RedStateEclectic

The Ambivalent Nature of Conservancy

[Guest Post from Ed Stevens]

A while back I had the opportunity to visit The Cather Prairie, a restoration project just south of Red Cloud intended to re-create the prairie as it existed in Willa Cather’s time. It is impressive in physical scope (several hundred acres), as well as in the obvious depth of commitment of those involved in the effort. Even in the early spring, the rolling swards of grassland, the pastoral springs festooned with Cather's beloved cottonwoods and a jangly profusion of wildflowers offer balm to the most calloused soul. But even as I soaked up the prairie lusciousness on that breezy Saturday morn, questions, like the springs in the canyons, bubbled up in my mind. I am generally reluctant to allow my enjoyment of beauty, order and symmetry to be disturbed by ontological bickerings, but a certain lack of metaphysical clarity implicit in the situation pesters me.

Consider...

By what spurious aesthetic do we value a "virgin" prairie, by which we mean one that existed in, say, 1875, over one which exists now - in 2012? What standard gives us license to consider a sweep of prairie grass, unsullied by tree, bush or plowshare to be more valued than some other green stretch, this one liberally punctuated with small red cedars, plum thickets and gawky goldenrod?

Is not the current state (or any state) of the land an equally authentic element of the Gaean creation story - our earth's story? Is bluestem more deserving of a place on the prairie than musk thistle? Does the cow deserve to drink at the spring, or must she walk half a mile to quench her thirst at a stock tank filled from an artificially drilled well - just to satisfy some arbitrarily defined sense of epochal legitimacy?

Biological evolution can best be understood when viewed as "analog" in nature, that is, as moving more or less smoothly from one state to the next, rather than as "digital" - jumping from one level of development to another, quantum-style. If this is so then it seems likely that all those intermediate states should be equally valued or justified. So, logically, it is difficult to see why certain of those states should be designated more desirable than others, based solely on the forms of flora and fauna currently extant upon them. Put another way, should we make judgments that only the ecosphere itself has the right to make? It makes decisions based on a couple of hundred million years’ worth of evolutionary experience - compared to our paltry one or two millennia.

I do not suggest that making sensible use of the resources provided to us by a loving Maker is not a good idea; indeed, efficient utilization of relatively scarce resources is not only a good geo-strategy, it is the only one I can think of that has demonstrable long term survival value. But I do submit that we must be careful about confusing stewardship with conservation, preservation or re-creation; to do otherwise is to find ourselves, to steal Buckley's marvelous phrase, "in diligent pursuit of the irrelevant."

So why do we do it? Why do we expend so much of our time and energies lusting after the existential architectures of yesterday? I wonder if there is another, more subtle dynamic at work here. Perhaps we seek the world of Cather (and others), search for the flowing source of her genius, not solely, or even primarily, in her written works, but by trying to physically re-create the world after those images she has left us through her words.

Extending the analysis further, isn't it possible that perhaps we are simply responding to some limbic desire to dwell, even temporarily, in a world that today exists only in dream and legend, yet has been so purely and powerfully evoked by Cather and others? Are we really just trying to build the "Good Old Days" into our own internal geographies? In our efforts, for example, to restore the "shaggy prairie" that she extolled, maybe all we're doing is hearkening to a primal need to seek the comforting swaddle of the known - the already experienced - or, to call it by its more familiar name, the past? Maybe conservancy, either actual or intellectual, is just another of our artful, and ultimately futile, attempts to go home again.

Silent Spring at 50

PERC report on the effect of the famous apocalyptic Rachel Carson’s work:

Fifty years after the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, the book's legacy is mixed. It helped raise awareness about the costs of mass spraying operations, but it also provided justification for campaigns against the use of DDT in malaria control programs, which contributed to the deaths of millions in Africa and Asia.

Earlier in her writing career, she was a well respected nature writer, but in Silent Spring, she shifted to advocating positions linked to a darker tradition in American environmental thinking: neo-Malthusian population control and anti-technology efforts. Her background as a nature writer gave credence to these views and helped build those darker themes into mainstream environmentalism today. Many, such as the late Julian Simon, viewed this as a tragic turn.

The book was as tragically oversold by the fourth branch of government as Sinclair’s ‘The Jungle’; complete with scary scenarios which lent justification for governmental involvement now reaching religiously fanatic levels of misanthropy.

Glenn Beck: How do Warren Buffett and Sen. Ben Nelson benefit from the White House killing the Keystone pipeline?

Now Glenn Beck is on it.

