25.10.03

The Ethics Of Land Trusts

Land Trust Alliance Rewriting Its Ethics Standards At its annual conference last weekend in Sacramento, the Washington-based Land Trust Alliance announced plans to add ethics training to its professional workshops, begin an ethics column in its quarterly magazine and develop regulations governing land-preservation techniques. ... The nation's 1,300 land trusts represent the fastest-growing arm of the environmental movement. The nonprofit organizations protect land by buying and holding real estate, and by accepting donations of conservation easements -- permanent deed restrictions that bar some types of intrusive development. The alliance said those methods have helped protect more than 6 million acres of open space in the United States. The alliance's emphasis on ethics comes after a Washington Post investigation into the Arlington-based Nature Conservancy, the association's largest member and the world's wealthiest environmental group. The three-day Post series published in May reported that the conservancy had logged forests and drilled for oil under the last native breeding ground of an endangered bird species. The charity's governing board and advisory council included executives and directors from corporations that had paid millions in environmental fines, the series pointed out, and the conservancy had engaged in multimillion-dollar business deals with those executives and their companies. Other stories told how conservancy officials had extended low-interest loans to charity executives and sold scenic properties to conservancy employees and state trustees, who often built homes on the sites and reaped large tax breaks from the Internal Revenue Service.

A land trust is an interesting creature. Though it frames its mission in a social-benefit sort of way, it's a private organization. The problem is how to preserve that first element against the abuses that the second allows. The discussion of ethics seems focussed on shoring up the benevolence of the trusts. Trust managers simply need to be clearer on what the right thing to do is, and more committed to doing it. For example, Darby Bradley said:

Let me suggest that a land trust’s primary responsibility is to the Community At Large, and that because of this, we are obligated to think about the needs of that community which go far beyond land conservation. ... It is no longer ethical, in my view, to say that the job of a land trust is to conserve land, and that meeting all the other needs of the community is somebody else’s job. We must consider the larger big picture and the context within which we do our work. Back in the early days of the Land Trust Alliance, we could get away with thinking just about conserving land. The subject was so new to everybody, and our early efforts were so feeble (for the most part), that it didn’t really matter much what the context was.

What seems to be missing from this vision is a mechanism for ensuring that the ethical goals are met. External enforcement, such as the legal action that has prompted this ethical soul-searching, seem inadequate, particularly on a day-to-day basis. Some sort of internal checks and balances or incentives ought to be found that would inhibit trust managers from abusing the power that they attain as the owner of sorts of a large amount of land. The mission of a land trust means that the basic private property model, which is designed to enable one to do whatever one wants with one's property, is not enough.

There's also a problem of finding a mechanism for establishing the goals. The private decisionmaking model works well enough if the goal is strictly nature protection on the trust land. Nature can't effectively speak for itself, and so the role of a privileged interpreter, such as a land trust board with access to the latest ecological research, has a place. But if -- as Bradley argues, and I agree -- the role of trust land is broader, incorporating human needs and uses, as well as considering trust land in the context of the total landscape, things get trickier. There is a strong trend in the social sciences today away from the idea that any one actor, no matter how enlightened, is able to decide the proper land management regime. A broader participatory decisionmaking process (one that confers real power on community members) is necessary to make trust management more responsive to local needs, as well as giving the ultimate decision greater legitimacy.

On the other hand, the lack of this sort of broad participatory scheme is part of what makes land trusts effective at stopping development. To some degree it's the old dilemma of choosing between democracy and decisiveness. Beyond that, there's the problem that most people lack either the time, the energy, or the interest to do a good job of being in a participatory process. This means that such a process will not necessarily properly reflect the best interests of the community. Indeed, people often put land into trust specifically because they can't take care of it themselves, and thus they want to delegate that responsibility to a reliable institution. The point of the land trust is that it's given the responsibility to make decisions for the entrusters.
Stentor Danielson, 23:18,

Ouch

Apparently rugby has no mercy rule.
Stentor Danielson, 16:07,

You Learn Something Every Day

A couple little linguistic tidbits I ran accross today:

• An investigation of the urban legend that went around a little while ago claiming that "it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae." It turns out that the example sentence relies on a few extra tricks to make it work. What really caught my attention, though, were some of the foreign language ones. Finnish didn't work too well, in part because Finnish uses really long words instead of all the little un-jumble-able function words (like "by" and "and") that English has. On the other hand, I found the Spanish version to be just as readable as the English.



