1.11.03

Natural Fire

Gregg Easterbrook's latest post is an attempt to defend the Healthy Forests Initiative. His point here is to challenge "enviros" who think that a totally hands-off approach to forest management is the answer. In passing, he also lays some blame on people who choose to live in fire-prone areas -- the growing urban-wildland "intermix" that puts more and more people and homes at risk of fire -- while effectively taking that phenomenon as given. He goes on to state that, since intermix is a reality, simply allowing fires to burn naturally is unacceptable, as it puts people at risk. The alternative is some sort of environmental management, and Easterbrook thinks (incorrectly, in my previously-stated view) that Healthy Forests is a step in the right direction, in part because it commits us to management of wildlands rather than hands-off treatment.

This argument is ignoring two crucial bits of information: 1) not all fire-prone areas have become intermix areas, and 2) most "enviros" that I've heard do not oppose management-intensive fire policy in intermix areas. The backcountry -- areas far from human habitation -- still exists in many places. In the backcountry, it's possible to take a more hands-off approach. Indeed, such an approach would save money while reducing the risk that a fire will get a running start in areas where access is poor and hence firefighting is difficult, before roaring into the intermix. The converse situation -- in which backcountry is a tinderbox -- was created by fire-suppression management done at great expense in the backcountry. The general class of "hands-off" environmental proposals are focussed on the backcountry. They recognize that backcountry fire is less of a problem because human intrusion into the backcountry increases the fire hazard by 1) putting more people and livelihoods in risky locations, 2) creating more sources of ignition, and 3) making fuels more fire-prone, by exposing them to the drying rays of the sun (as occurs along roads) and changing the fuel composition (as when traditional logging leaves behind piles of slash and underbrush).

The Healthy Forests Initiative is, however, a backcountry plan. The timber companies who will do the work of thinning want access to the backcountry, because that's where the good timber is. "Enviros" generally agree that mechanical thinning should be focussed on the areas immediately around settlement, yet Democratic Senators had to do some arm twisting to get their version of the bill to mandate that a whopping 50% of thinning would be done in these critical intermix areas. The administration has explicitly defended the idea that thinning must be done in the backcountry, a proposal that doesn't square with Easterbrook's use of the problems of the intermix as a rationale for Healthy Forests.

On a slightly different topic, Easterbrook says:

After loggers come through there is a big, denuded open field. A big, denuded open field is also what is left after a wildfire. Better to arrive at the big, denuded open field artificially, avoiding death and destruction while creating logging jobs--since the Douglas fir will be just as happy to grow in the big open field regards of whether nature's fire or people's saws cleared the land.

It seems that Easterbrook has already forgotten a point he made earlier in his article -- that a natural fire regime, and certainly a managed fire regime based on controlled burning, does not leave a big, denuded field (at least in forested areas). It generally (though it's important to remember the exceptions lest we get too carried away by an enthusiasm for frequent controlled burning) results in parkland -- that is, land with little understory but numerous larger trees. Those larger trees are the first to go when loggers come in. Indeed, they have to be explicitly instructed to clear out the understory that presents the real fire danger.

From a hazard-reduction perspective, he's right that there's not a lot of difference between a field cleared by an all-consuming fire and one cleared mechanically. But from the ecological perspective -- which he invokes with his reference to the infant Douglas fir -- there is a big difference. Logging reduces fuel by taking it away. Fire reduces fuel by reverse photosynthesis, breaking the fuel down and redistributing its constituent nutrients. Traditional farming practices often include burning the stubble left after harvest both because that's easier than mechanical removal and because it returns nutrients to the soil. Further, mechanical clearing doesn't trigger many of the fire-dependent seeding mechanisms -- like the resin-sealed pinecones described earlier in Easterbrook's post -- that are necessary for healthy regrowth.
Stentor Danielson, 23:06,

The Manliest Cavemen

This Jeanne D'Arc post criticizing George Lakoff's "strict father vs. nuturing parent" scheme for understanding politics has been getting a lot of attention. But I didn't make it to her first mention of Lakoff yet, because this opening metaphor caught my attention:

... Republicans want to be cavemen: Every man goes out into the world with his club and his spear, ready to take on the wooly mammoths. Every woman needs to find a guy with a big spear to take care of her. The problem with that view is that it never worked, even in the days of of the cavemen. It takes a lot of spears to kill a wooly mammoth. One guy with one spear is a wooly mammoth snack. If we hadn't learned to work together, the wooly mammoths would be using computers, and we'd be extinct.