Readers of the RedStateEclectic first read about my rant in regard to the Keystone Pipeline one year ago, here and here. In those blog posts I also discuss the Warren Buffett connections. (Joe Herring at American Thinker picked up on the story from here last fall too.)

Now, Glenn Beck is all over this. It's about time. All Aboard, Glenn!

h/t ZeroHedge

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Unbelievably Misanthropic

And that's putting it mildly.

In a remarkably churlish article on Sunday, Britain's influential left-leaning newspaper (The Observer is The Guardian's sister Sunday paper) pronounced Harper's parents "environmentally irresponsible" for choosing to bring her into the world. Headlined "Beckhams a 'bad example' for families," the piece was a sour blast at parents who raise good-sized families. "One or two children are fine but three or four are just being selfish," Simon Ross, executive director of the Optimum Population Trust, told reporter Tracy McVeigh. "The Beckhams . . . are very bad role models with their large famil[y]."

McVeigh also quoted natural-history broadcaster David Attenborough, who recently "made a passionate speech about how the world's baby-making was damaging the planet."

Read the entire article.

See also my entries The Sport of Facile Killing ..., An Overpopulation of Malthusians, and Be Fruitful and Multiply ...

Millions from Waste - How Capitalism Saves the Environment

90% of deforestation occurred before the global spread of carbon based fuel. The advent of coal etc. saved forests, protected the soil against overuse on account of highly unproductive, energy-starved agricultural practices.

From the time of their emergence, industrial entrepreneurs have been society's leading protagonists and most efficient and successful practitioners of conservation and environmental protection.

Indeed, many 19th-century authors argued that pollution, whether it be unburnt fuel released into the air or sludge dumped into rivers, was a form of waste that no competitive business could afford.

For instance, the journalist Peter Lund Simmonds (1814-1897) published in 1862 his best-seller Waste Products and Undeveloped Substances, in which he discussed the profitable recovery of previously "injurious" waste ranging from bones and other animal by-products to the acid manganese solutions of chloride of lime factories, from the scoriae of metals produced by blast furnaces to "poisonous" gases which used to escape during the process of smelting, from the distillers' wash to the "impurities" of coal gas, and many others. Interestingly enough, Simmonds felt compelled to write at the beginning of his 420-page book that his treatment would have to be superficial because his subject was "too extensive in its scope to be discussed successfully in detail ... since any one branch would of itself form a useful and interesting volume." Confronted with the incessant rate of innovation in this field, he revised his book extensively and published a second edition in 1873.

"In every manufacturing process," Simmonds observed, "there is more or less waste of the raw material, which it is the province of others following after the original manufacturer to collect and utilize. This is done now, more or less, in almost every manufacture." Just as utilization was the great law of nature, man also had to provide "for converting all the material he uses into useful purposes. There must be no loss of anything once within his grasp." The results of such creative behaviour were not only increased profitability, but improved environmental amenities.

Among countless examples, Simmonds related that a process had been developed at the Kinghole woollen mills, near Dumfries, by which the hitherto refuse water of the washing houses was now converted into valuable commercial material. "By means of mechanical appliances and chemical action," he wrote, "the refuse formerly turned into the river Nith to the injury of the salmon, is made to produce stearine, which forms the basis of composite candles, as well as a cake manure that sells at 40s per ton."

Similarly, Simmonds pointed out that what should be done with the fifth quarter of the animal, or the "offal," was a question that "formerly used to be perpetually assailing Boards of Health, and other sanitary bodies who have the supervision of slaughter-houses, meat-markets, etc." By the time he wrote his books, however, the offal of cattle suited for food, the waste from dressing skins and preparing leather, and other animal refuse had all found "distinctive and remunerative uses." If "such skill and ingenuity" had not been exhibited in the case of bones, and if bones had been left to rot or decay, "producing fever and disease," there would indeed have been "cause for anxiety amongst sanitary authorities." Yet, this was not the case and it was there for all to see "how the danger is dispelled, and a source of evil becomes the agent of much good, and the subject of a thriving and prosperous industry."

Why did Simmonds' contemporaries behave this way with industrial waste? Simply because "as competition becomes sharper, manufacturers have to look more closely to those items which may make the slight difference between profit and loss, and convert useless products into those possessed of commercial value, which is the most apt illustration of Franklin's motto that 'a penny saved is twopence earned': Our manufacturers have not been slow to appreciate this truth."

