The report, commissioned by Wyden, Craig and other members of Congress, identifies problems created by the practice of transferring funding from one project to another within agencies when those agencies have insufficient budgets for fighting wildfires.
For the last two years, federal agencies charged with preventing wildfires have been forced to borrow funds from other, unrelated projects to pay for firefighting. This shell game leaves vital fire prevention projects – such as hazardous fuels reduction and watershed restoration - underfunded and undone, which contributes to continuing fire dangers.
... The report cites that neither the Forest Service nor the Department of the Interior have adequate data or tracking mechanisms for the effect of continued interagency borrowing for fire fighting. It also recommends setting aside off-budget funding specifically for emergency purposes, either in agency-specific accounts or in a government-wide account.
The full report is here. I may have more comments in the morning. Unfortunately, I'm not surprised to hear that the Forest Service and Interior have poor data on their own operations.
Stentor Danielson, 02:19,
3.6.04
Leave A Penny
It looks like William Safire has hauled out that old staple of feel-good reform: abolition of the penny. It's a convenient cause to champion, since you can tap into a vast reservoir of public annoyance, without having to dip your toe into the divisive and morally challenging waters of social injustice.
I'm personally neutral on the issue, or perhaps mildly in favor of abolition if only to save the nation's public swimming pool snack stand employees the hassle of being confronted by little kids with huge piles of wet pennies after the Fun Day penny-find. But I wonder why the reform has to come from the top. If pennies are such a burden, you'd think private choices would have started to make the penny obsolete.
To some degree this is happening. Every time you drop a penny and don't bother finding it, you strike a blow against the coin. Take-a-penny-leave-a-penny dishes help, as do charity penny collection jars*. But if pennies are such a pain, why don't more people just refuse to take them? Pay to the nearest nickel, say "keep the change," and leave. People occasionally did this when I worked as a cashier, and I simply created an informal take-a-penny-leave-a-penny stash. If more people did likewise, the annoyance of the penny would be greatly relieved. The fact that they don't suggests that, despite the whining, people really do think pennies are worthwhile.
There's room for retailers to take things into their own hands as well. If stores can refuse to take $50 or $100 bills, they can certainly manage to ease pennies out of their system. They needn't even ban pennies outright, as hardly any customer will voluntarily offer pennies if they don't have to. They just need to make a store-wide policy of rounding off prices to the nearest 5 cents. It could be a good advertising gimmick. I can already hear the radio commercials -- a wimpy-sounding man groans under the excessive weight of all the pennies he has to carry, when his excessively perky wife suggests he shop at such-and-such a store, where they don't use pennies. The store could even sweeten the deal by raising their prices a few cents, then pledging to always round down. The main problem here seems to be the vertical segregation of tasks -- the cashiers, who are most aware of the penny problem, have no input into marketing and store-wide policy. Score one for socialism, as collective ownership of the enterprise would make the necessary communication more likely.
These reforms may not cut into the main thing that seems to anger Safire -- the time the mint wastes making pennies (though perhaps reduced demand from stores could help). But it answers the most common source of anti-penny sentiment.
*I don't know how effective these are at raising revenue, but their continued popularity suggests this is one argument in favor of retaining the penny. Indeed, the penny's very percieved worthlessness can be its strength, as it's easy to part with into a charity bucket or a piggy bank, but in the long run it adds up into a seeming windfall.
Stentor Danielson, 16:13,
2.6.04
Indians vs. Archaeologists
For a site with an archaeology name, it's been an awful long time since I posted about archaeology. Today Witches' Voice comes to the rescue, pointing to a mediocre New York Times article about a dig in California:
... many Native Americans are outraged that the bones of their ancestors are being dug up from the ancient burial ground, known to the Tongva tribe as Saa'angna and filled with the skeletal remains of people whose predecessors hunted and roamed across Southern California 7,000 years ago or more. Archaeologists here believe it is the largest excavation now going on in the country.
The skeletons, most of them female, are being removed for the development of Playa Vista, a complex of condominiums, apartments and townhouses, some selling for more than $1 million. The burial grounds, which were discovered late last year, stand in the way of a proposed stream that opponents call a drainage ditch and that the developer more elaborately calls a riparian corridor.
... [Togva tribe observer Jordan] David said that at least three of the approximately 70 archaeologists and osteologists had quit because they were unhappy about what they were being asked to do. Mr. David said some archaeologists had shown "appalling disrespect to the people who have passed."
