20.9.03

4.3 million acres

I went to Google to try to find more information about the following interesting facts from a Washington Post letter to the editor:

From 1992 to 2001, 91 national forests had a cash-flow loss of $2.95 billion from logging 4.3 million acres to cut 31.8 billion board feet. That's a loss of $685 an acre. On the other hand, 17 forests turned a profit of $15 per acre or $1.72 per thousand board feet. While that's not a huge profit, it at least isn't a drain on taxpayers.

I figured one way to do it (since the letter didn't say where those facts came from) was to search some of the numbers. So I tried "4.3 million acres." I wasn't able to find the source of the letter's 4.3 million acres, but I did find out that there are 4.3 million acres of (among other things):

• Forests that burned prior to August 10 in 2000


• Oregon Wild Roadless areas on US Forest Service Land


• Mulch tilling in North Dakota in 1992


• Durum wheat expected in 1999


• Estuarine wetlands in the mid-1980s

The pristine myth

Amazon Was Settled Before Columbus' Time The Amazon was densely populated before Christopher Columbus' arrival in the New World, confirms new evidence unearthed in Brazil1. The finds lay to rest the notion that the region was pristine forest when the explorer landed in 1492. Support had been growing among archaeologists for the idea that parts of pre-Columbian Amazonia had sophisticated settlements, but hard evidence was lacking. Now Michael Heckenberger, of the University of Florida in Gainesville, and his colleagues have excavated and mapped 19 villages, roads, trenches, bridges, agriculture, open parklands and working forests in the Upper Xingu region of central Brazil. "The folks who lived there were clearly not simple," says Heckenberger. ... Alhough there was probably some untouched forest in the region, Heckenberger reckons that most was managed by the inhabitants and kept for cultural and symbolic, rather than economic, reasons. "It was probably very important to them just as Central Park is important to New Yorkers," he says. -- via Cronaca

This doesn't particularly surprise me, since Bill Denevan and Claude Levi-Strauss have been saying similar things for years. The use of GIS to establish a landscape pattern for this civilization is quite interesting. But what really struck me was the comment about the people deliberately maintaining pristine patches. It's so similar to modern environmentalism (I think National Parks would be a better analogy than Central Park) that I'm a little suspicious of how much it's a projection of our modern attitudes and practices onto this other civilization.
Stentor Danielson, 13:58,

Polly want a savior

Faith Keeps Parrot Owner's Hopes Alive A Medicine Hat man puts his faith in the Lord that he'll seeing his prized African parrot - who tells sinners to repent - one more time. ... "I taught him to tell people to 'turn off your TV and open up your Bible,' " said Doell, who says he is a born-again Christian. "He confronts people about their soul and where they're going to spend eternity. He preaches the same messages as Billy Graham. He says 'repent before it's too late because you're one heartbeat from heaven or hell.' " -- via The Right Christians

We'll get the obvious joke out of the way first: It says something about the intellectual quality of fire-and-brimstone preaching that even a parrot can do it.

But on a deeper level, I think there is something deliberately parrot-like, and unsettling, about conservative Christianity. The parrot in this story is just a vessel for his owner's project of preaching the gospel. The parrot doesn't have to think about what the message is, because his owner puts the words in his beak. Similarly, in conservative Christianity the goal is to become simply a vessel for God. Complete surrender to God's power is the believer's final act, because it negates the believer's capacity for further action by putting God in charge.

A good illustration of this comes in the early chapters of Exodus. The thing that's always struck me about the story of the plagues of Egypt is how God takes over not just Moses and Aaron, but also the Pharaoh. Early on, the Pharaoh is ready to let the Israelites go. But God hardens his heart, deliberately making the task of winning freedom harder for the Israelites. Everyone becomes a marionette in God's puppet show.

On the other hand, neither the Pharaoh, nor the parrot (so far as I can tell, though I'm no expert in animal psychology), willfully gave up control. God forcibly took over the Pharaoh's mind. This seems to suggest that if God wanted us to be merely passive tools of his will, he wouldn't need our permission. This would cut out the long and difficult Christian struggle to set aside individual human desires to let God fill you. If you had skills God could use, he'd just come and take them. Note the contrast to what happened to Moses. God obviously thought Moses was the best man for the job. But God didn't just possess Moses. He gave in to Moses' complaints about being a poor public speaker and enlisted Aaron's help. This suggests that God wants his will done in partnership with independently thinking people. Certainly God did a lot of the work for Moses and Aaron, writing the script for them to say and preparing their miracles. But he presented it as "I'll help you out if you go do it," not "if you become my host body, I'll do it for you."