These processes were so prevalent that an acquaintance of Simmonds, a fellow by the name of Karl Marx, later made similar remarks in Volume III of his Capital. Marx identified industrial waste recovery as the "second big source of economy in the conditions of production" (after large-scale production). As he put it: "This waste, aside from the services which it performs as a new element of production, reduces the cost of the raw material to the extent to which it is again saleable ... The reduction of the cost of this portion of constant capital increases pro tanto the rate of profit." As a result, "the so-called waste plays an important role in almost every industry."

While Simmonds' may have authored the first treatise that systematically described the widespread and spontaneous recycling behaviour of all industries, his book would not be the last of this genre. In the following decades, other lengthy books on the topic would be written in the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany and France, and most certainly in other languages and places. In all of these, authors went out of their way to argue that turning industrial waste into profitable by-products almost always made economic sense and that, as a by-product of such innovative behaviour, the state of the air, the rivers and the forests were usually improving.

The bottom line of green has always been black. Good entrepreneurs, engineers and technicians have always been able to figure out that pollution is wasteful and doesn't make good business sense. Although it may prove hazardous to their belief system, some environmentalists will eventually have to come to terms with the fact that the invisible hand was busy cleaning up and restoring the environment long before they entered this world.

The source.

Also, do make sure to listen to this 50 minute interview of Pierre Desroches, one of the world's leading researchers on the real, positive relationship between capitalism and our environment.

See also The Master of Doomslaying ..., Unecological Ecologists, A Flow System Far from Equilibrium, The Obsolete Economics of Peak Oil, The Sun Queen of Germanny.

Not Politics, But a Record?

I hadn’t looked at the weather predictions for a few days—had heard sort of vague notions that it’s supposed to be “nice” this weekend.  So, imagine my surprise when I looked at this, this morning:

This is the 5 day forecast for my part of the world.  Now we’ve had upper 70s and low 80s occasionally over the last few weeks, which has had some of us scratching our heads, considering that it’s only March.  But the Saturday and Sunday forecast?  Is this an April Fools’ joke by the Weather Channel?  91?  On April 1?  In Nebraska? 

Maybe it’s payback for the 4 months of cold and snow we had 2 years ago.  Or maybe the other shoe is going to drop. 

Our lilacs—which usually start blooming the end of April—our starting to burst out in color.  Daffodils have already pretty well finished their blooming. 

I’m not complaining—I like spring (although 90 degrees is much more like summer, which I’m not so keen about).  But I remember, back in 1987, when my husband was graduating from medical school, and we were looking for a new apartment the last few days of March and the first of April:  SNOW.  LOT’S of snow.  So much, in fact, that as we were driving around Omaha looking for places inhabit, that we ended up getting stranded at a friend’s place out in one of the suburbs of Omaha, because we couldn’t make it back to our midtown apartment near the medical center…

What’s it like in other parts of the world?  Has South Carolina reached 100 with 100% humidity, yet?  Are the tulips blooming in Michigan? 

LLE

Chernobyl & Fukushima

One year ago today, one of the strongest earthquakes in recorded history occurred less than 100 miles off of the north east coast of Japan. About 30 to 40 minutes after that massive movement of the earth, a series of 7 large waves rolled in from the ocean to cause massive damage along a long swath of coastline.

Barriers that were supposedly supposed to protect people and infrastructure failed dramatically, resulting in nearly 20,000 deaths, the displacement of more than 300,000 people, and the destruction of hundreds of billions of dollars worth of assets including factories, homes, roads, railroads, automobiles, and other personal possessions.

Pipelines exploded in flames, toxic materials and other refuse from an industrial society was widely distributed and at least one large oil refinery was engulfed in towering flames and billowing black smoke that did not stop until March 21, ten days later.

However, the people [...] supplying the world with titillating news [...] all decided to distract the whole world from that tragedy and to focus our attention on the events at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station. [...]

 

The fact remains that not one single person – either in the public or in the plant work force – was exposed to enough radiation to cause more than a minor reddening of skin. [...]

We are doing a huge disservice and causing real, current, measurable harm by allowing anyone to believe that there is any doubt about the safety of small amounts of released radioactive material. We have been studying this topic for nearly 100 years. We know that small doses do not result in any health risk that is distinguishable from the risk of simply being a mortal human being living in an inherently risky world.

The source.

See also Fukushima - Level 7, including links at the bottom of the post to a large number of blog entries I published at the time of the unfolding crisis.

Going Nuts in Germany (2/2)

We live in a free society with unprecedented access for everyone to information essential to the critical mind, and yet mass deception and consequential madness and hysteria are rampant - in fact, they define the profile of our political system.

