15.5.04

A Science Fiction Documentary?

Since that last post sort of bashed the precautionary principle and sort of agreed with a libertarian on an environmental issue (one publishing in Tech Central Station, no less), I have to earn my left-wing credibility back with a nitpick.

In another Commons post, Amy Ridenour quotes David Almasi saying "the likes of Al Gore and MoveOn.org ... want people to see it [the climate change disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow] as more of a documentary than the disaster film that it truly is." But on the very page that you get when you click the link in "MoveOn.org" in Almasi's statement, MoveOn says "'The Day After Tomorrow' is more science fiction than science fact." It seems that, in accordance with the hope I expressed, their campaign is taking the "any publicity is good publicity" tack and trying to use the movie as a jumping-off point to talk about the actual threat of climate change. But statements like Almasi's suggest I was right to worry that the movie's bad science will be conflated with actual environmentalist claims, and thus the latter will be rejected along with the former.

Incidentally, there's good news and bad news about Blogger's new search function. Good news: It gives you the permalink to the post, so you don't have to look at the date then crawl back through your actual archives to find the link. Bad news: Its search algorithm is still crappy -- "Day After Tomorrow" brought up no posts, despite the fact that I've written about the movie twice.
Stentor Danielson, 22:37,

Precautionary Proverb

Via Juan Non-Volokh, I've found something I keep meaning to search for -- a contrarian environmentalism blog, The Commons (hopefully it proves worth reading consistently, though I'm probably jinxing it here). In the posts linked to by Non-Volokh, two authors take Jeremy Rifkin to task for an article promoting the precautionary principle (PP). Despite Rifkin's assertion that the PP is a groundbreaking post-Enlightenment new idea, it's basically classical conservatism -- "the world is extremely complex, so don't change anything unless you're really really sure you know what you're doing." The PP merely emphasizes the environmental applications, whereas conservatism focused on social changes.

Joel Schwartz argues that Rifkin is inconsistent in his use of the PP, since he's decidedly un-precautionary about changes he likes (such as hydrogen fuel). But I think the problem is in a slightly different place. Rifkin mistakenly characterizes the PP as a decision rule. In reality, I think the PP is a proverb. It's used to evoke a certain attitude and declare your feeling that it is applicable to a certain situation.

Schwartz rightly points out that total precaution is unfeasible. But so is total risk-seeking. We have to find some balance where we are willing to take the plunge despite a degree of uncertainty. What the PP amounts to is an assertion that, in the opinion of the person invoking it, we haven't been cautious enough. One could also invoke the inverse proverb -- "nothing ventured, nothing gained" -- if one believed we had been too cautious. Neither of these proverbs constitute a reason for a particular non-extreme level of risk or a rule by which we can test the appropriateness of our chosen level of risk. Rather, they are expressive claims that call on decisionmakers to consider whether they've shown too much/little caution. It's easy to get caught up in the beneficial possibilities of a course of action, so the PP can act as a reality check (and conversely for invoking "nothing ventured" to a worrywart).

Thus, the inconsistency of Rifkin's application is not a sin, by this understanding of the PP -- or at least, it's no more or less of a sin than favoring hydrogen fuel but opposing GM crops. One can dispute his implicit risk assessments in each case, but the PP is no more than an expression of the relationship between his preference and the course of action actually being pursued.
Stentor Danielson, 22:10,

Tolerance

Mark Kleiman (via Matthew Yglesias) makes the old argument that it's hypocritical for pro-tolerance people to be intolerant of intolerant people. I don't think this argument holds up quite as well as it seems to on first glance. If your goal is to maximize total tolerance in society -- i.e., you treat tolerance as a social good rather than a personal virtue -- then it may be necessary to employ some selective intolerance. It's a contingent, rather than analytical, fact whether being intolerant of a bigot might maximize total tolerance by deterring him from practicing an amount of bigotry that outweighs your intolerance. It's similar to the way that, in the interests of maximizing freedom from coercion, we practice some selective coercion (enforcement of murder laws, for example).

That said, I think liberals and leftists often are too quick to assume that being intolerant of intolerant people will maximize tolerance. Barring situations of great urgency, I think it's better and ultimately more effective to change someone's beliefs and behaviors rather than cowing them into keeping silent. To do that, you need to demonstrate what respecting another viewpoint is like, by granting them a degree of tolerance. This is especially the case when numbers are not on your side -- we can probably keep the Republicans in the closet here at Clark, but good luck doing that in the country as a whole.