• An answer to the origin of the racial term "Caucasian": apparently Johannes Blumenbach, the guy who invented it, thought Caucasians got their start when Noah's Ark ran aground in the Caucasus Mountains. This, of course, leads one to wonder where the other races got started, if they weren't on the Ark. I haven't been able to track down more information on Blumenbach's system. My best guess would be that, of Noah's three sons, two -- Japheth and Shem -- were thought at the time to be the ancestors of groups (Europeans and "Semitic" people, respectively) that would be classified as Caucasian. This means that the remaining four of Blumenbach's five (I'm guessing Negroid, Mongoloid, Australoid, and ... ?) split from Ham's descendants at a later date.

24.10.03

Catholic Church Kinda Sorta Maybe Supports Gay Rights

Church Open To Same-Sex Benefits Talk Leaders of the Roman Catholic Church in Massachusetts yesterday told lawmakers that the state's bishops would "join the discussion" of granting domestic-partner benefits to same-sex couples, but that they remain opposed to legalizing gay marriage or civil unions. ... A spokesman for the Boston Archdiocese, the Rev. Christopher Coyne, echoed [Church lobbyist Daniel] Avila's position, saying the church is primarily interested in extending benefits that affect education and health matters in gay families with children. Such benefits would be unrelated to the institution of marriage, he said. "I think what's actually being said is that the benefits that are necessary for the protection of children and families don't necessarily involve any kind of a redefinition of relationship or marital status," Coyne said.

What's interesting about this development is how the Massachusetts Church's position takes a different tack from most anti-gay-marriage arguments, including those made by Catholics. One very standard form of argument is to make a tight link between heterosexuality, the raising of children, and marriage -- usually in a form like "the only purpose of marriage is child-rearing, and only heterosexuals can have children, therefore only heterosexuals can get married."

As far as I can tell, given the confusion in what precisely the Church is advocating*, this article shows Catholics challenging both premises of the argument above. Their rejection of the idea that homosexual couples can't have children is obvious. And unlike many (including the Pope), they don't get around the problem by arguing that child rearing by homosexual couples is illegitimate. Whether because they've given up that fight as unwinnable, because they see that in most cases their ideal option of being raised by the biological mother and father isn't an option that's available to the children being raised by homosexual couples, or because they realize there's nothing wrong with being raised in a homosexual household, I can't say. But whatever their rationale, they've taken an important step in accepting homosexual parenthood as something that should be legitimized and supported by society and the state.

This position could easily lead one to support gay marriage, but the Church has attempted to get out of that conclusion by denying the other premise of the standard "marriage is for the children" argument: that child rearing is the sole purpose of marriage. In advocating the extension of only some of the benefits of marriage to homosexual couples, they seem to be saying "these are the elements of marriage that are about child rearing, and which -- for the sake of the children -- should be extended to any family." This implicitly identifies the other aspects of marriage, which they would deny to homosexual couples, as being about the married people rather than about the children. I'm a bit skeptical that the elements of marriage can be so neatly classified, and of course I don't see any reason to deny the non-child-related elements of marriage to homosexual couples. But what the Church has done here with its position is interesting.

*I don't know how much of this is the writer's fault and how much of it is the existence of dissent among members of the Catholic hierarchy, which can't be directly acknowledged due to the institutional and theological arrangements of the Church.
Stentor Danielson, 17:32,

23.10.03

We Have To Do Something

One of the more popular rhetorical strategies used by Republicans lately is to accuse their opponents of not wanting to do anything. Opponents of the war in Iraq wanted to let Saddam do whatever he wants, opponents of the Healthy Forests Initiative want to let people's homes burn down, opponents of the PATRIOT Act want to tell al-Qaida "thank you sir, may I have another?"

On one level, this is an example of the logical fallacy of the false dilemma. The user of this fallacy offers two choices -- support the war or let Saddam off the hook, for example -- as if between them they exhausted the possibilities, when in fact they do not.