To go beyond Exodus, I think the problem with surrendering to God is that God's will underdetermines our selection of a course of action. There isn't one perfectly Godly way to act, and others that are not. God's universality only works when it's in cooperation with our particular positionality.
Stentor Danielson, 13:09,

18.9.03

Heightening the contradictions

There's been a lot of talk lately about Jacob Levy's latest article, which revisits the Wall Street Journal's infamous "Lucky Duckies" editorial. The Journal's editors proposed to raise taxes on the poor, thus turning them into tax-hating Republicans. Levy suggests that the general form of this argument -- "we need to subject everybody to the same rules (e.g. high taxes), so that we don't have the system run by people who aren't personally affected by the rules they make (e.g. poor, non-tax-paying voters)" -- shows up in other contexts, often offered by the left. His first and clearest example is proposals to reinstate the draft, so that the Presidents and Congress members who make the decision to go to war have to worry about their own sons being called off to fight. This proposal is a response to the feeling that the government can be cavalier about starting wars because they and their families won't bear the costs, just as the poor are expected (by the logic of "Lucky Duckies") to be cavalier about raising taxes on the rich because they won't have to pay another cent.

What's interesting about these two examples (but not all of Levy's examples, such as making the king subject to the law of the land) is the motivation that the change is supposed to give the person who is brought into the system. The Wall Street Journal didn't believe that high taxes are just fine, so long as the poor people who vote for them have to share in paying for them, and the people who propose the draft don't think that going to war is fine, so long as Senators are willing to send their own sons to fight. The purpose in both cases is to make the affected parties hate the system, turning Lucky Duckies into tax-cutters and belligerent elected officials into pacifists.

Put that way, the logic of these proposals resembles the Leninist notion of "heightening the contradictions." HtC proposes that a revolutionary group would oppose reforms that move society in the right direction, because reform dissipates people's anger at the system. The Fordist economy that the industrialized world had after World War II is a case in point -- by granting workers comfortable wages, business owners took away much of their motivation to join radical communist movements that would try to overthrow capitalism. Instead, HtC proposes that we make the system so burdensome that its victims eventually explode in a revolutionary backlash.

"Lucky Duckies" is, in essence, a proposal to heighten the contradictions of the taxation system for the poor. By temporarily going in the wrong direction -- toward high taxes -- we could motivate the masses to backing a revolution that would wipe out everyone's taxes. Similarly, if elected officials have to contemplate their own sons dying in battle, they would rebel against the use of military force (the parallels are clearer if you think of this happening when a war is going on, rather than while the government is deciding whether to start a new war).
Stentor Danielson, 19:28,

The aesthetics of abortion

Ampersand points to a couple posts (part 3 coming soon) by Jeremy of Refference about using aesthetic reasoning as a basis for resolving political disputes. The first post uses a parable about a man and woman discussing their opinions of TV and abortion to show that aesthetic agreement is easier to come by. In the second post, he moves on to show how aesthetics (which he says we all agree on at some basic level) can provide a basis for agreement:

Neither side, with the exception of a small minority, favors abortions. I know almost no-one who campaigns for more abortions. Considered aesthetically, and I mean this seriously, there is an aesthetic argument against abortion. Abortions are ugly. This argument doesn't carry the moral force of the arguments against abortion or for a woman's control of her person and her privacy, but it still might guide policy. In fact, it is able to guide policy precisely because it lacks that moral force. It merely is a judgement of taste, not of condemnation, or one which requires absolute action. What if the left and the right were committed to attempting to reduce the number of abortions, not out of moral fervor, for their moral ends are surely different, but out of a shared aesthetic sensibility? The different set of criteria over policy might enable a shift in consensus that moves towards a shared goal, rather than morally opposed and intractable positions.

