VVVMorat points to a nice Slacktivist post that elaborates the title of Chris Hedges' book War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning. He describes how knee-jerk support for the Afghanistan and Iraq wars was an attempt to find meaning in our otherwise banal turn-of-the-century lives, to make this what a letter to Josh Marshall called "the most critical time in the history of the modern world."
But I think the post is made unnecessarily narrow by Slacktivist's use of the concept to bash hawks. In addition to the knee-jerkers, I think the war gives meaning to many who have well-thought-out reasons for supporting the war, adding an emotional level to the intellectual. More importantly, he misses that the war gave meaning to many opponents. War draggged many people out of their apolitical postmodern malaise and into a political program charged with emotion -- horror at the deaths that would come, fear of the specter of an American Empire, excitement at identifying with the popular revolution trying to stop it. It reawakened that sense of righteous protest that we associated with the 60s. What better proof that we're in "the most critical time in the history of the modern world" than the carrying out of an unprecedented preemptive attack, the stirrings of fascism in the Patriot Act, and the near-demise of international institutions like the UN? And that goes as much for the knee-jerk "Bush sucks" crowd as for the most well-informed and reasonable dove. posted by Stentor Danielson at 23:48 -- link --
VVV The obvious interpretation for skeptics of Bush's Healthy Forests plan (discussed in the previous post) is that he's using the threat of wildfires as an excuse to give a bonus to logging companies, allowing them to get around environmental regulations that protect our forests. Then I ran across this interesting bit of information, via Earth Blog:
Few projects to reduce wildfire threats were long delayed because of environmental challenges, congressional auditors say. The conclusion runs counter to the case the Bush administration and Republicans in Congress have made for scaling back studies and appeals.
The General Accounting Office (news - web sites) found that three-fourths of the 762 Forest Service projects to cut wildfire risk in the past two years went ahead without any challenge. That allowed treatment such as logging or controlled burning on 3.8 million acres of national forests.
Projects that were challenged by environmental groups or other parties generally move ahead within 90 days, according to the report by the investigative arm of Congress.
So the problem that Bush is trying to solve for logging companies doesn't really exist. The rules he wants to weaken don't pose much of a barrier to logging (and hence the bill won't have much impact on the health of our forests, either). But if nobody gains much from the plan, why is he pushing it? My suspicion is that this is -- like ANWR drilling, which is only a tiny drop in the bucket for oil companies because of the size of the reserves and the expense of extracting them -- a symbolic victory. It goes over well with those small-government and pro-business voters who think environmental regulation has gone too far but don't know enough about the particular situation of the logging industry (which certainly isn't going to be complaining about the change) to realize how little the bill actually accomplishes. And it gives Congress momentum in the direction of rolling back environmental regulations. posted by Stentor Danielson at 23:22 -- link --
The Bush administration on Tuesday rallied behind a bill in the U.S. House of Representatives [passed later in the day] that aims to reduce the risk of wildfires in U.S. forests, but green groups said the proposal promoted logging at the expense of environmental protection.
Introduced by Rep. Scott McInnis, a Colorado Republican, the bill would ease procedural requirements needed to remove underbrush and trees on 20 million acres of U.S. forest land susceptible to wildfires. In 2002 more than 7 million acres of forest were burned.
... "One reason for these deadly fires is found in decades of well-intentioned, but misguided, forest policy which has allowed dangerous undergrowth to build up on the forest floor," Bush told reporters at the White House.
Bush has the right diagnosis. Fire suppression is not a sustainable practice, and the longer we adhere to it the more disastrous will be the fires that slip through and the greater will be the ecological damage. Opponents of the Healthy Forests bill need to acknowledge that point so that the debate can center on the real issue: whether Bush's prescription is appropriate to the problem. I'll grant that the long history of fire suppression, and the attendant buildup of fuels, require some sort of "unnatural" intervention in the short term to reach a point where stopping fire suppression is no longer disastrous, and may be required for some areas (those immediately surrounding towns, for example), where even controlled (preemptive) burns are too much of a risk to people and property, in the long term. But for most areas in the long term, switching from fire suppression to brush clearance is not the healthiest path for forests. Fires do more than simply remove dead wood. The heat is necessary for the reproductive cycles of many plants in fire-prone areas. And ash recycles important nutrients. I also wonder about the long-term prospects of a system that would require loggers to remove small trees, debris, and brush, which are the most significant fuels but are economically useless. posted by Stentor Danielson at 23:11 -- link --
VVV I'm really on an environment-blogging kick recently. That's a semi-conscious decision, as I've decided that blogtopia hardly needs another mediocre center-left politics blog. So I'm going to focus a bit more on some of the issues I have a bit more expertise in -- particularly the environment and archaeology. Which is not to say I won't still post about general political issues if I feel like I have something especially interesting to say, or about philosophy or religion, or random weird stuff (I've got a post in the works about UFOs). As always, my mission statement remains very loose.