(And no, I'm not being intolerant of people who are intolerant of intolerant people. What makes tolerance different from acceptance is that you still disagree, and can make your case and try to convince others, but you don't show disrespect or coercion toward them.)

I should also point out that in my experience, the bad effects of hate (the strong, emotive form of intolerance) accrue to the hater as well as the hated -- though I'm open to the idea that my moral psychology is unusual. I don't mean merely that hate leads to retribution of some sort, but that the very act of (knowingly) hating makes me feel like a bad person. I won't say I'm not often tempted to blow off steam (more often than I care to think about, in fact), but it's like wanting to eat a whole box of ice cream. It sounds good in anticipation, but even before you're done you regret it.
Stentor Danielson, 15:32,

14.5.04

Cost-Benefit Analysis

TAP has an interesting debate between Kerry Smith, a proponent of using cost-benefit analysis in making environmental decisions, and Frank Ackerman and Lisa Heinzerling, who oppose it. Though I'll doubtless be kicked out of the environmental movement for saying such a think, I think Smith has the stronger position:

Why then is there so much controversy about cost-benefit analysis? In my view, the reason is simple: It forces those with alternative agendas to place their cards on the table. The rationale for each proposed decision must be made explicit. Holistic, moral, safe, and fair criteria must be translated into specifics. Once this is done, the tradeoffs among alternative outcomes implied by these decisions can be compared with the wishes of the affected people and any deviation from those wishes must be explained.

The general principle of cost-benefit analysis (CBA) correct. It recognizes the necessity and inevitability of tradeoffs between different values, and forces us to be explicit about what those tradeoffs are. CBA is a tool for helping us structure our thought processes, not a black box that will spit out The Correct Answer. A CBA is an argument, a proposal for how to weigh the various considerations, not an incontrovertible decision or revelation of an objective fact. It's open to tinkering with the inputs and structures, while making such tinkering, and the assumptions behind it, transparent.

The one major revision I would make to CBA is to incorporate more of the techniques of handling uncertainty and utility scales that have been developed within the Decision Analysis framework. Monetary costs can be misleading because the amount of benefit associated with a dollar differs depending on how many dollars someone has. In any case, the criticisms made by Ackerman and Heinzerling aren't specific enough to differentiate between the various mathematically explicit decision procedures (such as classical CBA, Decision Analysis, Analytical Hierarchy Process, and Linear Programming). They argue:

The administration of George W. Bush is the most hostile to environmental protection of any in recent memory. It is also the most enthusiastic about the use of cost-benefit analysis to screen proposed regulations. Perhaps this is only a coincidence. Perhaps a process of carefully summarizing people’s preferences has found that the American public wants to weaken the Clean Air Act, drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, ignore the dangers of global warming, allow more polluting snowmobiles into national parks, use cheaper and less effective safeguards against SUV tire blowouts, accept high levels of mercury in our food and water, and so forth. But we don't believe it. Gamblers know that dice that always roll snake-eyes are loaded. The same holds true for a decision-making method that repeatedly tells us to do less about environmental protection, even when public opinion polls tell us that the American people want to do more. ... It is a political tool used to undermine regulation, hardly ever to strengthen it. As Smith notes, cost-benefit analyses have occasionally supported environmental protection, as in EPA’s retrospective analysis of the Clean Air Act. In such cases the Bush administration -- populated by the most ardent defenders of cost-benefit analysis in executive branch history -- has pressed ahead in exactly the opposite direction, attacking rather than defending key provisions of the Clean Air Act, without mentioning the cost-benefit results.

In what way does "the Bush administration doesn't do CBA properly" imply "CBA itself is no good"? If the administration's CBAs are "loaded," then the problem is the loading. And the explicitness of analysis that CBA requires would seem to make it easier to identify the whether, how, and why of the administration's disregard for public preferences.

Almost no one attaches a price to the things they care most about. How much is your family worth to you? Or your religion? Or your health? By arguing that good decision-making requires monetary equivalents for environmental goals, the advocates of cost-benefit analysis degrade priceless values to the level of cheeseburgers and fries ... Without cost-benefit calculations, we are not helpless or indecisive; without help from economists, ordinary people think profoundly and come to reasoned judgments about threats to life, health, and nature, and about our obligations to future generations.