I'll spare you the talk about how the coalition nature of the American parties makes any "X party is like Y" statement that isn't issue-specific very suspect (a criticism that applies to Lakoff as well). What I'm interested in is what D'Arc's metaphor says about cavemen.

The "mammoth hunter providing for the band" idea we know so well -- and which D'Arc plays on to illustrate what she thinks of Republicans -- isn't a terribly good picture of most hunter-gatherer cultures, even with D'Arc's "caveman cooperation" revision. In a typical hunter-gatherer society, most of the band's food is provided by gathering, which is usually a task for women and children. Meat is a small (though crucial, for its protein) part of most hunter-gatherer diets. Further, much of that meat comes from small game. Even the women and children would hunt small animals, which were caught with more frequency than megafauna (just as men would gather while out on a big hunt).

Hunting and gathering practices varied a great deal. The societies who were closest to the popular idea of cavemen as being dependent on men hunting megafauna were those in polar regions -- where the classic wooly mammoth was found. Why has a polar hunter-gatherer lifestyle become symbolic of how our ancestors lived, when for much of the development of the human species they lived in tropical African environments? One answer is Eurocentrism. The ancestors of Europeans went through such a polar megafauna-hunting phase, and the climate difference makes it stand out from the more temperate modern European climate.

Another reason may be the very gender dynamic that D'Arc points out. Masculinity run amok carries with it a sense of being primal and raw. It's nice if we think that such masculinity did prevail before the dawn of the civilization that reined in the manly men. Harsh climate and mighty megafauna reinforce the idea of male strength battling for victory on behalf of a beleagured people. At the same time, this primal masculinity is also primitive. While admiring the cavemen's feats of strength, we can look down upon their stupidity, a mental level defined by their lack of civilized comforts and the presumed trade-off between brains and brawn. These kind of cavemen reassure modern men and women that this is what pure masculinity is, and that civilized men have a masculinity that's compromised (even if it's a compromise we accept).

UPDATE: I finished reading D'Arc's post, which ends with this:

People want the party of "masculine" strength. But real masculinity is more complicated and includes women. (Well, heterosexual masculinity anyway. There's an obvious flaw in my metaphor here, and I don't want to feed anti-gay stereotypes while trying to fight anti-female ones, but I don't see a way around it at the moment; another reason why I need to keep thinking about this). The frame I'm aiming for contrasts phony, immature masculinity vs. real, sexual, smart masculinity that prefers life with women and a community rather than being out in the field with a spear and a mammoth.

I'm happy to see D'Arc thinking about the sexuality implications of her proposed metaphor, something that's unfortunately rare in dichotomous metaphors that play on gender ideas. But in this case I think her concern is misplaced. She seems to be presuming that the need real men have for women and traditionally feminine characteristics is a sexual one, and thus the scheme is inapplicable in the case of a homosexual man. As a heterosexual man, I disagree with the idea that my need to include women in my life and community is entirely mediated by my sexuality. Certainly there's one way that a woman can be part of my life that a gay man would lack -- though I lack one of his ways of making another man part of his life (bisexuals are problematic in one of these ways if they're monogamous). But it's only one of many ways in which I can relate to a woman, in addition to things like friend, sibling, colleague, teacher/student, etc. To reject such relationships on the basis of gender would be unhealthy masculinity just like rejecting such relationships with anyone (as in the case of D'Arc's solitary cavemen) would be unhealthy masculinity.
Stentor Danielson, 19:49,

31.10.03

Healthy Forests Passes

I don't have time for a lot of posting, so I'll just point you to a nice little post by Matt Reading on the passage of the Senate's version of the Healthy Forests Initiative, which is a slightly better version of the House bill (providing such things as a requirement that half the thinning be done in the wildland-urban interface, which would limit the kind of backcountry logging that timber companies would like to do). Now we just have to count on the conference committee not to take the House's side. I'm pessimistic about that, which means that the Senate will be forced to make an up-or-down vote on the worse version, with the fact of the California fires and the threat of being accused of wanting to do nothing hanging over them.
Stentor Danielson, 17:42,