On another level, Republicans are able to make the false dilemma into a true one. They're able to do this because they're in power (and presumably the Democrats would do the same thing if they controlled both Congress and the White House). And they're able to do this because the policy debate takes place not only on the discursive level, but on the level of voting. Voting lacks the nuance of speech, particularly the ability to challenge the terms of the question and introduce alternatives. It's yes or no on the measure at hand. And the people in power -- the Republicans, at present -- have the ability to define what options are on the table. They're able to simplify the debate so that voting for Healthy Forests or doing nothing about wildfire do in fact exhaust the available courses of action. (Of course, the Democrats aren't totally powerless, so the situation right now is slightly less rigid than the pure case that I'm presenting for the sake of argumentative clarity.)

This is one reason to take those "report cards" that interest groups issue about voting records with a grain of salt. The groups issuing the card define one vote as doing something good about the environment/guns/abortion/whatever, and the other as not. This misses out on people who would like a third option and don't think the option on the table is good enough. Further, it conflates actual support for a measure with voting for a bad measure so as to look like you're on the right side or that you do want to do something about the issue. In one sense, this isn't so bad, since it's the votes that actually count, not what an official feels in his or her heart. But those votes are dependent on the power relations at the time of the vote. The Democrats would come off looking much more like they want to do something about terrorism if they had the power to define what something we were going to consider doing about terrorism.

Anyone who can make a false dilemma into a true one in this fashion is in a good position. They can smuggle quite a lot of objectionable (to their opponents) things into the "do something" option, trusting that the overall package is still better than doing nothing and that a better version can't be introduced into the choice. The side without power, meanwhile, is in an unenviable situation. The dilemma facing Congressional Democrats over the $87 billion request for Iraq is the most prominent example. They're stuck between not wanting to endorse the administration's adventure in Iraq, but also not wanting to do nothing for the people of Iraq or the American soldiers serving over there. While I would vote yes in this artificially de-falsified dilemma, I can understand others voting no.

Some Democratic leaders seem to have found a way that may alter the terms of the debate in situations like this. It's a solution that's dependent on the less-powerful party still having a sizeable chunk of power. What they're doing is making a credible threat to do nothing. The powerful party will, presumably, want something to be done. Faced with the possibility of getting nothing done, they may be convinced to alter the nature of the "do something" option, making it more palatable to partisans of a third option that has been taken out of the universe of possibility.

The threat to do nothing is most clear in the case of filibustering nominees. Both sides would like to see offices filled. The Republicans have tried to define the terms of the debate to be a righ-winger or nobody. By using the power of the filibuster -- siezing the "do nothing" option in the face of an undesirable "something" -- the Democrats hope to put the Republicans in the position of either nominating more moderate candidates, or doing nothing. The filibuster takes certain options out of the universe of possible courses of action. On the discursive level, anything is still fair game -- people can say they want an ideologue rather than a moderate or nobody. But on the practical level, that option has been taken out of play if the filibuster strategy is successful.
Stentor Danielson, 23:22,

22.10.03

Ecuadorian Law

Ecuadoreans sue U.S. oil company over pollution in Amazon A decade after Texaco pulled out of the Amazon jungle, the U.S. petroleum giant went on trial in a lawsuit filed on behalf of 30,000 poor Ecuadoreans who say the company's 20 years of drilling poisoned their homeland. ... The lawsuit alleges that Texaco took advantage of lax Ecuadorean environmental standards to cut costs by pouring wastewater brought to the surface by drilling into some 350 open pits instead of reinjecting it deep underground. ... ChevronTexaco has denied the allegations, saying it followed Ecuadorean environmental laws and spent $40 million under a clean-up agreement with the Ecuadorean government in 1995. The government certified the clean-up three years later.

The claim is that Ecuador's laws allowed Texaco to do something bad. And Texaco's defense is that the law allowed it to do what it did. I'm glad we can agree on the facts, then. I don't know much about the Ecuadorian justice system, but the way the article puts it makes it sound like the plaintiffs' case is weak on legal grounds. That's the tricky thing about the law system -- it explicitly defines the terms you're allowed to debate something on, so that it becomes difficult to go to court over something that was clearly wrong if there's no relevant law. In the abstract, this is a good thing -- it's beneficial to be able to know with some certainty what standards you'll be subject to, in order to plan your actions. But it's problematic when right and legal don't line up.
Stentor Danielson, 21:58,

