said, “Scientific discovery is not valuable unless it has commercial value.” Gary Goodyear, the Canadian Minister of State for Science and Technology, also stated “There is [sic] only two reasons why we do science and technology. First is to create knowledge … second is to use that knowledge for social and economic benefit. Unfortunately, all too often the knowledge gained is opportunity lost.”

I had to read the Toronto Sun article two or three times to make sure I wasn’t missing something, because I was thinking that no one could possibly utter such colossally ignorant statements. These two men — leaders in the Canadian scientific research community — were saying, out loud and clearly, that the only science worth doing is what lines the pocket of business.

Really? Doing something to improve our society is doing something for “business”? I guess I am “colossally ignorant” too. I know there is a school of scientists who believe that research should be “of the scientists, by the scientists and for the scientists” but they’re usually not that vitriolic.

Whoops.. guess I wandered off the original topic.

Let’s Talk About “Over-Consumption”

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Matthew has raised the issue of “overconsumption” a couple of times, most recently in this comment.

On the way home from the hearing yesterday, I stopped to get a tour of our local community facility for those in need, the Action Center. They said that they were having trouble with moving people from homelessness into housing due to a less than 5% vacancy rate in rental housing in our area. So it seems like more building would be good in that context to move people from underconsumption to consumption.

I think individuals probably do “overconsume,” and people with more probably have since before recorded time. In those days it was decried more from a “give your extra to those who have none” context rather than a “reduce your environmental footprint” context, but the behavior seems to be the same.

Still, I’m not sure that decreasing timber production from small western communities close to federal land is really related to the problem of overconsumption. If people think so, I would like to hear more about it. Because people definitely do overconsume calories, and the solution has never been to buy up farmland to bring it back to its historical range of variation. When food or timber can be and is imported, I’m not sure that “overconsumption” is an argument for not producing it locally and giving our own folks jobs.

This topic is a bit of a crosswalk of my interests, and I wouldn’t have posted the essay below except that the topic came up. I took a class in Creative Writing with Gotham Writers Workshop online last fall. It was a good course and teacher was excellent. Here’s an essay I wrote for the class…note that Matthew didn’t say “we” overconsume, so the essay is not directed at folks like him.. his comment just reminded me of this essay.

Breast Beating of Others is Neither Attractive Nor Particularly Useful
I spend a great deal of time around people who work in the spiritual and church business. They are great people in general, and I love them. These are the people you want around when things are going very, very badly for you. That’s why I don’t ask them what the H they are talking about, or slap them upside the head, when they say things like I’m going to describe below. Occasionally I am tempted but..

It’s about the profligate use of the word “we”. As in “we Americans consume too much.” I honestly don’t understand why someone would say this to a group of people. You could say “I think some of the people in this room consume too much”, but really how would you know? Unless you were going through their trash, or checking the miles per gallon of, and counting their vehicles. And of course in my spiritual community, we’re supposed to follow the Guy who said “Judge not, lest ye be judged.”
My point would be that while some Americans are rich, many are poor. Many are working and overworked, in a less-than-pleasant work environment, to make ends meet and to provide for their families, not to buy their second Prius, and then bask in a glow of climate change prevention self-satisfaction.
We always talk, in the same kinds of churchy situations, about ethnic and cultural differences among Americans and how valuable these differences are. Yet when it comes to something bad, we seem to have been homogenized into one gelatinous glob (“Americans are destroying the environment”). So if you only mean “some” Americans, just say it. Like “I think white upper-class Americans are destroying the environment”. That’s much better as those of us not in the upper class or white, can just grab a milk shake at McDonald’s and go home and feel good about ourselves.

Now that we’ve identified the culprits of over-consumerism, you can target your message to them and make sure that they are there when you engage in your castigation of behavior. This reminds me of my former church in Virginia. A couple of times per year, young priests from somewhere would show up with fire and brimstone sermons against abortion, to a congregation of gray and white-haired folk. Waste of time, anyone?

And really, what good is it to exhort people who are not there? And really, how well does exhortation work to modify human behavior? Seems like we have been hearing “Thou shalt not kill” since the time of Moses, which has been a long time, and people still go around killing.