30.10.03

Gotta Love Those Conference Committees

A couple stories of mischief by conference committees (the guys who reconcile differing House and Senate versions of a bill) have come to my attention lately. First, a post by MBW of Wampum brings this to my attention:

Indians Irate At Change Of Language In Spending Bill Language inserted in an Interior Department spending bill may force lawmakers to choose between urgently needed funds to battle wildfires and delaying a federal court-ordered accounting of billions of trust fund dollars that American Indians say have been misplaced. ... opponents of such an accounting have pointed in part to studies showing it would cost taxpayers an estimated $9 billion to $12 billion to retrace and verify all the transactions for every account. It is against this backdrop and the backdrop of catastrophic wildfires this year in California and Arizona that a Senate-House conference committee has quietly inserted the language into the Interior Department bill delaying the court-ordered accounting by a year, to Dec. 31, 2004.

(A slight tangent: If we can afford $87 billion to help the people whose country we invaded in 2003, surely we can find $9-12 billion to help the people whose country we invaded in 1607.)

The second incident relates to my commentary from this week, linked in the post below. When I wrote it, I was optimistic that the measure to essentially lift the ban on travel to Cuba (by denying the funds to enforce it) would pass Congress, since both the House and Senate had voted yes to a transportation funding bill that included the Cuba language. Then I encountered this report, which suggests that the conference committee will dump the Cuba measure to spare President Bush the embarassment of having to veto.

I'll admit to mixed feelings on the rules of legislative procedure. On the one hand, I know that laws are often more than the sum of their parts, and thus I'm skeptical about procedures (like the line-item veto) that would treat bills as just collections of clauses. On the other hand, I hate the strategy of attaching riders to unrelated bills. (Incidentally, I also hate the strategy of "repealing" a law by denying funding to enforce it. So the Cuba measure has two procedural strikes against it in my book despite achieving a worthwhile end.) So while I don't like artificially restraining conference committees from crafting a bill that works as a whole, surely there must be some standard about not dropping language passed by both houses, and not inserting entirely new language?
Stentor Danielson, 20:14,

29.10.03

Fighting Fire With Rhetoric

This week's cartoon:



And my commentary: "Veto This? Cuba And Bush In 2004," with its cartoon.
Stentor Danielson, 18:28,

Good Enough For Now

Leavitt Wins Approval as Head of EPA The Senate on Tuesday confirmed Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, ending an effort by six senators to block the vote in protest of Bush administration environmental policies. ... Leavitt, who has governed Utah for 11 years, has earned a reputation even among some environmentalists as someone who can gather people of divergent views to work toward common environmental goals. He shares President Bush's preference for coaxing businesses to become partners in achieving pollution reduction objectives, rather than forcing them to comply with strict regulations. ... Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg of New Jersey said Leavitt had allowed one of the country's biggest polluters, Magnesium Corp. of America, to release 170 times the allowable amount of dioxins, one of the most dangerous toxins, for years.

Leavitt seems like he's about as good an EPA head as we could expect to be appointed by President Bush. Any Republican who's substantially more environmentalist than Leavitt would have to come from a marginal part of the party, and would anger a sizeable portion of the party's base -- not to mention being on a collision course with the rest of the administration. I certainly wouldn't want to subject myself to the arm-twisting that the President gives to the EPA (or the CIA, for that matter). I wouldn't be surprised if Leavitt, like Christie Whitman before him, ultimately resigns because he can't take the White House agenda anymore. On the other hand, he may become a sort of Colin Powell figure, loyal while disagreeing and being forced to compromise his integrity to keep up the administration's stance. Indeed, that may be exactly what Bush is hoping for -- someone who can sell the administration's policies to skeptical members of the public, because they've built a reputation for being one of the good Republicans. I think Leavitt also represents the best side of Bush's environmental philosophy, and does it better than Bush because he's not as compromised by his ideology on other, more important to him, topics.

