debitage: part of the core tool and scraper tradition

debitage

26.5.06

Do You Trust The Forest Service?

Now that I've showered and eaten, I can give a bit more substantive comment on the article linked to in my previous post. Aside from the comparison of environmental litigation to WWII Japanese military strategy, it makes a pretty standard conservative argument about wildfires -- the wildfire risk is due to excessive fuel buildup, which we should reduce through logging, but environmentalist lawsuits are holding up the process.

This argument is a great example of one of the core threads of modern conservatism -- trust in the government. Conservatives have inherited the New Deal faith in impartial technocratic administrators who will pursue the public good so long as nobody goes poking around in their wiretapping programs or meetings with lobbyists. On the wildfire issue, the conservative position presumes that, if left alone to do its job, the Forest Service would efficiently pursue hazard reduction. Citing (misleading) statistics* on the number of logging projects that are blocked and the amount of additional paperwork the Forest Service assumes that the Forest Service's initial plan is optimal, and any changes occaisioned by public scrutiny necessarily compromise it.

But this assumption of bureaucratic good-will is exactly where the environmentalist viewpoint diverges from the conservative one. Environmentalists don't trust the Forest Service. They've seen how administrations in general, and the Bush regime especially, have turned agencies like the Forest Service into an instrument of the spoils system. They have seen that reducing public oversight of government leads not to efficiency but to corruption.

Environmentalists, therefore, don't trust either the Forest Service's general commitment to logging as a solution to fire risks, or their particular plans for fuel reduction projects. They recognize that just because the Forest Service says they're planning to mitigate fire risks doesn't mean they're not actually planning a giveaway to timber companies. The conservative argument tends to conflate the reasonable proposition that logging can -- if done in the right way and in the right places -- be a tool for hazard reduction, with the ridiculous claim that all logging, by its very nature, reduces the fire hazard.

Stentor Danielson, 22:51, |

Hideki Tojo Works For The NRDC

It's not quite Godwin territory, but it looks like people who don't buy the "logging prevents forest fires" line are at least comparable to the Japanese in World War II.

Stentor Danielson, 19:06, |

Oops

My apologies to Chris Clarke -- both attempts to link to his squirrel poem in yesterday's posts were botched. The links should be fixed now.

Stentor Danielson, 05:39, |

24.5.06

Nature Is Not Wise, But We Are Foolish

One of the most common themes in environmentalism is the need for humans to be humble in their actions that impact nature. This is an important principle. But I'm not entirely happy with the way it's usually framed.

The most common way of articulating the need for ecolgical humility -- as seen, for example, on Dave Pollard's blog, or in Hugo Schwyzer's interpretation of Chris Clarke's squirrel poem -- is to refer to the Earth's wisdom. Gaia is smarter than us, they say, so we need to defer to her judgment about what should happen in nature. There's an obvious appeal to having a higher and wiser authority to look to for guidance, and it avoids directly knocking what wisdom we humans do have.

I would rather frame it the opposite way -- it's not that nature is wise, but that humans are foolish. We simply don't -- and in many cases can't -- understand all the ramifications of the things we do. The idea of human foolishness rejects such hubristic projects as the Three Gorges Dam, importing Canada's rivers to the US southwest, or correcting global warming through massive eutrophication of the oceans.

But on the other hand, the idea of human foolishness does not require us to hold an elevated and unjustified ideal of nature. Nature is in a constant state of crisis and readjustment, plowing forward on the basis of what works for the moment, not what's good in the long run. Nature doesn't have wisdom, it just has routines that have not (yet) self-destructed or been destructed by others. It's not a process that we should ever expect to tame or direct -- but it's also not one whose dictates need be respected in any particular case.

Stentor Danielson, 22:39, |

Natural Suffering

[UPDATE, 17 June: In the comments to Hugo Schwyzer's response to this post, Chris Clarke clarifies the meaning of his poem, which is quite different from the way Schwyzer and I read it. So take this post as a criticism of Schwyzer's interpretation of the poem, not of Clarke's views.]

Chris Clarke has written a striking poem about finding an injured squirrel, and deciding not to interfere with nature by trying to save it. Hugo Schwyzer and numerous commenters at Clarke's blog aver that they would have chosen differently, but they chalk the difference up to their sentiment getting the best of them. But I find the ethical principle behind Clarke's decision to be problematically anthropocentric. (If you have no problem with anthropocentrism, the rest of this post will be beside the point for you.)

Who among us would leave a human injured by a natural disaster to die, reasoning that we shouldn't interfere with nature? Why, then, treat a suffering non-human differently than a suffering human?