I doubt that, for all the pieties about the sacredness and infinite value of human life, anyone seriously feels that way. We make tradeoffs in our lives all the time. If our health was really priceless, we would never eat so much as a single Dorito, or get within a hundred feet of a car. The fact that we drive around and eat junk food (among other activities with some level of risk) shows that -- as the authors go on to admit -- we're capable of making tradeoffs. What CBA does is ask us to try to be explicit and systematic about those tradeoffs.

When it disagrees with actual public opinion -- as it does so often on environmental issues -- we’d rather let the people decide.

Public opinion does not exist prior to and independently of the policymaking process. CBA incorporates public opinion into its analysis, and has the possibility of in turn shaping public opinion.

The numerous deaths avoided by reducing air pollution were given a monetary value, around $6 million apiece in today’s dollars. This was based on an average of the small wage increases that blue-collar workers in the 1970s and early 1980s supposedly received for accepting small risks of dying on the job. What do the wages of blue-collar workers decades ago, many of whom went to work out of economic necessity and without an explicit understanding of the risks they faced, have to do with our preferences, today, for cleaner air? Some economists try to avoid this problem by asking people, in “contingent valuation” surveys, how much they would be willing to pay to avoid a hypothetical risk. But survey participants’ answers are heavily censored by the surveyors, who discard some answers for internal inconsistency and others for asserting too high a value for protecting health and the environment.

That CBA has been done poorly or ineptly should be no surprise. But it's only the explicitness of CBA that makes such specific criticisms possible. People's intuitions about what course of action is better incorporate these very kind of tradeoffs, in inchoate -- and thus dificlt to criticize -- form. Such intuitionism may be fine for private decisions. But major governmental policy changes should be obligated to make their reasoning clear, through a technique like CBA.

Smith says that we have limited resources and that we may have to trade one environmental or educational program against another. But why is it only good things that have to be traded against each other? What if we want both education and environmental protection, what if we want both protection of coastal wetlands and spending on climate change mitigation? Personally, we’d like to have it all, and finance it by giving up some useless missiles or tax cuts for millionaires.

Education versus environment is a tradeoff that CBA helps us analyze. So is education and environment versus missiles and tax cuts. I entirely fail to see how CBA requires us to make the former decision but prevents us from making the latter. Indeed, it would be helpful if Congress could use some form of CBA to decide whether money spent on missiles and tax cuts wouldn't be better put into education and environmental protection. Then we'd have a clearer basis for decision than Ackerman and Heinzerling's intuition (which I share) that the tradeoff would be beneficial.

Ultimately, it seems that most of Ackerman and Heinzerling's arguments point to the benefits of CBA, rather than detracting from it.
Stentor Danielson, 13:25,

Cost-Benefit Analysis

TAP has an interesting debate between Kerry Smith, a proponent of using cost-benefit analysis in making environmental decisions, and Frank Ackerman and Lisa Heinzerling, who oppose it. Though I'll doubtless be kicked out of the environmental movement for saying such a think, I think Smith has the stronger position:

Why then is there so much controversy about cost-benefit analysis? In my view, the reason is simple: It forces those with alternative agendas to place their cards on the table. The rationale for each proposed decision must be made explicit. Holistic, moral, safe, and fair criteria must be translated into specifics. Once this is done, the tradeoffs among alternative outcomes implied by these decisions can be compared with the wishes of the affected people and any deviation from those wishes must be explained.

The general principle of cost-benefit analysis (CBA) correct. It recognizes the necessity and inevitability of tradeoffs between different values, and forces us to be explicit about what those tradeoffs are. CBA is a tool for helping us structure our thought processes, not a black box that will spit out The Correct Answer. A CBA is an argument, a proposal for how to weigh the various considerations, not an incontrovertible decision or revelation of an objective fact. It's open to tinkering with the inputs and structures, while making such tinkering, and the assumptions behind it, transparent.

