Thursday, January 31, 2008

EXPLOITATION

"I will not rest until every last predator in New Mexico is dead." -Aldo Leopold as a Young Man



I just got out from my Wildlife Conservation class. The lecture was about the history of wildlife conservation. Conservation since white settlers came to America has been non-existent.

If you never said your goodbyes to the estimated 631 North American species that have gone extinct since 1641, here are some of the big ones you might want to lament.

Passenger Pigeon: This bird had the largest flocks of any bird, of all time. Now it is extinct, the last one died in captivity in 1914. The loss of this billions strong population had tremendous ecological impacts. Nutrient cycling, seed dispersal and predator influences must have changed dramatically. It is because they were hunted for food. In 1850, one New York merchant was selling 18,000 pigeons a day. Yum!

Bison: No one even wanted to use them for anything. They were killed and then left on the plains, sometimes their skulls were piled thirty feet high. In wildlife conservation there are two knids of control over populations, direct and indirect. Direct control is shooting animals. Indirect control is changing their habitat. While the extermination of the bison was in fact direct control of the animal itself, it was really indirect control of the population of Native Americans who depended on them.

Cod: When the first ships sailed to Newfoundland, they were rocked by the battering of millions of Cod. Now the fishing season on them has been closed since 1994 and they are slated for extinction. In Cape Cod, it was said you could walk across the water on the heads of the fish. No more. All the fisheries of Earth are decaying. I mean that in a mathematical sense. Exponential decay. Which means its slowing down now that most of the damage is done.

Whales: The main pattern of exploitation in Human history has been that big tasty animals are the first to die. This was certainly the case with whales. But as each whale died out, the next largest became the most profitable. So they killed that one too. Poor whales.

Predators: Grizzly Bears and wolves were ravaged and that story has been told many times. They have dissappeared from most of their range. Where ever there are people, predators die.

I'm glad Aldo Leopold changed his tune, and became the father of conservation. Hopefully one day his writings on the land ethic will be codified in law.

"Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land. By land is meant all of the things on, over, or in the earth. Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left. That is to say, you cannot love game and hate predators; you cannot conserve the waters and waste the ranges; you cannot build the forest and mine the farm. The land is one organism. Its parts, like our own parts, compete with each other and co-operate with each other. The competitions are as much a part of the inner workings as the co-operations. You can regulate them--cautiously--but not abolish them." -Aldo Leoplold 1993

-ATION NATION

This is my brilliant idea for a book. It's called -Ation Nation. Since I don't really want to write a whole book, It'll just be a series of posts. I'd love as many comments as you can muster, folks, so I'll try to keep it interesting.

GLOBALIZATION

My Microeconomics class used the model of a farmer and a rancher. This suggests that both producers can benefit from specializing in one crop and then trading it with the other. This simple model used only time as the input for their products. And the conclusion was of course: TRADE IS GOOD FOR EVERYONE! Yeah right. Here's an email I wrote to my prof. this morning.

John,

I am worried about the farmer and the rancher. I know that it is a model to explain comparative advantage and absolute advantage, but I can't help realize that it does not make sense for two reasons.

1. It assumes that maximum production is ideal.
2. It is so simple that when applied to the real world it suggests specialization and trade are good in every situation when in fact they can lead to pollution, waste, and exploitation of people and the land.


1.Your slide suggested two options: to trade or not to trade. Most of the following lecture was focused on trading, and only two graphs were devoted to the non-trade model. These graphs didn't make a pretty picture. The bottom line was that if they both worked alone there were fewer potatoes and less meat to be had by either. This made the lack of trade seem inferior to the more productive model, in which each producer specialized in one crop and traded.

What these slides didn't take into account was the fact that maybe the farmer doesn't need all the meat and potatoes she can get. And the same for the rancher. I think that providing goods that are above and beyond peoples needs by too much can lead to health problems. They would be making so much meat and potatoes that they'd be the fattest people in the world. Sustaining oneself does not always mean maximum production, It more often means meeting your needs (and hopefully a few of your wants) using what you have. More is not always better, especially when externalities of maximum production include soil erosion, water pollution, and other agricultural environmental costs. And where does it stop? What if we introduce pesticides into the equation, and if these toxic products help increase production, does that automatically mean that their use is "better" because it produces more? When does it stop?