This sounds, at first, pretty good. In fact, I wrote an article for The Maroon-News arguing something very similar -- that both the pro-life and pro-choice forces could move forward if they cooperated in making it so that women wouldn't have any use for abortions in the first place rather than engaging in a war of attrition over whether those who do have a use for abortions should be able to get them. Naive? Probably. But it has the same general outlines as Jeremy's argument, with one exception: I didn't need to resort to the aesthetic realm. In my article, the intersection of political goals was enough without depending on agreement that abortion is ugly (whatever that even means). On top of that, Jeremy argued in his first post that the reason aesthetic agreements are more tractable is because aesthetic judgements are not considered to be as important, so we're willing to give ground (which seems more or less true, in that the most divisive aesthetic disagreements come about when the participants take their opinions very seriously). So why would anyone agree to set aside their moral principles in order to make a decision based upon what is billed as a more trivial standard?

The other problem is that agreement as to ends doesn't mean there's any agreement about means. I'm sure most people would agree that poverty is ugly, as well as morally and politically undesirable. But that doesn't change the fact that some of us believe that progressive taxation and social programs will eliminate poverty, while others believe that deregulation of business and old fashioned hard work will do the trick. And I doubt that we can come to any easy agreement about whether progressive taxation is "ugly" or not.
Stentor Danielson, 13:39,

17.9.03

Geography will swell your brain

As Autumn Approaches, This Chickadee's Brain Begins To Expand In the fall, as the chickadee is gathering and storing seeds, [Lehigh University biologist Colin] Saldanha says, its hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for spatial organization and memory in many vertebrates, expands in volume by approximately 30 percent by adding new nerve cells. In songbirds, the hippocampus is located on the dorsal surface of the forebrain right beneath the skull. In mammals, the hippocampus is located beneath the cortex. In the spring, when its feats of memory are needed less, the chickadee's hippocampus shrinks back to its normal size, Saldanha says. -- via Nature is Profligate

Stentor Danielson, 16:50,

Clark feints

The Hamster posts an excerpt from finally-an-official-candidate Wesley Clark's "100 year vision," which included this bit about the environment:

Environmentally, it means that we must do more to protect our natural resources, enabling us to extend their economic value indefinitely in through wise policies of extracting natural resources that protect the beauty and diversity of our American ecosystems – our seacoasts, mountains, wetlands, rain forests, alpine meadows, original timberlands and open prairies. We will have to balance carefully the short term needs for commercial exploitation with longer term value of the natural gifts our country has received.

The beginning of this bit sounds like it's coming from a conservationist/resources point of view, perhaps even pointing toward an ecosystem services vision. But he quickly shifts into a typical destructive economic use versus preserving natural beauty paradigm. This probably says more about me than it does about Clark -- I want to hear candidates proposing an anthropocentric environmentalism, so I read it into the beginning of his statement. That sort of thing has been the order of the day ever since Clark's name was floated as a possible candidate. Because he's never run for elected office, it's easy for people to read the parameters of their ideal candidate onto the biographical framework Clark gives them. There will probably be some rude awakenings over the next few months, even as he gathers in support from people who hadn't taken much notice of his hypothetical candidacy.
Stentor Danielson, 14:11,

16.9.03

Palmerton progress

Prairie Grasses Appear To Be Working On Blue Mountain Last year the Wildlife Information Center purchased approximately 756 acre parcel of land between the Appalachian Trail and the soon-to-be-constructed Delaware & Lehigh National Heritage Corridor Trail along a portion of the Blue Mountain between Washington Township and the Northeast Extension of the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Because approximately 400 acres of the land was denuded by historic zinc smelting operations in Palmerton, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has ordered that Viacom, Inc., one of the parties responsible for the damage, pay for the mountain's revegetation. This past spring, Frank & West Environmental Engineers, Inc., an engineering firm hired by Viacom, seeded 54 test plots along a portion of the refuge's trails with equal amounts of warm season prairie grasses and varying amounts of fertilizer and soil amendment.

Maybe someday I won't be able to tell people where I live by saying they should watch for the bare section of mountain as they drive along the Turnpike.
Stentor Danielson, 17:40,

15.9.03

Vacation on the farm

Agritourism Is Booming ... They call it agritourism — farmers, ranchers and winemakers offering the public a chance to experience not just their products, but their way of life — albeit an often cleaner version that focuses more on fun than drudgery. ... "People enjoy learning and experiencing what it's like to be part of America's breadbasket," said Diana Thompson, director of Ohio's Historic West, an organization of 10 west-central Ohio counties that promotes cultural and heritage tourism. "There's some kind of Americana feel. That has become more prevalent, certainly in our region."