My solution is that if you want to confess and do penance, beat your own breast, and I’ll let you know when you can touch mine. If you said, instead of “Americans consume too much”, “I consume too much,” I would ask you “what do you think is too much?” and “why do you do it?”. That would be the beginning of an interesting and instructive conversation. But please, leave the “me” in “we” out of it.

Dan Botkin on Earth Day 2013: How is Earth doing after 40 years of Earth Days?

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Dan Botkin at Three Forks, MT
Dan Botkin at Three Forks, MT

Somehow I missed this on Earth Day, but here it is…note what Dan Botkin says about “drowning in information” but “sometimes the most basic information has not been gathered.”

Here’s a link and below are excerpts:

This year we will celebrate Earth Day for the 43rd time. Where have we come in those years in dealing with the environment, and how has Earth’s environment fared? I have been an ecological scientist since 1965, five years before the first Earth day. Many improvements have taken place in how the major nations deal with the environment. People the world over are much more aware of the environment, but ironically, some of the ways people think about it have not changed. There are still major gaps, concerns, confusions, and misunderstandings about ecology and the environment.

On the positive side, today in the United States we have strong environmental laws, including the Endangered Species Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Clean Air Act. The Environmental Protection Agency was created, and all the federal agencies that deal with land and water have major programs for environmental protection and improvement. Most states too have environmental protection departments under a variety of names. Non-governmental organizations, most of them small and little known in 1970, have grown into billion dollar enterprises, taken seriously by governments.

So why is it that after all this progress we have difficulty solving so many environmental problems? And why is there so much controversy about them? How could something that seems basically a set of scientific questions have been politicized and made into ideologies, to the point that each side in the environmental debates views the other side as immoral and worse? Why can’t we just engineer our planet like we do airplanes, cell phones, televisions, and automobiles? Why can’t the planet run as steadily and smoothly as the spinning blades of a hydroturbine as it produces electricity from one of our major dams?

….

We have lost touch with nature in a direct, personal sense: many of us are no longer deeply aware of nature, alert with all our senses. Although the word “environment” may be on our lips daily, few of us have the deep connection to nature that moved Cicero two millennia ago. Without that, environmental issues become abstracted, appearing as just another special interest with a backing politician, like Al Gore, telling us what to believe and whom to disapprove of.

Yes, environmental issues are so popular and affect so much of our lives and economy that many spokesmen have come forward. But some of those who claim to know the truth about it have no training or experience about it. They are today’s snake oil salesmen, feeding us phrases that capture our attention on whichever environmental position they champion. As a result, we ignore many of the key issues we should be thinking about. At the moment, we are captured by climate change, our current morality play. Meanwhile, our forests and fisheries suffer from too little attention and care. Invasive species hitch rides on our commercial jets, but we ignore these dangerous traveling companions.

..

Perversely, although our information about nature has increased greatly, we hold on to the dominant fundamental myth that nature is perfect, fixed, constant, unchanging, except when we tinker with it. Our major laws and policies and even many of our scientific premises assume this constancy. Meanwhile, nature in all its forms—climate, oceans, forests, individual species—has gone on changing, has always changed.

In every environmental issue I have worked on, I have been shocked to discover that although we are drowning in environmental information, some of the most basic and essential information has never been gathered. For instance, the state of Oregon passed a special bill to fund a study of the relative effects of forestry on salmon. I was asked to direct it and quickly discovered that the basic facts we needed in order to answer the question were unknown. Of the 23 rivers we were asked to study, salmon had been counted on only two. The state did not have a map of its forests. Logging permits were given by counties, which did not record the logging methods, area to be cut, or any other information necessary for an ecological assessment. All the blame for the decline in salmon was attributed to human actions though salmon live in perhaps the most changeable series of environments of any animal.

…

Does this matter? Such mistakes cost big money and lead to endless political and ideological debates without solving problems. As the leader of an environmental group in Oregon told me, “When the government said they could manage salmon, we thought that meant we could manage to have salmon.”