I think my assessment is corroborated by the tone of the debate over Leavitt's nomination. We've seen plenty of heated nomination fights in which Democrats scrutinized the record of the nominee -- John Ashcroft, Miguel Estrada, etc. That didn't happen with Leavitt. The focus of the debate was always on what Bush had done to the environment. The nomination became a forum to criticize the federal government, not the Utah government. Leavitt was sort of a hostage, his approval held up as a desperate attempt by an out-of-power party to force the administration to cooperate more.

I'm disappointed that John Kerry -- whose stance on the environment I've praised -- and Joe Lieberman -- who seems to be pushing his environmental credentials as an antidote to the "too far right" charge -- missed the vote.
Stentor Danielson, 16:52,

28.10.03

The Devil's Sidebar

According to The Gematriculator (link via Disputations), my main blog page is 35% evil. But when I feed it just the text of my posts, it says 28% evil. Hence my sidebar and stylesheet are more evil than my actual content. Make of that what you will. (Also note that "The Gematriculator uses Finnish alphabet, in which Y is a vowel." I blame my evil on the Finns.)
Stentor Danielson, 22:04,

27.10.03

Sprawl And Fire

California's Fire Policies Feel Heat The spate of fires that began leapfrogging across Southern California Saturday, fueled by unseasonably hot weather and scorching winds, once again spotlights the vulnerability of California's arid climate to quick-moving blazes. As happened 10 years ago, when flames destroyed 265 homes in Laguna Beach and in 1991 when 400 homes were devoured in the residential hills of Oakland and Berkeley, debates on past lessons and new regulations are already swirling like the white ash now rising above San Bernardino's blackened foothills. Those debates include how California home builders site their subdivisions amid the tree-lined canyons where lush undergrowth fed by winter rains become tinder-dry brush by summer and late fall. They include fresh assessments of how well homeowners are keeping the leafy growth trimmed back, whether or not bans on flammable building materials have been effective, and severe critique of neighborhood planning designs that should have prevented the flames from leaping from one residence to the next.

This article was a bit disappointing, as it didn't go into much more detail than you see in the quoted paragraphs. Nevertheless, they raise an important issue relevant to the human vs. natural causes thing I wrote about in the previous post. A fire hazard (or any hazard, really) is a combination of the magnitude of the event and the exposure of people and property. That exposure is a largely human-made phenomenon. Current development patterns greatly complicate fire management, because they increase the amount of edge area where a fire threatens to cross from wildlands -- where, broadly speaking, it can and should burn -- into the built landscape -- where it can't and shouldn't. This increases the need for resource-intensive treatments like mechanical thinning (chopping stuff down) and house protection, while requiring the cooperation of a much larger array of individuals (since homeowners need to fire-proof their property).
Stentor Danielson, 12:44,

Whose Fault Is A Fire?

Bushfire Blame Pinned On Public More than half the bushfires fought in recent months started on private property but escaped onto public land, according to a "blame sheet" of figures compiled by the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service. ... "While it is difficult to ascertain the causes of the fires which started on other tenures, national parks and reserves were certainly impacted by these fires." ... The president of the NSW Farmers Association, Mal Peters, said grazers and farmers knew best how to manage the land. ... He rejected the argument that drought, high summer temperatures and lightning strikes created ideal conditions for fires. ... Nine farmers [who have filed a lawsuit], whose properties adjoin Goobang National Park, north of Parkes, say that if the parks service had done more hazard reduction and fought the fire more aggressively it would not have escaped the park and damaged their land.

I've quoted a lot to give the context of the conflict, but what I found really interesting was the fourth paragraph above. The government position is a blend of social and natural explanation. They attribute the ignition of the fires that spread from private to public land to the human activity of prescribed burning, but they emphasize the role of nature -- specifically climatic conditions -- in making the resulting fires a serious hazard. The farmers, on the other hand, seem to be opting for a thoroughly social explanation.

The farmers' argument seems to be in part a strategy for rhetorically taking control of the environment. They can emphasize the ability of the members of their group to handle the land, while putting the government at fault. I suspect this is related to a fear of regulation -- in order to argue against interference in their land use practices (by the government), farmers need to be able to assert that their practices are responsible and sufficient for addressing any problems that may occur.