It is the lack of interest to exercise their critical faculties that distinguish today's Mitläufer (literally: fellow-runner, i.e. the opportunistically compliant person) from the Mitläufer of the 1930s, the latter having been in an incomparably more disadvantaged position to probe the news and other forms of propaganda.

Even science has been captured by it to an extent that has turned it into a politically correct force ready to buttress any charlatanry.

One of the world’s biggest green-energy public-policy experiments is coming to a bitter end in Germany, with important lessons for policymakers elsewhere. [...]

Germans have paid about $130 billion for a climate-change policy that has no impact on global warming. They have subsidized Chinese jobs and other European countries’ reliance on dirty energy sources. And they have needlessly burdened their economy. As even many German officials would probably attest, governments elsewhere cannot afford to repeat the same mistake.

Read the entire piece.

See also my post The Sun Queen of Germany and The Epistemic Consequences of Totalitarian Democracy.

Homo Faber

Homo faber, man the creator. Man is fallible and insignificant; yet, this is precisely why, in the long term, man survives only by being on balance a creator, rather than a destroyer.

Being fallible, he relies on an unending learning avenue to knowledge, an open horizon of knowledge. Omniscience would be fatally rigid in as confined and poorly endowed a being as man. It is possible for man to act as an all-knowing creature, the question is whether a sense of omniscience will allow him to survive. The more complete, yet less resourceful crocodile is robust enough to be omniscient, maybe even for another 150 million years.

As for man's insignificance, it is the reason why he needs to adapt to his environment - as opposed to treating it as his design -, enlisting the support of many kinds of spontaneous order (non-man-made orders, from the human body and mind to the institutions of a free society) for survival. The natural laws that are binding to human interactions and social systems are no less part of (the spontaneous orders of) nature than the air, the oceans, or the stars. When men think they are stronger and more powerful vis-à-vis the universe, including the social universe, than they really are, they cannot last for long. Hence the inevitable collapse of regimes of human hubris like the Soviet Union or the politicised social democratic societies on both sides of the North Atlantic.

Who can forget Simon’s statement: “It’s reasonable to expect the supply of energy to continue becoming more available and less scarce, forever.” [1] That one got the neo-Malthusians mad! Or this: “Discoveries, like resources, may well be infinite: the more we discover, the more we are able to discover.” [2]

And his public policy conclusion: “The world’s problem is not too many people, but a lack of political and economic freedom.” [3] Simon elaborated:

The extent to which the political-social-economic system provides personal freedom from government coercion is a crucial element in the economics of resources and population…. The key elements of such a framework are economic liberty, respect for property, and fair and sensible rules of the market that are enforced equally for all. [4]

And

The message about human betterment and economic progress is more general than any individual statements about raw materials, air, water, life expectancy, education, and the like. There is solid theoretical basis for the idea that that all aspects of human welfare should get better, not just as a matter of coincidence but as part of a broad causal mechanism.

Humanity has necessarily evolved so that we have more of the nature of creators than of destroyers—or else the species would have died out long ago. People seek to improve their conditions, and therefore on balance people build more than they tear down and produce more than they consume. Hence each generation leaves the world a bit better in most respects than it begins with. [5]

Make sure to read this article published on the occasion of the 80th birthday of Julian Simon (1932-1998).

See also The Sport of Facile Killing, The Obsolete Economics of Peak Oil, and Unecological Ecologists.

Holzvergaser

Mercedes-Benz 170V Holzvergaser. At least, in those days during and immediately after the war, people in Germany clearly saw just how inadequate alternative sources of energy were.

Summing up Germany's rushed shift to renewable energy, a commentator at NoTrickZone writes:

At least the old-style 5-year-plans were aimed at heavy industrial production and modernization; and after the “Thaw” there were pockets of the so-called “Goulash communism” to provide at least a minimum of poultry and vegetables (in 1962, the “dachas” comprised 3% of the USSR’s agriculture and supplied 50% of the victuals). This sounds more like the Great Leap Forward with local windmills instead of backyard smelting yards, backed up by AGW instead of Lysenkoism, with Arcadia as the new collectivist paradise.

From the below report on the forcible transformation of the energy supply system, get an idea of the totalitarian habits mushrooming all over Germany under the aegis of environmental alarmism:

Germany’s energy transformation has already failed. For Germans, the outlook is bleak. …the planned mismanagement is heavily damaging the economy and will fail spectacularly some years later because its economic and social costs will have become unbearable. The question remaining open is how many billions of euros will have to be destroyed before a new energy policy (a new energy transformation?) picks up the shattered pieces.

The source.