He said one archaeologist had waved a carved bone tube used to draw out sickness or bad spirits and had exclaimed, "Oh, look, I can do magic!" A supervisor told her to stop, he said.
It's not clear from the article how deep the Indians' opposition goes. The initial comments are general enough to suggest an overall opposition to archaeology, but the article goes on to focus on some abuses so egregious that even the archaeologists are angry. This may be an attempt to evoke sympathy for the Indians on the part of the reader. It may also be a case of opposition to particulars leading to a more general opposition. The opinions of the Indians may have been open to revision at the outset, but first-hand experience with a bad dig hardened them against the whole archaeological enterprise. It certainly sounds like cooperation between the two sides has been minimal. One disgruntled archaeologist reports being ordered not to speak to a tribal liaison, and the description of what will be done with the remains, while obviously meant to be conciliatory, sounds as if it was all the archaeologists' idea, rather than an agreement worked out with the tribes. Proactive involvement of Indians from day one has helped to generate much goodwill at other sites. Then again, it may not have been possible if the tribes started off implacably opposed to unearthing their ancestors and unwilling to give seeming approval for a lesser-of-two-evils situation (if they even see scientific study as better than obliteration under the developer's bulldozer). I'd be interested in how these initial countacts played out, but the reporter didn't ask.
Incidentally, if corporations want to know why we insist on creating "command and control" regulations rather than pursuing the kind of voluntary compliance programs that the Bush administration is so fond of, we need look no further than this all too typical bit of rhetoric from the developer:
George Mihlsten, a lawyer representing the Playa Vista development, said the company was not legally bound to consider the Tongvas' wishes because they were not members of any of the 562 federally recognized Indian tribes. The Tongvas acknowledge that they do not have federal recognition but said their cemetery should be respected nonetheless.
If you're going to dodge moral questions by turning them into legal questions, then we'll have to come at you through the legal system.
Stentor Danielson, 22:38,
The wolf-effect theory holds that wolves [in Yellowstone] kept elk numbers at a level that prevented them from gobbling up every tree or willow that poked its head aboveground. When the wolves were extirpated in the park as a menace, elk numbers soared, and the hordes consumed the vegetation, denuding the Lamar Valley and driving out many other species. Without young trees on the range, beavers, for example, had little or no food, and indeed they had been absent since at least the 1950s. Without beaver dams and the ponds they create, fewer succulents could survive, and these plants are a critical food for grizzly bears when they emerge from hibernation.
After the wolves' reintroduction in 1995 and 1996, they began to increase their numbers fairly rapidly, and researchers began to see not only a drop in the population of elk but a change in elk behavior. The tall, elegant mahogany-colored animals spent less time in river bottoms and more time in places where they could keep an eye out for predatory wolves. If the wolf-effect hypothesis is correct, and wolves are greatly reducing elk numbers, the vegetation should be coming back for the first time in seven decades.
Trees are coming back most dramatically in places where a browsing elk doesn't have a 360-degree view; these willows, for example, sit below a rise that blocks the animals' view. A look at the plants shows they have not been browsed at all in several years. Elk don't feel safe here, Ripple contends, because they can't see what is going on all around and are nervous about spending time in this vicinity. Just 50 meters away, however, where the terrain is level and wide open and the elk enjoy a panoramic view, the willows are less than a meter tall and have been browsed much more heavily over the past three years. "It's the ecology of fear," Ripple says.
That's a pretty neat scenario. The article goes on to cite some skeptics who think the changes may have more to do with climate changes than wolf reintroduction. There may be something to that, although the last paragraph I quoted seems to be a good pro-wolf-theory quirk in the data.
Stentor Danielson, 22:06,
31.5.04
Powerlessness
The "retribution" rationale for punishment is often conceived of as an issue of reciprocity of harm -- and eye for an eye, you should feel as much pain as you caused me. But I think on the level of motivation, there's more to it than this sort of hedonic calculus. The basic impulse seems to come from the question of power.
One of the strongest moral desires people have is for agency. We want to shape our own sense of self and life-project (even if we do so by giving ourselves over to God or some group). Most crimes or injustices are premised on a loss of agency, a loss of power over who the victim is and what they can do. The frightening part of being mugged is as much the realization that you're not in control of the situation and that someone else is dictating to you as it is about having less money at the end.
Retribution, then, is an attempt to reestablish the victim's power. It's a way of proving you haven't lost your capability for agency while making your erstwhile dominator into a non-agent, rendered powerless over his own life and liberty.