The government, meanwhile, is haunted by its lack of omnipotence. The social contract charges the government with taking care of society, and thus opens it to criticism when society is not taken care of. The problem can be dodged if the blame for the failure can be shifted to an outside factor, such as climate, that's beyond anyone's control. Thus, there's an incentive to play up the natural side of things -- and indeed, in most government reports on fires that I've read, the role of nature takes center stage.
Stentor Danielson, 01:44,

26.10.03

How Did They Say "Quagmire" In Latin?

Exhibit: Romans Weren't Racially Prejudiced The ancient Romans did not judge people based on ethnicity nor did it influence the status an individual could achieve within the Roman Empire, a new exhibit in England contends. ... Lindsay Allason-Jones, who organized the exhibit and is director of archaeological museums at the university, said very few Italians constructed and manned the wall [Hadrian's Wall, which defended Roman-occupied Britain]. Most were Spanish, Gallic, German and North African. She said soldiers could rise to senatorial status regardless of their color or country of origin, as long as they were loyal to the empire. Allason-Jones told Discovery News that Emperor Hadrian himself was Spanish. Yet another famous Roman emperor, Septimius Severus, came from Libya. A number of governors of Roman Britain came from various parts of Africa. These leaders included Urbicus, Adventus, L. Alfensus Senecio, Clodius Albinus, L. Aemilius Salvianus and L. Minthonius Tertullus.

I don't mean to dispute the conclusion that race and ethnicity was a very different thing in Roman times. But the evidence I quoted above seems a pretty weak way of defending the conclusion that Romans weren't prejudiced. After all, consider American-occupied Iraq: there are plenty of black and Hispanic soldiers over there, and the person running the show -- Condoleeza Rice -- is likewise not white. Yet it would clearly be incorrect for the archaeologists of the future to infer from that that there's no racial or ethnic prejudice in the United States.

On a bit of a tangent, I wonder if anyone who actually knows something about ancient history has written an article comparing the American occupation of Iraq to the Roman occupation of Britain.
Stentor Danielson, 21:49,

More On GM Externalities

This article contains some interesting information about the safety of organic versus GM food, and the history of opposition to changing agricultural technology. Unfortunately, it's framed as a screed against leftist intellectual snobbery. In so doing, it makes the most common mistake made by anti-organic/pro-GM arguments: focussing almost entirely on the inherent qualities of the food product, and thus missing the huge question of the externalities of the production process.

I'll grant that many opponents of GM do focus on the food itself, claiming that it's less nutritious and more dangerous to the eater. While I'm not conversant with all the agricultural science on the question, on this issue I tend to think the anti-GM side's claims are not strong enough to justify a regulatory, rather than individual choice, solution. One "inherent quality of the food" question that isn't raised in the article is taste. Anecdotally, I can report that one of the best pieces of fruit I ever ate was a bunch of organic grapes.

The tack that DeGregori (the author) takes is somewhat different from the typical "GM food is safe" argument. He opens by describing how the ability to mass-produce identically perfect goods has led to a search for imperfection and inferiority -- such as one sees in handcrafted goods -- as a mark of authenticity, prestige, and value (for those who can afford it). In doing so, he lays the groundwork for a critique of his argument.

On one level, I can agree that there's often something silly about the search for inferiority. But it's important to see what that search for inferiority is really seeking. It's not necessarily something inherent in the product. It's a recognition that the product has a history, that it came from somewhere and was worked on by someone. The very sameness and perfection of mass-produced goods makes them seem as if they appeared out of nowhere. In buying handcrafted items, people want to reconnect themselves with the production process, to think about all the externalities created in making what they buy. Since DeGregori can't see that in handcrafted items, it's no surprise he can't see it in organic food.

For example, DeGregori says:

It is another of the "inferior is superior" views that there is something inherently virtuous in farmers planting their own saved seeds ...

But the argument in favor of planting saved seed has nothing to do with the inherent virtues of the product. It's an argument about the political economy of agriculture. The problem is not with the qualities of the crop, it's with the farmers becoming dependent on agrobusiness corporations for their seed, which reduces the power and autonomy of the farmer.

Interestingly, DeGregori is able to see political economic conditions when they weigh against organic food. He expresses concern that because organic food (and other non-mass-produced goods) is more expensive than high-tech food, restricting the latter would affect the ability of the poor to get any food at all.
Stentor Danielson, 14:35,