One might point out, rightly, that there's no such thing as a purely natural disaster. But there are disasters that are not purely social, and I would doubt that we can make our degree of responsibility for hurricane victims proportional to the share of the blame that human activities hold. And even so, it's strange to claim that there purely natural disasters claim no human victims, or that we should care only for the human victims of human-caused disasters.

Our moral obligation is not just to right the wrongs that we (individually or collectively) are responsible or blameable for. Our moral obligation is to relieve suffering, regardless of what the cause is.

Of course, there's a strong case for a pragmatic refusal to go actively saving wild animals from suffering. We can't dismiss the suffering of animals because it's "natural" -- there's something literally true about the Christian ideal of the lion laying down with the lamb when perfect justice is achieved. But our recognition of the injustice of nature as it exists must be tempered by a recognition of our own lack of knowledge and power, and hence our inability to effectively do anything about it. We can't reengineer nature to save the animals in it. Indeed, we may not even be able to save individual hurt animals (encountering Clarke's injured squirrel, I would doubt the usefulness of my own first aid skills). But insofar as we're able, I don't think the naturalness of suffering gives us any excuse to refuse aid.

Stentor Danielson, 22:39, |

22.5.06

Grazing Is Good For Butterflies

Here's an interesting example of how, once humans have altered the environment, continued human intervention -- in this case grazing -- can help to mitigate the impacts.

The Checkerspot Mystery: An Ecological Whodunit

... the nitrogen oxide emissions from cars commuting to Silicon Valley enriched the nutrient-poor serpentine-rock soil that sustains the native grasslands on Coyote Ridge. This soil enrichment allowed invasive grasses -- which flourish in more nitrogen-rich soil -- to out-compete the native plants on which the checkerspot [butterfly] depends. When local ranchers stopped grazing their cows on one side of the ridge, it made things worse, because grazing helped keep invasive grasses in check.

Stentor Danielson, 23:47, |

Are You For The Cause, Or Just Using The Cause?

Earlbecke and jedmunds have each posted recently about incidents in which an ostensible anti-oppression ally used sexist language, got called on it, and then became self-righteously defensive. They claim that they're innocent because their intent was not to hurt their allies (indeed, in the case jedmunds points to, his intent was to advance the cause by using a sexist slur against one of its enemies). Fine -- claiming lack of intent gets you out of the first use. But let's look at what your intent is if you fail to apologize, and insist on continuing to use the language in question (this is applicable to non-verbal behaviors as well). It shows that you intend to ignore the feelings and needs of your supposed allies. It shows that you intend to avoid questioning your own complicity in the problem. It shows that you intend to elevate your own habits over the judgments of those you claim to be helping. You intend, in sum, to use the cause rather than fight for the cause.

Any cause with a strong social justice element is liable to attract users (most, but not all, of whom come from the group whose privilege is being attacked). The "Us vs. Them" heuristic is a strong one in the human psyche, and social justice causes provide a great opportunity to indulge it. You can divide the world into two camps, the good guys and the bad guys. Then, as one of the good guys, you can attack the bad guys with all your might. And you feel justified, because what makes the bad guys bad is something that really is bad. You come to see sexism (or racism or ableism or whatever cause you've joined) to be something that They do, and since you're against it, you must be innocent.

But users fall afoul of the real world. Social injustices are pervasive, and everyone -- especially those of us in privileged groups -- has been trained to participate in them. If you really care about eradicating injustice, and not just about using the injustice as an excuse to attack a perpetrator group, you also have to be willing to examine and eradicate it close to home. This is not to advocate a navel-gazing obsession with purity that comes at the expense of the larger picture. But most cases in which an ostensible ally gets defensive when called on their complicity in oppression are cases in which cleaning up your own act requires little more than paying attention to your own language.

So don't say "come on, can't we get back to the fun of fighting the big villains where I get to be on the right side?" Say "sorry, I'll try harder not to trip up the cause with my thoughtlessness." That's the difference between using the cause to identify enemies, and fighting for the cause's values.

Stentor Danielson, 18:23, |

New Comments

After yet another person told me they'd tried to post a comment but it hadn't worked, I got motivated to finally ditch YACCS in favor of Haloscan. I get few enough comments as it is, so there's no point in making it worse. This should also clear up the problem of this site taking forever to load when your browser can't load the YACCS stuff. I took the liberty of reposting all the comments from the two commented-upon posts that were still on the front page, but any older YACCS comments are now gone -- sorry.

Stentor Danielson, 03:25, |