Unless we deepen our personal connection with nature, unless we get away from the folktales that dominate our beliefs about nature, unless we get involved and monitor what is around us, we will continue to see each environmental issue as just another political special interest and not know how to judge what is said, nor care deeply about it.

Wise words from Dan.. IMHO.

The bottom line: contact nature, think about it, feel it; seek facts, not slogans; understand science’s methods, not the catchphrases of its pseudo-spokespersons.

When Trees Die, People Die (from the Atlantic)

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AshRangeMap

The curious connection between an invasive beetle that has destroyed over 100 million trees, and subsequent heart disease and pneumonia in the human populations nearby

Again, scientists are discovering things that mystics and poets have sensed for thousands of years.

From the Atlantic here, excerpt below.

Something else, less readily apparent, may have happened as well. When the U.S. Forest Service looked at mortality rates in counties affected by the emerald ash borer, they found increased mortality rates. Specifically, more people were dying of cardiovascular and lower respiratory tract illness — the first and third most common causes of death in the U.S. As the infestation took over in each of these places, the connection to poor health strengthened.

The “relationship between trees and human health,” as they put it, is convincingly strong. They controlled for as many other demographic factors as possible. And yet, they are unable to satisfactorily explain why this might be so.

In a literal sense, of course, the absence of trees would mean the near absence of oxygen — on the most basic level, we cannot survive without them. We know, too, that trees act as a natural filter, cleaning the air from pollutants, with measurable effects in urban areas. The Forest Service put a 3.8 billion dollar value on the air pollution annually removed by urban trees. In Washington D.C., trees remove nitrogen dioxide to an extent equivalent to taking 274,000 cars off the traffic-packed beltway, saving an estimated $51 million in annual pollution-related health care costs.
trees.JPG©Science

But a line of modern thought suggests that trees and other elements of natural environments might affect our health in more nuanced ways as well. Roger Ulrich demonstrated the power of having a connection with nature, however tenous, in his classic 1984 study with patients recovering from gall bladder removal surgery in a suburban Pennsylvania hospital. He manipulated the view from the convalescents’ windows so that half were able to gaze at nature while the others saw only a brick wall. Those with trees outside their window recovered faster, and requested fewer pain medications, than those with a “built” view. They even had slightly fewer surgical complications.

ReWild(life)ing of the US…

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This is not the incident described below in the Bend Bulletin, but the internet is full of related photos and stories.

While researching a future post yesterday, I came across this in the Bend Bulletin

Bend Dog Attacked by Deer in Backyard.

Steven George, a biologist with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife in Bend, said humans aren’t really in danger of an attack — but if there’s a reason, they can go after dogs.

“The deer don’t differentiate between whether it’s a domestic dog or coyote,” George said. “They see a dog as a predator to them. It’s something that wants to hurt them, or even kill them. And so they’re going to be fairly defensive, and they can be defensive to the point of being aggressive toward that animal.”

George said attacks like this aren’t an everyday occurrence, and happen maybe once a month. And, in in the fall, deer are less likely to be aggressive compared to the spring.

“This time of the year, it’s usually a buck that’s associated with any kind of attack, but not always,” George said. “In the spring, it’s more normal, typically, a doe or a doe with a fawn associated with it.”

George said the most important thing people can do is keep their dogs on a leash.

“Typically, 99 percent of the time, when a dog gets injured, it’s because it’s not leashed — and it takes off after the deer,” George said.

Then, serendipitously, Terry Seyden sent this article “America Gone Wild” from the Wall Street Journal. The article is by Jim Sterba and adapted from his book “Nature Wars: The Incredible Story of How Wildlife Comebacks Turned Backyards into Battlegrounds” to be published Nov. 13.

There’s a great photo in the article.

Below are some excerpts.

This year, Princeton, N.J., has hired sharpshooters to cull 250 deer from the town’s herd of 550 over the winter. The cost: $58,700. Columbia, S.C., is spending $1 million to rid its drainage systems of beavers and their dams. The 2009 “miracle on the Hudson,” when US Airways LCC -0.16% flight 1549 had to make an emergency landing after its engines ingested Canada geese, saved 155 passengers and crew, but the $60 million A320 Airbus was a complete loss. In the U.S., the total cost of wildlife damage to crops, landscaping and infrastructure now exceeds $28 billion a year ($1.5 billion from deer-vehicle crashes alone), according to Michael Conover of Utah State University, who monitors conflicts between people and wildlife.