This may explain some of the appeal of prison rape as an ultimate punishment. Regular prisoners retain some amount of dignity and agency, despite having their life so circumscribed by prison routine. But being raped invades one of the most private elements of the self, stripping the victim of control over something that should be a fundamental act of self-actualization. If "Bubba" can rape you, he's in total control. What's more, it's arbitrary power, regulated by Bubba's whims rather than the (paradoxically humanizing) regularity and predictability of a set of official prison rules. It's this total disempowerment that seems like the only fitting way to reestablish justice after someone has committed an egregious abuse of power.
Stentor Danielson, 23:46,
Authorial Intent
I'm writing an awful lot about The Day After Tomorrow considering I'm probably never going to actually see it*.
Strangely enough, the only favorable review of the movie that I've seen (not that I've been looking that hard) comes from a conservative. Liberals seem eager to minimize its cinematographical merits in order to distance themselves from its wacky science, while Johnathan Last is apparently comfortable enough in his political stance that he can sit back and enjoy it as a fun disaster flick.
Last goes on to argue that TDAT can't be construed as a criticism of the Bush administration because neither the screenplay nor the book it's based on were originally written with an explicitly anti-Bush agenda in mind. That's a pretty strong version of the idea of authorial intent. Art is a pretty shallow pursuit if you can't reinterpret it and make new connections -- if it's not just wrong but illegitimate to see a movie whose theme is people dying because of their complacency about climate change, and then apply that message to the specific case of the Bush administration.
*Not that this is much of a rejection of the movie. I only see about two movies a year in a theater. This year I've already seen Return of the King, and I'd probably spend my money on Shrek 2 over TDAT.
Stentor Danielson, 13:24,
30.5.04
"Bubba"
I'm starting to think that a good measure of someone's partisanship (which is different from the extremeness of their ideology) is whether they approve of rape. By this measure I'm pretty non-partisan, since I don't ever approve of anyone being raped for any reason. But I've noticed a disturbing tendency among wild-eyed Bush haters* to exult in the idea of their opponents being raped. It's not enough for the bad guys to be stripped of power, totally discredited, and thrown in jail. Ultimate justice involves "a cellmate named Bubba." Perhaps this is just my naivete about the world of power politics, or just a deep-seated aversion to the "retribution" model of justice, but I can't sink low enough to wish that kind of treatment on anyone (yes, not even Hitler).
*Yes, I'm sure it happens on the far right too, but I don't read those sites.
Stentor Danielson, 15:22,
"I Support Environmental Protection, But I'm Not An Environmentalist"
Over at Open Source Politics, Joe Taylor approves of a post by natasha celebrating the death of environmentalism (which Jesse Taylor predicts will be the outcome of The Day After Tomorrow):
[I have to say here that the death of environmentalism might not be an entirely bad thing. Put a nail in the coffin already. Bollocks to people who want to spread a message of brotherhood with the animals, and double bollocks to those who like to talk about the sacredness of untouched nature. Kill environmentalism, and bring on the environmental science.
We don't need to protect the animals because they're cute, or unique, or interesting. We need to protect them because they keep us alive. We don't need to protect the trees because they're sacred and old, but because they filter our water, maintain our atmosphere, and keep our topsoil in place. Coral reefs shouldn't be protected because they're fun to visit, but because populations will starve and the reefs will cease to protect coasts from the full force of storms. The earth doesn't need us, we need it.]
Like natasha and Joe, I prefer a science-based and anthropocentric approach to environmental protection*. But that view is environmentalism. You don't have to join PETA and ELF to be an environmentalist. Saying otherwise is like the people who say "I believe in equality for women, but I'm not a feminist" -- they've fallen into the trap of thinking that only the extremists count as members of the movement.
To the extent that The Day After Tomorrow damages environmentalism, it won't discriminate between the spiritual environmentalism that natasha and Joe hate and the scientific environmentalism that they support. Rather, it will make people think that the positions taken by scientific environmentalism are spiritual and thus discredit the very thing natasha and Joe want to advance. People will be looking for a less radical approach to the environment, but they'll be more likely to see it in right-wing "sound science" than in environmental science, whose conclusions they've learned to associate with TDAT's wild hyperbole.
*Though I don't share their disdain for people who take the more spiritual view.
UPDATE: natasha clarifies her position in comments here and at OSP. Essentially she seems to be taking a pragmatic stance regarding the ineffectiveness of "spiritual" arguments for environmental protection.
Stentor Danielson, 11:32,
debitage 
Fire Funding