The one major revision I would make to CBA is to incorporate more of the techniques of handling uncertainty and utility scales that have been developed within the Decision Analysis framework. Monetary costs can be misleading because the amount of benefit associated with a dollar differs depending on how many dollars someone has. In any case, the criticisms made by Ackerman and Heinzerling aren't specific enough to differentiate between the various mathematically explicit decision procedures (such as classical CBA, Decision Analysis, Analytical Hierarchy Process, and Linear Programming). They argue:

The administration of George W. Bush is the most hostile to environmental protection of any in recent memory. It is also the most enthusiastic about the use of cost-benefit analysis to screen proposed regulations. Perhaps this is only a coincidence. Perhaps a process of carefully summarizing people’s preferences has found that the American public wants to weaken the Clean Air Act, drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, ignore the dangers of global warming, allow more polluting snowmobiles into national parks, use cheaper and less effective safeguards against SUV tire blowouts, accept high levels of mercury in our food and water, and so forth. But we don't believe it. Gamblers know that dice that always roll snake-eyes are loaded. The same holds true for a decision-making method that repeatedly tells us to do less about environmental protection, even when public opinion polls tell us that the American people want to do more. ... It is a political tool used to undermine regulation, hardly ever to strengthen it. As Smith notes, cost-benefit analyses have occasionally supported environmental protection, as in EPA’s retrospective analysis of the Clean Air Act. In such cases the Bush administration -- populated by the most ardent defenders of cost-benefit analysis in executive branch history -- has pressed ahead in exactly the opposite direction, attacking rather than defending key provisions of the Clean Air Act, without mentioning the cost-benefit results.

In what way does "the Bush administration doesn't do CBA properly" imply "CBA itself is no good"? If the administration's CBAs are "loaded," then the problem is the loading. And the explicitness of analysis that CBA requires would seem to make it easier to identify the whether, how, and why of the administration's disregard for public preferences.

Almost no one attaches a price to the things they care most about. How much is your family worth to you? Or your religion? Or your health? By arguing that good decision-making requires monetary equivalents for environmental goals, the advocates of cost-benefit analysis degrade priceless values to the level of cheeseburgers and fries ... Without cost-benefit calculations, we are not helpless or indecisive; without help from economists, ordinary people think profoundly and come to reasoned judgments about threats to life, health, and nature, and about our obligations to future generations.

I doubt that, for all the pieties about the sacredness and infinite value of human life, anyone seriously feels that way. We make tradeoffs in our lives all the time. If our health was really priceless, we would never eat so much as a single Dorito, or get within a hundred feet of a car. The fact that we drive around and eat junk food (among other activities with some level of risk) shows that -- as the authors go on to admit -- we're capable of making tradeoffs. What CBA does is ask us to try to be explicit and systematic about those tradeoffs.

When it disagrees with actual public opinion -- as it does so often on environmental issues -- we’d rather let the people decide.

Public opinion does not exist prior to and independently of the policymaking process. CBA incorporates public opinion into its analysis, and has the possibility of in turn shaping public opinion.

The numerous deaths avoided by reducing air pollution were given a monetary value, around $6 million apiece in today’s dollars. This was based on an average of the small wage increases that blue-collar workers in the 1970s and early 1980s supposedly received for accepting small risks of dying on the job. What do the wages of blue-collar workers decades ago, many of whom went to work out of economic necessity and without an explicit understanding of the risks they faced, have to do with our preferences, today, for cleaner air? Some economists try to avoid this problem by asking people, in “contingent valuation” surveys, how much they would be willing to pay to avoid a hypothetical risk. But survey participants’ answers are heavily censored by the surveyors, who discard some answers for internal inconsistency and others for asserting too high a value for protecting health and the environment.

That CBA has been done poorly or ineptly should be no surprise. But it's only the explicitness of CBA that makes such specific criticisms possible. People's intuitions about what course of action is better incorporate these very kind of tradeoffs, in inchoate -- and thus dificlt to criticize -- form. Such intuitionism may be fine for private decisions. But major governmental policy changes should be obligated to make their reasoning clear, through a technique like CBA.

Smith says that we have limited resources and that we may have to trade one environmental or educational program against another. But why is it only good things that have to be traded against each other? What if we want both education and environmental protection, what if we want both protection of coastal wetlands and spending on climate change mitigation? Personally, we’d like to have it all, and finance it by giving up some useless missiles or tax cuts for millionaires.