There are several paragraphs about how trees have come back to the East.

The founders of the conservation movement would have been astonished to learn that by the 2000 Census, a majority of Americans lived not in cities or on working farms but in that vast doughnut of sprawl in between. They envisioned neither sprawl nor today’s conflicts between people and wildlife. The assertion by animal protectionists that these conflicts are our fault because we encroached on wildlife habitat is only half the story. As our population multiplies and spreads, many wild creatures encroach right back—even species thought to be people-shy, such as wild turkeys and coyotes. (In Chicago alone, there are an estimated 2,000 coyotes.)

Why? Our habitat is better than theirs. We offer plenty of food, water, shelter and protection. We plant grass, trees, shrubs and gardens, put out birdseed, mulch and garbage.

Sprawl supports a lot more critters than a people-free forest does. For many species, sprawl’s biological carrying capacity—the population limit the food and habitat can sustain—is far greater than a forest’s. Its ecological carrying capacity (the point at which a species adversely affects the habitat and the other animals and plants in it) isn’t necessarily greater. The rub for many species is what’s called social carrying capacity, which is subjective. It means the point at which the damage a creature does outweighs its benefits in the public mind. And that’s where many battles in today’s wildlife wars start.

What to do? Learn to live with them? Move them? Fool them into going away? Sterilize them? Kill them? For every option and every creature there is a constituency. We have bird lovers against cat lovers; people who would save beavers from cruel traps and people who would save yards and roads from beaver flooding; Bambi saviors versus forest and garden protectors.

Wildlife biologists say that we should be managing our ecosystems for the good of all inhabitants, including people. Many people don’t want to and don’t know how. We have forsaken not only our ancestors’ destructive ways but much of their hands-on nature know-how as well. Our knowledge of nature arrives on screens, where wild animals are often packaged to act like cuddly little people that our Earth Day instincts tell us to protect. Animal rights people say killing, culling, lethal management, “human-directed mortality” or whatever euphemism you choose is inhumane and simply creates a vacuum that more critters refill. By that logic, why pull garden weeds or trap basement rats

Cascading species shift looms in fire-starved Eastern woods -E&E News

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Managing smoke is a continual challenge for prescribed burns, even in rural Arkansas. Plumes like this column, from a 1,400-acre burn of the Big Piney Ranger District in 2001, must be carefully monitored for dispersal and escapes. Photo by Steve Osborne.

I really liked this article and it is right up our discussion alley and also about the East. It might be worth getting a temporary subscription for those who don’t get Greenwire. Fundamentally the story is about fire in Eastern forests. I could have quoted any part and it would be interesting but here is the last section. The author is Paul Voosen, E&E reporter.

Here’s a quote from early in the piece:

On a hot spring morning, foresters and scientists tromped through the charred understory of a burned patch of the Ozark National Forest. They had recently wrapped their work, dripping fire this way and that beneath an open canopy of oaks. Soon, they hoped, a succession of grasses would bloom in blackened soil, bathing in restored light.

The site is an atonement for the Forest Service’s past sins.

I think it’s kind of funny to think of a prescribed burn as “atonement for sins”… maybe it would be cheaper for the taxpayer for the Chief to just sign a confession ;)..or we could have an atonement ceremony and be done…

Big questions

If there’s a model for a restored Eastern forest in Arkansas, it’s Buck Ridge.

An upward-sloping 29-acre woodland tucked in state wildlife land north of the Ozark National Forest, Buck Ridge is a gateway to the past. About 250 species of plant can be found in its understory, an astounding diversity. Through the year, each wave of grasses flowers taller than the last, chasing light. By midsummer, they are waist high; by the end of the year, the big bluestem grasses reach 6 feet high.

“Everything is adapted to work well in this system,” said Witsell, the botanist.

