Unintended Consequences

Jen and I had the chance to spend a couple hours with a forester in some of the woods around where we live. It was part of this group Black Mountain Forestry Center. The guide kept talking about the "unintended consequences" of environmental regulations and how some of them were causing more damage in the long run than was ever intended. (making it easier to get a permit to clear-cut than to selectively harvest, stream buffers, letting beavers keep their dams when it was drying up the stream removing fish habitat - these are just a few) Back40 at CrumbTrail has an excellent writeup on yet another "untended consequence" of environmental "planning" -- another exercise in short-sighted thinking and a deficit in communications skills: bq. Dumb Environmentalism One of the reasons that environmental protection and remediation has had so little success despite so much noise and anger is that noise and anger are the chosen behaviors of the politicized environmental movement. Huge amounts of time, energy and money are squandered by brain dead activists who approach every problem with protest, legal and political efforts. bq. Force is a blunt instrument for these issues which is mostly ineffective. Worse, it creates opposing armies. The activist-bureaucrat-lawyer-politician pseudo-environmentalist army is opposed by an equal and opposite force. Little changes, less is accomplished, time passes and the only ones smiling are the lawyers and politicians. It's just so stupid. Here's an example. He then quotes from an article in the Eugene, OR Register-Guard newspaper: bq. Politicians should act on Siskiyou compromise The Bureau of Land Management is studying cattle impacts [on the Cascade-Siskiyou Monument] now, but results are not expected until 2006. And even then, the agency says it probably will be years before the government issues a final decision. bq. For the ranchers, this investigation might not represent the proverbial writing on the wall, but it has made them hesitant to bet tens of thousands of dollars in legal costs on an uncertain result if the grazing study lands in court. As for the conservationists, they want to begin environmental restoration and protection of the monument's outstanding features without further delay or damage. These are the separate but dissecting interests that have brought the sides together. OK you say -- must be a lot of cattle to be causing that much fuss. Back40 provides some of the back-story: bq. There are only 600 cattle in the whole disputed area and ranchers have been willing to vacate their leases for years if they were compensated. Just the current study will cost a million dollars and take years to complete and lead to management changes. The grazing leases could have been bought out several times over by the money spent over the years attempting to take the leases by force. bq. If that happened then the brain dead pseudo-environmentalists could more quickly see that they have accomplished nothing. As in other parks such as Yellowstone native grazers such as Elk will soon increase in numbers to replace the cattle, and do as much "damage" or more. Then the brain dead environmentalists can agitate for wolves to control the naive grazers, or park service hunters can cull the herd with guns, poison or traps. Emphasis mine -- the environmentalists only look to their own agenda -- a talking point or two. A project to work on. The often fail to see the total effect of what they are proposing in the grand scale of things. If they do own up to the possible damage, they will say that the victories over the industrialists have to start small and one at a time. Back40 goes on some more about the comparitive virtues of the ranchers and the environmentalists and suggests that the ranchers are doing a lot more to environmentally manage the park system than the rangers or the scientists. The forester we talked with on the trip said basically the same thing. The people who own the timberlands do not want to do anything that would hurt the environment. Their profits depend on a healthy ecosystem and the majority of their techniques are designed to mimic those of nature. True, a clear-cut looks pretty fugly and I would not want to live in one of them but a naturally burned forest is not a nice place either but in a few years, it's an incredible habitat and in 30 years, it's another forest. Same thing with the clear-cut.