Rick Santorum Inadvertantly Supports Gay Marriage

Pass Protection ... Well, Gary Bauer, cover your eyes, but [Senator Rick] Santorum came frighteningly close to endorsing gay marriage. By the time he got to these two lines of his response, the force of the logic he was employing to escape the paradox of marriage promotion and marriage protection had acquired an intriguing momentum of its own: "And I'm not suggesting that single men -- heterosexual, homosexual -- [or] single women -- heterosexual, homosexual -- without children should get married. I mean that's -- if they want to get married, if that's the time of their life they want to do that, that's fine." So there you have it. Rick Santorum on gay marriage: "That's fine."

More support for my point that anti-gay people often make the best pro-gay arguments.
Stentor Danielson, 21:44,

Blog Labels

It's interesting sometimes to notice where you wind up in a categorized blogroll. Take for example the link to me on two blogs I would consider progressive, Alas A Blog and Nathan Newman. Alas lists me under "To Alas' Right," which confused me, making me think that maybe Amp or bean had visited on a day I was being particularly contrarian, and thus got a skewed view of where I stand. Then I noticed two things: 1) There's an "Even further right" category, where all the actual conservatives live, and 2) I was in good company in "To Alas' Right," being listed with Matthew Yglesias and Calpundit, probably my two favorite political blogs. All this made me remember that Alas is a progressive/lefty blog, and so one could be quite liberal while still being to their right. Then I was re-confused by the fact that someone like skippy the bush kangaroo would be listed under "Blogs of a Feather," since (partisanship of our tone aside) I would have said that skippy and I agree on the substance of most issues. Indeed, I probably agreed more with skippy than with those of my category-mates whose blogs I knew well, since the latter were liberal hawks with last-minute regrets rather than opponents of the war all along.

For a while I thought there was something screwy with the TTLB Blogosphere Ecosystem, since it listed me as having a link from Nathan Newman that I couldn't find. Apparently the trick was that Ctrl-F is case sensitive, and Newman went ahead and capitalized my blog name*. Now that I've discovered that, I've found myself listed under "Progressive Blogs." This was a bit odd to me, since I don't identify with the term "progressive" (though perhaps my politics fit someone else's definition of "progressive" -- one professor once told me he admired my "unique brand of radicalism"). In this case, "progressive" seems to mean "left of center," since the category seems to be basically "other blogs that I don't read with any regularity, but which exist."

All this is not to accuse Alas or Newman of miscategorizing me. It's just an observation of how one's self-image can be called into question by how other people categorize you.

* I'm still not sure why I don't capitalize it. As my post titles and article headlines indicate, in general I prefer to err on the side of too much capitalization. But after two-plus years, I'm kind of attached to the lower-case title.
Stentor Danielson, 20:46,

21.10.03

Something Frivolous

I just got a hit from somene searching for "aral tradition call and response mean." It just so happens that in my research I came across an ancient Central Asian chant. It goes something like this:

When I say Uzbek, you say Istan!
Uzbek!
Istan!
Uzbek!
Istan!
When I say Tajik, you say Istan!
Tajik!
Istan!
Tajik!
Istan!
Stentor Danielson, 21:54,

Who Does A Gay-Straight Alliance Hurt?

Tex. Students Sue To Organize Gay Club At High School ... Now [Rene] Caudillo is embroiled in a lawsuit against Lubbock's public school system, the latest in a handful of disputes pitting gay teenagers who have organized gay student groups against school districts that have objected to the clubs. ... Lawyers for the school district argue that the Equal Access Act permits schools to override students' free speech rights and forbids clubs if they jeopardize students' well-being. In support of that argument, they cite a little-known section of the Texas Penal Code that prohibits gay activity between youths younger than 17. Allowing a Gay-Straight Alliance amounts to giving students license to break the law, said Ann Manning, an attorney for the school district.

I like how anti-gay lawyers sometimes make the best arguments for the pro-gay side. The article makes it pretty clear that not having a Gay-Straight Alliance is jeapordizing the well-being of the town's gay students, since they would then lack the support and community that they need to maintain their psychological, and perhaps even physical, health in an overtly homophobic environment.