I seem to make these changes around the time I change templates. Last summer I shifted (somewhat unintentionally) from a mostly personal blog to a mostly political one at about the time I introduced the blue template. posted by Stentor Danielson at 22:45 -- link --
VVV Posting like crazy this morning. Languagehat points out this article:
France spent much of the 20th century trying to eliminate the minority languages that were spoken by half its population 100 years ago. But now, France is experiencing a renaissance of interest in its regions and their languages, foods and customs. Not just Breton, but also Alsatian, Basque, Catalan, Corsican, Flemish and Provençal.
... Many observers attribute this change, paradoxically enough, to the European Union, which has all but eliminated national borders in its ever-expanding drive to create a single political entity. While the EU is a homogenizing force, putting Heineken in every café and the euro in every wallet, its universal identity seems to have taken the pressure off countries to impose their culture and language on all their people.Here in Brittany, there is a sense of a culture coming alive after decades in the dark. In the towns along the craggy Breton coast, many buildings fly the Gwenn ha Du, a Breton nationalist flag. The stores sell Breizh-Cola -- a Breton-language copy of Coca-Cola.
... Under the shadow of the EU, highly centralized nations such as France and Germany have begun to cede real power to regions such as Brittany, in much the same way that decentralized powers such as the United Kingdom have given legislative independence to their regions. In March, the two houses of the French Parliament passed a constitutional amendment that describes the French state as "decentralized" -- a seismic shift in France, where Parisian authority has always been taken for granted.The French seem to have discovered what other European nations have come to realize: that regional independence can actually strengthen national identity, and effectively defuse potential separatist tensions.
The first parallel that came to my mind is the revival of Native American languages in the US (which I've blogged about before, but I'm too lazy to find the link). There hasn't been a decentralization in this country in the way that the article describes for Britain, Germany, and France, but Native tribes have been gaining more power than they held previously. The idea of the EU leading to increased regional identity also parallels predictions made by many postmodern theorists, who claim that the coming era will see a shift in power away from the nation-state -- both upward to international and global institutions as well as downward to local organizations and groups. posted by Stentor Danielson at 12:20 -- link --
VVVGrist magazine has a good interview with Howard Dean about his stance on the environment. There's nothing terribly surprising in it. He supports all the standard moderate environmental items like renewable energy and reducing environment-related human health impacts, and mentions that environmental protection can be good for the economy (a crucial point to emphasize given that the bad economy will be issue #2 in the election and will probably make or break the Democratic candidate). On the other hand, he takes a few stands likely to anger the hardcore green voters -- he doesn't repudiate his support as governor for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump (and mentions the annoying terrorism argument), and while he is in favor of labeling genetically modified food, he seems fairly sanguine with respect to the potential health and ecological impacts of GMOs. The first sentence of his response quoted below pretty well sums up how the environment issue will probably play in the campaign:
Grist: How do you distinguish your environmental agenda from those of the other candidates?
Dean: The big difference between the Democratic candidates is not our intentions. I'd say most of us have strong records on the environment and that we generally have similar environmental positions. But what you see with me is that as governor, I've actually been able to carry out policies rather than just vote for them. ...