Education versus environment is a tradeoff that CBA helps us analyze. So is education and environment versus missiles and tax cuts. I entirely fail to see how CBA requires us to make the former decision but prevents us from making the latter. Indeed, it would be helpful if Congress could use some form of CBA to decide whether money spent on missiles and tax cuts wouldn't be better put into education and environmental protection. Then we'd have a clearer basis for decision than Ackerman and Heinzerling's intuition (which I share) that the tradeoff would be beneficial.

Ultimately, it seems that most of Ackerman and Heinzerling's arguments point to the benefits of CBA, rather than detracting from it.
Stentor Danielson, 12:38,

13.5.04

Public Understanding Of Science

Dense Matter Indeed ... As science becomes more complex, more prominent in everyday life and more dependent on taxpayer dollars for research, Nobelist-breeding academies like Caltech are reaching out to the clueless — meaning most folks. The goal is to nurture popular support for scientific endeavors by making them easier to understand. Public lectures are the front line of this campaign. But as Schwarz has learned, dumbing down the toils of super-nerds can strain the brawniest of brains. "I don't think anybody's going to get the whole story," said Schwarz, before addressing 900 walk-ins at Beckman Auditorium, where Caltech holds a series of public lectures. "I am presenting some difficult subjects, like extra spatial dimensions. It's a little hard to visualize."

What's interesting about this story is that, while the public doesn't quite get what the scientists are saying, their support for science isn't diminished. They don't object to funding particle accelerators even if they have no clue what it's used for. As long as it's Science, they accept it. There's a sort of acquiescence to technocracy, to a division of labor where we trust the scientists to do the science. It's a viewpoint I can sympathize with, as I don't know any more about string theory or the big bang than the confused attendees at the lectures the article discusses.

The article seems confined to high-level physics topics. The technocratic attitude is easy when the subject is something that seems esoteric and distant. Why shouldn't I trust physicists? But I think we'd find a different result if they dealt with popularization of scientific topics that the public sees* as directly bearing on their lives -- say, cloning, or fire ecology, or mercury pollution**. In such cases I think there's a greater need for public understanding, a greater possibility for public understanding, and a greater threat of public skepticism.

There is a greater need for public understanding of science in seemingly life-relevant topics for two reasons. First is to maintain public trust in, and support for, the scientific enterprise. Because of the increased skepticism (on which more below), the public is less accepting of the argument from authority and thus needs to come to a real understanding (in the Habermasian sense) of the value of the science. Second, technocracy is neither advisable nor possible, a point I've argued at more length elsewhere.

There is a greater possibility for public understanding of science in seemingly life-relevant topics because people have more of a motivation to master the material. The environmental justice literature is replete with examples of cases in which concerned citizens, driven by a feeling of threat to their lives and homes, became sophisticated producers and users of scientific knowledge. I think there are some grounds for hope that, despite the tendency to ideologically reject science that conflicts with our desires, overall the public will more readily learn about life-relevant science than about seeming esoterica.

There is a greater likelihood of public skepticism of science in seemingly life-relevant topics because such topics bring the scientific enterprise within the scope of social maneuvering that people understand. It's logical that environmentalists would want to inflate the rate of extinction, or that tobbacco companies would want to show that smoking doesn't cause cancer. But who ever heard of ulterior motives for discovering the "up" quark? Doubtless they exist, but they're disciplinary politics far removed from most people's experience. But while this ability to see the possibilities of a failure to adhere to objectivity calls scientific findings into question, it also boosts the public's confidence in its ability to engage in the scientific debate. People are willing to participate because the science is intertwined with things they are familiar with. They feel qualified to have an opinion rather than simply shrugging and deferring to scientists' expertise.

*The crucial issue is the perception that a finding has relevance to everyday life, not whether it actually does.

**I think evolution is a case that goes both ways. I doubt I'm alone in being willing to smile and nod when presented with the esoterica of evolutionary biology because I don't feel it has a strong impact on my daily life. On the other hand, if my theological worldview required faith in a six-day creation, then I would be more critical, because evolutionary explanations threaten my philosophy of life.
Stentor Danielson, 18:41,

Global Darkening

Doom May Loom Amid The Gloom In the second half of the 20th century the world became, quite literally, a darker place. Defying expectation and easy explanation, hundreds of instruments around the world recorded a drop in sunshine reaching the surface of Earth - as much as 10 per cent from the late 1950s to the early 1990s, or 2 to 3 per cent a decade. ... the dimming trend - noticed by a handful of scientists two decades ago, but dismissed at the time as unbelievable - is now attracting wide attention. Research on global dimming and its implications for weather, water supplies and agriculture will be presented in Montreal at a meeting of US and Canadian geological societies next week.