UPDATE: I've added the end of the second paragraph quoted above, which clarifies how the school's lawyers think the "well-being" clause applies. The legal argument is not that homosexuality is bad (though I don't doubt they'll bring that up), but that for minors it's illegal. Not having a copy of the law in question on hand, I can't say whether it ought to be invalidated by the Lawrence decision -- it's plausible that it wouldn't be, since the rationale for legalizing sodomy tends to talk about "two consenting adults."

My thought following that was that maybe the club could work around the restriction, presuming that the "gay activity" prohibited by the law is simply gay sex, and not, say, displays of homosexual affection. A Gay-Straight Alliance would have its work cut out for it in terms of combatting homophobia and educating people, so it wouldn't need to talk about gay sex specifically, and certainly not in the context of minors doing it.

Then it occurred to me that there is a need for gay kids to be able to talk about gay sex. Children are typically expected to acquire reliable knowledge about sex from "the talk" with their parents, and sex ed in schools. In a place like Lubbock suspect that such knowledge is not forthcoming for gay students (except insofar as they can translate hetero sex ed into the homo sphere), since their parents and teachers are likely to be unable (because they lack personal experience with it) and unwilling (because of their conservative mores) to discuss responsible gay sex practices. This doesn't have to be the mission, or even a mission, of the Gay-Straight Alliance, but it strikes me as something that ought to be done somehow.
Stentor Danielson, 14:54,

Kerry And The Environment

John Kerry has announced his environmental plan, and overall I give it high marks. It has a forward-looking tone, keeping the Bush-bashing to a minimum. And he denies (though perhaps not as vigorously as he could) the simplistic premise that the success of the environment and the economy are mutually exclusive.

Now I shall nitpick. His first of six points is a re-invigoration of the cleanup of local toxic sites (such as those treated under the Superfund program). His sub-points here are good, emphasizing the need for increased federal funding and the promotion of green spaces like parks. However, one important point is missing: the community. While he refers to the highest-priority sites as "Environmental Empowerment Zones," the overall thrust of his plan is a government-led top-down approach, in which cleanup is something that we do for affected communities, rather than with them. My own experiences in Palmerton suggest that there's a real danger in government programs coming in already knowing what needs to be done for a community. And even if the government is ultimately right in its analysis, the process of community involvement is still important. For example, the "Neighbor Helping Neighbor" lawn restoration program in Palmerton had benefits (in terms of reinforcing civil society and social relationships) that went beyond just getting grass growing in people's yards, and that would not accrue if we had simply hired some outside contractor to redo everyone's lawn. I have a suspicion that lack of community involvement is a major problem with the Superfund program. In doing some preliminary research for my job this semester, I was surprised to discover that only 71 sites had COmmunity Advisory Groups. Certainly there may be some sites where cleanup is so straightforward that no community input is needed, but I remain suspicious of how low that number is.

Point two is, again, good on the whole. I am especially pleased that his sub-points include:

1. Reinvest royalties obtained from extracting resources from public lands back into protecting our lands and special places; ... 3. Put new teeth into requirements that private companies and individuals who lease public lands return the land to its original state after completing energy development, grazing, or timber operations; ... 7. Modernize our mining laws and provide a fair return to the American people for mining operations on public lands.

I hope that sub-point 7 means that mining will be subject to the same sorts of restoration requirements (perhaps including posting a pre-development restoration bond so that if the company goes bottom-up, the country isn't stuck with the cleanup bill). I would also hope that the economic concerns woven in here mean that the government will stop subsidizing the overproduction of lumber on public lands.

Nevertheless, there is one big point that Kerry completely misses: fire. Catastrophic wildfires such as we've seen in the west the past few years (though this summer we dodged the bullet), as well as the unhealthy forests and rangelands that result from too much fire suppression, are one of the top threats to both our environment and the people that live and work in it. Much of the criticism of Bush's environmental policy has centered on the "Healthy Forests Initiative," which is ostensibly meant to reduce fire danger. Yet Kerry does not mention wildfire anywhere in his environmental plan. In his list of top ten environmental insults he makes "Healthy Forests" number five. Yet he focuses entirely on the way the plan will sell out our environment to timber companies. That's true, but as Bush's apologists remind us, we do need to address the issue of fire. It's not just a smokescreen cooked up to hide the logging giveaway, the way Bush's erroneous claims about environmental litigation are. Kerry needs a substantive policy on how we can change course from decades of fire suppression. I would suggest that a sensible plan would include changes in land use (such as limits on backcountry logging and zoning restrictions on development in fire-prone areas), the use of prescribed and natural burns, some mechanical thinning in buffer zones around settled areas, and public education on how fire works and what can be done about it.
Stentor Danielson, 13:22,

Yum Yum Bumblebee, Bumblebee Tuna ...