Announcing this on his blog, Lore stated "I'll keep everyone up to date on this very weblog. Also, I've typed this about six times so far today, but thanks for reading." When I read that, it struck me as sounding like something Dave (Wininger, not Nielson) would say. And Dave's computer-deprived period has coincided more or less with Brunching's recent lack of updates. Interesting ... posted by Stentor Danielson at 11:51 -- link --
VVV I know my current template looks pretty hideous on some monitors -- the links, in particular, are hard to read. I had given up on fiddling with it a long time ago, because I couldn't get it to look good on all monitors, and it looked fine on the ones I used most often. But now that I'm at home and stuck using a computer that makes my blog look like crap, I've become motivated to fix it. I decided that, since I'll be in Dayton and without access to a computer of my own on which to do layout on this site's 2nd birthday, I could jump the gun on moving to a new template. So here's what I've come up with. If you have comments, complaints, or suggestions, send me an e-mail. I'm having a heck of a time reading any comments left via the comments feature. I'm debating switching to Haloscan or another such service if this persists. posted by Stentor Danielson at 00:10 -- link --
If Simon Winchester is correct in his new book -- Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded, August 27, 1883' -- the current trial in Indonesia of accused perpetrators of last year's terrorist bombing in Bali may be part of the lingering reverberation of the volcanic eruption--the loudest sound in modern human experience, heard 3,000 miles away -- that made an island disappear.
Billions of tons of material -- six cubic miles of it -- were hurled 120,000 to 160,000 feet in the air. They filtered sunlight, lowering the Earth's temperature and creating spectacular sunsets that for months inspired painters and poets.
And in the East Indies outpost of the Dutch empire, where a notably relaxed and tolerant Islamic faith had long flourished, Krakatoa, by terrifying and dispossessing people, may have catalyzed the much fiercer form of Islam that fused with anticolonialism. It is alive and dealing death today.
There's an interesting twist on Environmental Determinism. posted by Stentor Danielson at 09:44 -- link --
21.5.03
VVV (Part 2)
The basic problem lies in what is being privatized. Classical liberal/libertarian ideas about private property and individual rights assume an atomizable world -- a world in which each person and his activities have no impact on any other’s unless the person chooses to reach out into another’s domain. In the sheep raising model of the TOC paradigm, it is possible to approximate that atomized situation -- grass doesn’t go anywhere, and fences can easily keep flocks from interacting with each other. But the seas are much less privatizable. We can’t build fences to stop fish and water from moving all around ay fishery (and in some cases the whole world). So instead of privatizing resources (i.e., inputs) as in the original TOC, ITQs privatize the product (i.e., outputs).
Since fishery resources are not privatized, ITQs do not solve the problem of dispersed benefits. Any action taken by a fisherman to improve the fishery -- working to reduce pollution, for example -- creates benefits that accrue to all fishermen equally. This is quite unlike the TOC shepherd who can reap all of the benefits of taking care of his pasture because his efforts can be confined to the pasture that he and only he uses. Dispersed benefits create the problem of free riders, reducing the incentive to put forth individual effort at conservation. Thus, ITQs do not properly accomplish the main goal of privatization according to TOC doctrine: encouraging stewardship of resources. They have an impact because the cap on total fish catch deals with the largest threat to aquatic ecosystems -- overfishing. And even the stop to overfishing is accomplished by fiat, not by creating an incentive for fishermen to voluntarily moderate their catch by making it in their economic self-interest to do so unilaterally, as would be the case with a shepherd keeping his flock at a long-term sustainable size. There is likewise little incentive, beyond regulatory requirements (imposed from outside or established by collective agreement among all fishermen) to do anything else to improve the sustainability of fishing and aquatic ecosystems.
It seems like the real market and private property answer to overfishing would be aquaculture, aka fish farms (incidentally, I find it interesting that, to the degree that we eat wild fish, even our modern society is partially hunter-gatherer). If aquaculture can be made profitable enough, it would drive wild fishing out of business, much like agriculture and ranching have replaced gathering and hunting. This would enable a split between private, managed, productive sea and ocean wilderness where ecosystems, freed from commercial fishing pressures, can operate in a more natural way. Of course, we've seen the kind of problems this sort of system brings to land ecosystems -- fragmentation of biomes, the expansion of humanized landscapes, the "untouched wilderness" question, etc. posted by Stentor Danielson at 23:20 -- link --
VVV (Part 1. Hopefully the new version they're upgrading Blogger to shortly will fix this request-too-long problem)
Too Few Fish In The Sea The new study, while alarming, told environmental analysts little they did not already know. Approximately 70 percent of fish stocks worldwide are either fully or overexploited. The state of fish in U.S. waters is not much better. The National Marine Fisheries Service acknowledges that dozens of federally managed fish stocks are overfished. Worse, it cannot account for the status of two thirds of the fish species under its "protection." Although the number of healthy fish species has increased in recent years, such gains have come at tremendous costs to local fishing communities faced with fishery closings and other stringent conservation measures. Green activists may exaggerate many environmental fears, but, if anything, they have been too quiet on the fate of ocean fisheries.