Possessing the rare ability to identify nearly any plant on sight, Witsell scrambled around the ridge like Darwin first alighting on the Galapagos. He listed off rare species that could only be found in a sun-drenched forest: Chapman’s purple top; Nuttall’s pleat leaf; snakeroot; all kinds of legumes; four different violets since leaving the car.

Above the grasses, the “swee-swee-swee” call of a redheaded woodpecker rang out.
Prescribed burns

Managing smoke is a continual challenge for prescribed burns, even in rural Arkansas. Plumes like this column, from a 1,400-acre burn of the Big Piney Ranger District in 2001, must be carefully monitored for dispersal and escapes. Photo by Steve Osborne.

“Those redheads are woodland birds,” said Steve Osborne, a retired Forest Service officer from Ozark National Forest. “You hear them all over the place right now. They’re here because of this treatment. I can tell you in the years past, I could go for months without seeing one of them in the national forest.”

For all its success, Buck Ridge’s restoration was not easy. The state has burned the ridge seven times in the past 15 years. Even then, the restoration did not truly take hold until a second tool was added: targeted herbicides. The dense pack of young trees did not easily give way, and so, in 2008, the forest managers injected herbicides into all the woody stems measuring from 1 to 10 inches in diameter.

From an ecological standpoint, the herbicides are not a problem, Witsell said.

“It’s a surgical approach,” he said. “You’re not spraying this from an airplane. You’re injecting it into the tree trunks. And it’s obviously not hurting the flora on the ground.”

But the hard truth scientists have found is that fire is often not enough to restore the forest. Most often, prescribed burns have to be combined with logging and herbicides, an active type of management that makes some environmentalists queasy. But perhaps it’s no surprise that such drastic steps are needed. Keeping fire out of the forest was itself a massive management choice, if one belatedly known.

“It’s been many years since fire was an active agent on our landscape,” said Nowacki, the Forest Service ecologist. “We’re dealing with decades here. And so it shouldn’t be surprising it might take decades to rehabilitate the forests.”

Indeed, much of the Forest Service’s interest in the historical fire conditions of the Eastern forest has been driven by the notion that logging can be ecologically justified. It’s the subtext for much of its financial support, Duke’s Christensen said. Even Abrams is studying how well harvesting and herbicide injections can take the place of fire.

For Christensen, efforts like Buck Ridge bring together larger questions of restoration. If humanity created and maintained these open, Eastern forests in the first place — if these are the first forests of the Anthropocene — then shouldn’t foresters actively choose the woodland they want, rather than using an arbitrary, uncertain historical baseline?

“It puts the burden on defining a restoration target on the managers themselves,” Christensen said. “They say, ‘I get to decide what’s going to be here in the future.’ Justifiably, public agencies are really uncomfortable with that. Do they even have the social license to do that?”

Despite sounding the alarm for 25 years, Penn State’s Abrams has doubts that much can be done to get the Eastern forest back to where he’d like, especially with fire. There’s too much settlement and too much land in private hands. Liability is a huge concern for those rare escaped fires. Climate change could make it difficult for the trees to survive.

A threshold has been passed. The oak and pine forest will never be what it was.

“I would like to see increased used of burning in the East for these fire-adapted forest types,” Abrams said. “But I realize we’re never going to have the extent of burning that we [had] before European settlement.”

What will survive are pockets, traces of humanity’s original sway over nature.

Standing near the top of Buck Ridge, where the post oaks spread their limbs wide, their girth a sign of the savannah forest this was and is again, Anderson, the hustling fire coordinator, stopped to survey his team’s work. This is an ecosystem that hasn’t been seen since the American Indians hunted in Buck Ridge, since the early settlers, he said.

And yet, in the soil, the seeds waited, returning in full bloom.

“It all says, ‘Yes, yes, yes. We want more of this,'” he said.

I wonder who is saying “we want more of this”; not sure there is a Nature, nor does She speak with one voice. Back to Christensen’s point, the future will bring tough decisions about what we (people) want or don’t want. Best discussed (dare I say it?) collaboratively, IMHO.