No Cure For Songs Stuck In Your Head ... "Earworm" is the term coined by University of Cincinnati marketing professor James Kellaris for the usually unwelcome songs that get stuck in people's heads. Since beginning his research in 2000, Kellaris has heard from people all over the world requesting help, sharing anecdotes and offering solutions. "I quickly learned that virtually everybody experiences earworms at one time or another," he said. "I think because it's experienced privately and not often a topic of conversation, maybe people really long for some social comparison. They want to know if other people experience what they experience." -- via Dave Barry

Not often a topic of conversation? What kind of weirdos does he talk to?
Stentor Danielson, 00:39,

20.10.03

Gays In The Military

Eugene Volokh has a post up about campuses barring the military from recruiting because it discriminates against gays. I think he is too accomodating to arguments that there's a rationale for excluding gay soldiers (though for the sake of argument he presumes that that rationale is insufficient), and looks too favorably on the overall role of the military (as if all they do is protect our freedoms, and the only downside is Don't Ask Don't Tell). Neverthelesss, he hits on two points I've made about the similar pro-gay rejection of the Boy Scouts -- reducing the possibility of change from within, and ignoring the benefits of the organization.
Stentor Danielson, 12:56,

19.10.03

The Perils Of Efficiency

Largest Ever Study Finds GM Crops "Harm Wildlife" The world's biggest scientific experiment into the environmental impact of genetically-modified crops, conducted on British farms, has shown that GM rapeseed and sugar beet are more harmful to wildlife than conventionally grown plants. ... Scientists unveiling the results at the Science Centre in London said some insect groups, such as bees in beet crops and butterflies in beet and spring rape, were recorded more frequently in and around conventional crops because there were more weeds to provide food and cover. ... Researchers stressed that the differences they found were not a direct result of the way in which the crops had been genetically modified. They arose because the GM crops gave farmers taking part in the trials new options for weed control.

The upshot of this seems to be that GM herbicide resistance works too well. The ideal of a modern farm is to have all crops of even quality, with no other organisms (such as pests and weeds) damaging or competing with the target crop species. Without modern agricultural technology, this ideal could only be roughly approximated. But advances -- most recently the development of GM -- have pushed us closer and closer.

Any ideal is a simplification and an abstraction. The real world is messy and complex. And to some degree I think the world depends on its messy complexity. Too perfect a realization of an ideal can undermine a system. For another crop-based example, take the genetic uniformity promoted by the use of high-tech hybrid and GM seed varieties. These even out the variable quality of more "natural" plants, pushing us closer to having the Form of the plant visible here in the cave. But that very variability becomes crucial when the crops are subject to stresses from climate or pests and diseases, and need the raw material for evolution. Perhaps the problem could be eliminated if we could realize our ideals across the entire universe, so that these idealized systems wouldn't be upset by their interface with the remaining messy parts of the world. But that degree of control is not in our power. So our idealized systems depend on their residual messiness to sustain themselves.

The model of genetic diversity doesn't entirely map on to the "weeds are good for wildlife" conclusion of the article I quoted. The article gives no indication that the wildlife are good for the farmer, presenting them instead as a worthwhile value in addition to farm productivity. One could retort "well, good riddance to that wildlife. It shouldn't be in the field in the first place." But it's also plausible that there is in fact such a connection (either directly or in a larger landscape health sense), in addition to the fact that one could argue that "farm productivity" and "wildlife" are both contributors to the larger goal of a good society.

This post is not an all-out attack on creating idealized systems (I don't think it's even a definitive statement that, on the basis of the study quoted, GM herbicide resistance is too idealized). Some degree of idealization is how people work, how we interact with our surroundings. It's often a very productive method. The key is to be cautious about going too far, and falling victim to the hubris of thinking we can get everything under control.
Stentor Danielson, 14:36,