I'm not so surprised to hear about this possibility. The mechanism -- light blocked by pollution -- seems straightforward enough. I'm reminded of the discovery of the ozone hole. Scientists initially couldn't believe the data because it was so much bigger than anyone would have anticipated, but it turned out to be legit.
Stentor Danielson, 18:36,

Bioregionalism Vs. Ayllus

The disjuncture between political boundaries and the boundaries of environmental systems has caused its share of problems. Consider the near impossibility of creating a workable solution to the Aral Sea crisis because the hydrological system is fragmented among at least six countries. Because of this, there have been numerous inter-jurisdictional institutions created to coordinate the management of border-crossing ecosystems.

Some people have taken this idea even further, creating a radical vision of bioregionalism. Bioregionalism is the philosophy that political boundaries should be redrawn based on ecological boundaries. This would not only reduce* cross-boundary management conflicts, but it would also allow each polity to assume a form most suited to managing the type of ecosystem it resides in.

Like many elements of the radical environmental movement, bioregionalists look to indigenous people for inspiration. In their view, indigenous people practiced a more or less bioregional way of life. But this is an unduly romanticized view of indigenous people. While their was of life was more sustainable than ours, and they were bioregionalists when looked at at a coarse scale simply due to the large number of polities they had, they exhibited plenty of borders drawn on the basis of social factors rather than natural systems. That alone is not a fatal objection to bioregionalism -- after all, they could consciously use the "ecological Indian" as a myth rather than as a historical fact, since its ability to represent their ideals is independent of what indigenous people ever actually did. More interesting is the fact that in some cases -- I venture to say most, at least in areas where the degree of environmental heterogeneity made it feasible -- indigenous people were explicitly anti-bioregional. They deliberately constructed their territories to cut across ecosystem boundaries.

The ayllus (clans) of indigenous Andean people are a classic example. Rather than differentiating into different tribes at different elevations, Andean social groups aimed at controlling a slice of territory spanning all the environments, from the coast through maize and potato farming areas to the arid altiplano and back down into the Amazon rain forest. When a group couldn't directly control access to a variety of environments, they would try to gain access through social connections (a strategy widely employed in Australia).

There are environmentally sound reasons for this effort to make polities cross-cut diverse bioregions (beyond the simple need or desire for a variety of products). It works as a risk-reducing strategy. If the potato crop fails, you still have the maize and the fish**. An ayllu-type system was possible in part because indigenous people rarely had the means to severely degrade their ecosystems and impose costs on their neighbors. They simply didn't need bioregional coordination of management in many cases. Thus they had more freedom to pursue the advantages of regional diversification.

The basic bioregionalist focus on homogeneous or systemically integrated regions overlooks the advantages of this kind of cross-cutting jurisdiction. But it does, as I mentioned, highlight an important issue of integrated ecosystem management, one becoming ever more important as our power over ecosystems (or at least our power to mess them up) increases. A better approach, then, seems to be some form of overlapping jursidictions. A proposal of this type has been made within the adaptive management literature. Studies of small-scale overlapping jurisdictions (e.g. school districts, police districts, etc.) suggests that, while having different (even arbitrarily different) boundaries for different functions may seem untidy and present bureaucratic hassles, such a system is more socially resilient in the long run. It seems no stretch to think that it would be more environmentally resilient as well.

*Only ever reduce, not eliminate. Geographers long ago realized that there is no one set of "true" natural regions.

**This point applies whether the bioregions are defined in terms of homogeneity of conditions or in terms of systemic integration.
Stentor Danielson, 01:42,

11.5.04

Burning Idiots

Communities Debate Tree-Thinning Rules To Avert Fire Danger ... "There are people here who have four to five dead pine trees on their property, and they completely ignore everything," said [Sam] Corsino, chairman of the "fire-wise" committee for his subdivision. Why the ignorance? "Because they're idiots!" he said. "Some people are not too bright."