Conservation of marine fisheries presents the archetypal "commons" problem, most famously detailed by ecologist Garrett Hardin in his 1968 essay "The Tragedy of the Commons." ...
... Under an ITQ [individual transferable quota] system, the government sets the total allowable catch for a given season, and then allocates shares of the catch -- quotas -- to individuals, boats, or firms as a form of transferable right. By allocating portions of the fish catch, ITQ systems eliminate the "race to fish" and encourage less wasteful fishing techniques. In several countries, ITQ programs have met with substantial success in increasing fishing efficiency, reducing over-capitalization, and lessening the ecological impact of fishing operations. What's more, ITQs have encouraged fishers to exercise greater stewardship. "It's the first group of fishers I've ever encountered who turned down the chance to take more fish," noted Philip Major of New Zealand's ministry of agriculture after the implementation of ITQs there. There have also been private initiatives to allocate annual harvests among firms in catch-limited fisheries so as to create quasi-property rights and capture the economic and ecological benefits that result.
Adler picks up on the fact that fisheries are a classic example of the "tragedy of the commons" (actually the tragedy of the open-access resource -- commons are another beast entirely), and finds what seems to be the classic tragedy of the commons (TOC) solution: private property. ITQs sound potentially promising -- though other sources indicate that they have plenty of problems, especially for small fishermen. But Adler's attempt to squish fish and ITQs into the TOC paradigm leaves something to be desired. posted by Stentor Danielson at 23:19 -- link --
VVV It's pretty common to see -- and be annoyed about -- people using Greek letters in logos with little regard for what sound the letter actually represents. Using a sigma for an E (instead of its proper "s" sound) is the most popular, but I've also seen a lambda used as an A instead of an "l." I just came across an example of this kind of adulteration being done to Cyrillic, in the logo for a new History Channel documentary: So tune in on Memorial Day at 9 EDT for "Yats-ssia, Land of the Tsars." posted by Stentor Danielson at 14:14 -- link --
Christie Whitman, who has often been at odds with the White House over environmental issues, submitted her resignation Wednesday as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Whitman said in a letter to President Bush that she was leaving to spend time with family.
While the Bush administration's environmental record is hardly admirable, the blame rests more on the White House than on the EPA. With all the fear about ultraconservative Bush appointees and being in the pocket of industry, I've been pleasantly surprised by Whitman's handling of things, and she's done as well as I could expect any Republican to do. Which means I'm a bit concerned about who will be named to replace her -- there are few people in the GOP who would be better, and many who would be worse. posted by Stentor Danielson at 13:46 -- link --
The boss of one of Britain's biggest companies last night became the first senior director to have his pay package rejected by shareholders who were appalled by a potential £22 million payout if he lost his job.
... Although not binding on the company, it is likely to send shock waves through many boardrooms and could be the first of many votes against company "fat cats" and what shareholders see as corporate greed.
A little good news. As Perry de Havilland points out in the comments over at Junius, this isn't so much about the stockholders standing up for some egalitarian principle as it is reining in a bad business move. And I think this is good news for precisely that reason. It shows that market forces can be used against the formation of a cronyish quasi-capitalist class. And I think it's this sort of cronyism, which exploits the capitalist system, that is at the root of much of the recent Enron-type problems.
There seem to be three general perspectives on capitalism these days. There's the socialist-egalitarian perspective, which claims that capitalism is in need of much guidance (through regulations and such) to prevent it from abusing the public. People of this perspective tend to see corporate corruption as an inevitable outgrowth of the logic of capitalism. On the other side are the libertarians, who praise capitalism as it is supposed to work in theory. Allied with the libertarians in the modern Republican Party are what we might call the "capitalist class," people who are in favor of capitalism not on principle but out of self-interest as business owners and executives, and who hence have no problem with corruption or government favors, if it benefits them. The libertarians and capitalist class wind up on the same side most of the time because the capitalist class hides behind libertarian rhetoric (about free markets and small government), and because the political discourse tends to lump the existing economic situation and the theory of free markets into a single "capitalism" entity (much like we fuse the writings of Marx, Kropotkin, etc. with the empirical reality of the Soviet Union). The story I quoted above shows how there's room for socialist-egalitarians and libertarians to work together against the capitalist class. posted by Stentor Danielson at 13:05 -- link --