The "Americana" angle is interesting. There's a certain national mythology that holds that farmers are the "real" Americans. It surfaces in politics when Republicans claim to represent the agricultural "heartland," dismissing Democrats as representatives of coastal urbanites. It's a factor in the farm subsidy program, which bills itself as a way to aid the romanticized family farm. It's also similar to the question of preserving traditional indigenous cultures through tourism, earning your income through display of your livelihood rather than directly through that livelihood.

Certainly one could spin this into a "modern people are realizing that they're too out of touch with the environment" thing. But I think it's more complex than that. While farmers may be the real Americans, there's a counter-mythology that says they're unsophisticated and boring hicks. People in rural areas are often fascinated by the city. The presence of farms was the first proof that Colgate students cited to show that "there's nothing to do" in Hamilton. And agritourism is a pretty sanitized version of farming. Petting a cow is nothing like having to get up at dawn and milk it every day; finding your way through a cornfield is nothing like planting a field and praying that it isn't killed by drought or bugs before harvest time. Similarly, going into the city for a baseball game or to go club-hopping is nothing like living in the ghetto, breathing smog every day and wondering if you're going to get shot. Ultimately, it seems to all be a "the grass is greener (and the neon lights are brighter) on the other side of the fence" thing.
Stentor Danielson, 21:05,

Danny Boy, you're old enough to wear your daddy's toenail polish ...

Only 3 copies of John Mars' debut album left at Amazon.com! Order quick, before they're gone!
Stentor Danielson, 19:08,

Stressed-out Savages

Jungle Dwelling Is More Stressful Life The indigenous Mangyan people of the Mindoro Island in the Phillipines live a traditional and primitive life on the edge of the tropical jungle. Norwegian researchers have now found that the Mangyan way of life produces the same types of stress that modern technological living does - only more so. ... Like present-day affluent Norwegians, the most common physical complaints were muscle and skeletal pains. But while 82.1 percent of Norwegians answered that they have had such problems in the course of the past 30 days, 100 percent of the Mindoro felt the same. ... A basic difference between the two varying cultures is that the Mindoro do not view their pains as illnesses, but rather as a normal state of affairs. -- via Foreign Dispatches

The obvious conclusion is that this study supports the "nasty, brutish, and short" theory of hunter-gatherer life. But I'm not so sure (the usual caveats about critiquing -- or buying into -- a study based only on a newspaper report apply). As far as I can tell, they based their measure of how often a person experiences pain on self-reporting. This opens the study up to cross-cultural subjective differences in what makes pain bad enough to remember and bad enough to bring up when asked. We rarely feel perfect, and there's no obvious point at which something is bad enough to count. So the two culture's attitudes toward pain may affect things. Norwegians see pain as an aberration, which could lead them to deny little pains, as they would be signs of weakness (it could also cause them to have exceptionally high, even perfectionist, standards for health and thus overestimate their pain -- this is something that would have to be established by further empirical work*). Conversely, It's plausible that the Mindoro attitude that pain is part of life may lead them to assume that they felt pain, in the absence of a memory that they definitely did not, or simply to remember actual pains more.

But even if we take their measures of pain frequency as accurate, that doesn't say anything about the pain's impact. The third paragraph I quoted above seems to indicate that the Mindoro have a healthier attitude toward pain -- a sort of "that's how life is, so I'll just roll with the punches" sort of thing. On the other hand, Norwegians see pain as a sort of unjust aberrant badness. This suggests that, when the Norwegians do experience pain, they don't handle it as well. It may spill over into their interpersonal relationships in negative ways, for example. I don't know if this speculation is true -- the report didn't cover these questions -- but it certainly seems possible.

What's really surprising here is that the same ailments are common among both the Mindoro and Norwegians. One would think that such different lifestyles would create different stresses on the body. Perhaps a biological predisposition to weakness in certain areas overrides anything culture can do. Or perhaps the psychosomatic expression of stress follows the same channels, regardless of what body parts are actually being hurt. Or perhaps our biological proclivities have shaped our culture, so that we design our environments in ways that suit our bodies (i.e., the stress ratios that both cultures experience are the optimum, and any other distribution of stress between body parts would result in more total stress).

*The researchers say something similar to this toward the end of the article, but the quotes sound like they're talking beyond the bounds of what the research actually demonstrated, to try to relate it to practical concerns.
Stentor Danielson, 19:06,