Well, there's some refreshing honesty. This whole story -- indeed, the whole private-property fuel management debate -- seems to have this quote as an underlying assumption. The firefighters know best, they say we need to clear defensible space, and it's those selfish idiot homeowners who won't shape up. Mind you, I'm an advocate of defensible space and strong home-construction fireproofing measures. But it bothers me to see the media, as well as many of my fellow fire safety partisans, slipping into this easy technocratism. I think there's a good deal more to homeowner noncompliance with firefighters' recommendations -- there'd better be, or else I'll have nothing to write in my dissertation.

I was also very interested by this bit:

John Mosier and a business called Healthy Acre Forestry have taken matters into their own hands, creating maps that show which Prescott properties meet the local Fire Department's standards for defensible space and which don't. His group recently sold their mapping services to two forested subdivisions. The idea is to create pressure on homeowners slow to get the thinning religion. "The map is a very powerful tool," Mosier said.

My basic dissertation approach is looking like it will be framed more in terms of land change and sustainability science than political ecology, but I have a hope of being able to put some of my findings into the context of more "critical" political ecology and constructivist perspectives -- to speak to both sides of the methodological divide in geography, though not necessarily at the same time. There has been some interesting theory produced, usually in the context of postcolonial studies, about how maps are used to frame issues and define the discourse. The role of fire danger maps could be an interesting and different sort of case to apply those ideas to. It's something that I ought to keep in mind, anyway, as I'll certainly want to at least have a look at the fire danger maps that fire councils in NSW are required to produce and use in policymaking.
Stentor Danielson, 23:18,

News Flash: Environmental Science Has A Social Component

A Matter Of Degrees ... The thread isn't the staggering complexity of the Earth's life support systems. Given sackloads more data and a few dozen more supercomputers strung together, we might just begin to cope with that. No, it's the infinite, and infinitely shifting human perceptions of, and reactions to, this drama now unfolding. Now here's something that we can, pedagogically speaking, get our teeth into. It's got everything: business, politics, economics, love and hate, rich and poor, science and art, and also, for comic relief, a soupcon or two of sheer gormless stupidity. You can develop fancy academic models of human behaviour. The frog-in-the-beaker-of water-being heated analogy, for instance (frog put into hot water straight away would jump out; frog in heating water stays put until ... it's too late). It's multidisciplinary, and crosses the arts/humanities divide. It just needs a fancy title. How about psychoclimatics, say? That's got a nice ring to it.

I'm glad he's discovered the importance of studying the human dimensions of global environmental change just a century after geographers took up the topic. When he puts together his syllabus on "psychoclimatics," I recommend starting with Carl O. Sauer, B.L. Turner II, William Denevan, Gilbert F. White, Roger Kasperson ... I'm hopeful he'll find something in those readings a bit more sophisticated than the old boiling frog analogy.

It's frustrating how often people from the natural sciences stumble upon the idea that social issues require analysis as well, then proceed to theorize with apparent obliviousness to the fact that social scientists have been working on these problems for years. I'm open to the idea that an outsider may have some fresh perspective, but you've got to show that you're familiar with what's been said before (and are thus being neither redundant nor naive) if you want to advance it as a scientific proposition.

On the other hand, I'm frustrated with the failure of social scientists to do this kind of realm-crossing. Even within human-environment study, people who start out on the social side tend to stay there, unwilling to make a real attempt to grapple with the subject matter -- much less the theoretical literature -- of the natural sciences. Unfortunately I have to count myself among this group as well.
Stentor Danielson, 22:57,

Perhaps I Should Watch Out For Airborne Pork

EPA Issuing Tough New Diesel Rules The Bush administration announced tough new rules yesterday to curb harmful emissions from off-road diesel-powered vehicles, pleasing environmentalists after brokering a compromise with industry on deadlines. Off-road diesel-powered vehicles, such as bulldozers, tractors and irrigation equipment, are among the largest sources of pollutants that scientists have linked to premature deaths, lung cancer, asthma and other serious respiratory illnesses. The regulations, which Environmental Protection Agency director Mike Leavitt will sign today, would reduce the emissions of nitrogen oxide and other pollutants from diesel engines by more than 90 percent over the next eight years. ... "It's remarkable that these strong rules come from the same administration that has otherwise turned back the clock on 30 years of environmental progress," said Emily Figdor, a clean-air advocate for the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. "It's great to see science win out over the special interests for a change." ... "With an opportunity to score a slam-dunk, at the last minute the Bush administration committed an unnecessary foul," said Frank O'Donnell, executive director of the Clean Air Trust. "It caved in behind closed doors to political pressure from oil companies and delayed cleanup for fuel used in marine and train engines."

I don't dispute that the rule contains concessions to industry, and I suppose it's necessary to be on record indicating that the final rule is not perfect. But this seems like a situation in which positive reinforcement combined with making the contrast with the usual conduct of this administration is key. Positive reinforcement emphasizes that environmentalists are not implacably opposed to whatever the administration does, while making the contrast helps to forestall using this policy to greenwash its overall record, stressing that the positive evaluation is policy-specific.
Stentor Danielson, 16:49,

10.5.04

Trojans And Indians

Belle Waring wonders why sports teams are named the "Trojans," considering that in the end the Trojans got soundly defeated. But it doesn't seem any stranger than all the teams named the "Indians," since the Indians also got beaten pretty bad in the end. Now, the Indian survivors and their descendants have made a (non-military) comeback, rebuilding their society and culture and pride. But that's not the era that the Chief Wahoo logos are trying to evoke, any more than "Trojans" refers (as some of Waring's commenters hypothesized) to their resurrection as the Romans.

In a way, though, picking a loser is appropriate. The ideals of good sportsmanship generally focus on being a good loser. So it makes sense to invoke the story of people reputed to fight nobly to the end despite being headed for defeat.

(Though I do note that, according to this list, there are nearly as many "Cowboys" (9) as "Indians" (10, plus two who have since changed mascots).)
Stentor Danielson, 10:12,

Superfund

Superfund Could Be Weakened By Recommendations From EPA Subcommittee Since President Bush took office, the Superfund program's budget has decreased by 25 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars, and some 50 percent fewer sites have been cleaned up, according to a report produced by the Sierra Club and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group Education Fund. In fiscal year 2003, the Bush administration completed cleanups at only 40 Superfund toxic-waste sites, whereas an average of 87 Superfund cleanups were completed per year between 1996 and 2000. Industry representatives and Bush officials argue that these numbers are misleading because many of the easiest-to-tackle Superfund sites were cleaned up early in the program's history, leaving behind bigger, more complex sites that take longer to deal with. Environmentalists counter that so-called "mega-sites" have been part of the agency's agenda for decades, and the shortfall is due to meager funding and a flimsy commitment to the Superfund cause. ... Among the range of recommendations [in a report released in April by an EPA subcommittee, which was accused of being loaded with industry representatives] that dissenting subcommittee members found problematic was the notion that sites be added to Superfund's National Priority List based on EPA's budgetary constraints, weighing the financial viability of site cleanups instead of focusing on how much of a threat sites pose to public health. Even more alarming to some was the suggestion that sites be cleaned up based on their potential to be redeveloped for commercial purposes -- a proposal that would disadvantage the cleanup of sites in rural communities and inner-city areas, which are generally less favorable markets for commercial development.

If the remaining sites are complex "mega-sites," that seems like a good reason to boost funding. The public health impacts aren't lessened by the complexity of the site, so complex sites demand more resources.

I have to disagree with the dissenters, though, on dismissing cost-effectiveness criteria for prioritizing cleanups. It sounds nice and high-minded to say public health should be the only issue. But when funding is as tight as they claim, it's even more crucial to get the best bang for our buck. One could plausibly argue -- and I'd be inclined to take this position, given that the NPL is hard to get on or off of, and thus far less changeable than budgets -- that NPL listing should be based purely on health considerations, but that the choice of which NPL sites to focus on remediating should be based on cost effectiveness. But that's really just shifting the issue back one stage.
Stentor Danielson, 00:06,

9.5.04

Tiny DC

Matthew Yglesias says that "it's often said that Washington, DC is a surprisingly small city for capital of The World's Only Superpower." But really, it shouldn't be that surprising. After all, it was built for the purpose of being the capital. If it weren't for the US government, nobody would have bothered to drain the swamp on the Potomac. Since there's no independent reason for there to be a city there, it's not inclined to as much growth. The pattern holds for other countries as well -- Brasilia is dwarfed by Sao Paulo and Rio, and Canberra is a fraction the size of Sydney or Melbourne.
Stentor Danielson, 15:28,