2. It is too simple because trade does not occur like this on the global scale.

What if the two producers live fifty miles apart, like I asked in class? What about one thousand? What if the rancher lives in California and the farmer lives in Mexico and they are both shipping their goods to centralized processing plants in Nevada to make cheap hamburgers and fries which are then sent to Williston, Vermont? Is that really more efficient than if the trade were eliminated and the rancher ate his own meat and the farmer ate her own potatoes?
And what about the factory in china that makes halloween spider rings? I hate those things. They use scarce resources, pollute, and the worst thing is that they are useless trash before they are ever thrown away, even before they are ever sold.

It is a matter of scale. I certainly don't believe that everyone needs to fend for themselves, I do however believe we can work together on smaller scales, using what we have to meet our needs rather than using such despicable means to achieve unfavorable ends.

We don't need every commodity in every part of the world. Let there be differences in the distribution of resources based on, well, the distribution of resources! Rather than based on the distribution of wealth. Why does Pheonix Arizona exist? Why does Las Vegas exist? There is not enough water for the people to drink, and yet there are golf courses with green grass and fountains that shoot fifty feet into the air, and the Colorado River no longer reaches the Mexican border. That is not a wise use of resources and it hurts everyone to be so irresponsible.

Adam McCullough
Resource Conservation: Ecology
Junior

Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Leave me There

Any set of tracks when watched with care appears to grow upward like a single fox sprouting simultaneously from four seeds. The paws form first and then the furry legs on top of them. Soon they join together in a sculpted image with tail and ears. Then the whiskers roll out like time lapse fiddle heads. This is a ghost. It walks in and out of view. It leaves tracks, and it leaves smells, and its story plays out on the snow. You cringe while watching its foot sink uncomfortably through the crust. You lose site of it under a low tree, but it is not enough to find the trail on the other side. You watch the fox ghost circle under the tree and sniff the bark, it licks its paws and peers around, hunting.

You can see the deer trail so clearly that the ghost dissapears and is replaced with the the animal itself. A sense of urgency and alertness descends on you and you can't help but sneak everywhere you go, with your tongue hanging out as you smile. The trail extends in front of you and the deer is standing behind every tree. Its hidden under every rise of ground, and its munching on every frigid leaf. You find where it bedded down the night before, its smell still strong and sweet. Its body heat left you a small bed of ice to slip on, but you step beyond it and the trail is fresher. The deer is watching you. Now the deer is inside of you. The ghost is gone, and the animal itself is just out of reach, but you know where it's been and how it went you know what it thinks.

Now you are the deer, you no longer look at the trail. You track by letting the broken snow pull your feet down and forward following the arch of the deer before you. DEER!

THE WORLD IS LOUD ON ALL SIDES BUT HERE THE HEAVY QUIET SINKS LIKE YOUR FEET IN THE SNOW AND ALERTNESS FLOWS FROM CARELESSNESS. CARELESSNESS THE SOURCE OF CARE. WALKING TOWARDS SHELTER DISTILLS LIFE.

But you only sometimes find the deer, and never the fox. And soon your tracks are the ghost seeds. Someone watches you form and feels your excitement when you ran, your anguish when you fell. Someone tracks you. Someone submits to you. Someone becomes you and you haunt them. Who tracks trackers? Who walks with ghosts? Trackers track themselves and walk with ghosts.

And you enter into the wind when you come over the ridge. There is no snow here, only ice. But still there are tracks. In the west there is a new mountain range. It is a billowing cloud bank, opaque and dark and ominous. It is behind this dark horizon that the sun sets. And now the cold hits even harder. You succumb to the bitter touch of icy wind.

And it is amongst the coyote tracks that you die. Your body crumples and you watch it for a time. It is still vibrantly colored like in life, but it is frozen. You walk away. You are a set of senses now, a set of instincts. Troubles of life are frozen next to coyote tracks and you walk along the mountain in cold pain, but with no self. Not even the bridge of your nose or the brim of your hat to block your circular view of the world. Senses only. Opinions are gone. A ghost like the rest. And you leave yourself there. Among the tracks. And you take yourself away to follow new ones unimpeded.

Monday, January 28, 2008

The art of invisibilty


I live at the base of a prairie covered mountain called Mount Jumbo. Have you ever seen the prairie? The range? Oh you Easterners don't know what you're missing! The colors are what get me. Throw green out the window. Ash gray of sage, dark red of dried forbs, shocking yellow of dry grass, blue shadows on the white snow and ice, and all the lichens on the rocks. And of course the blue sky. How complicated the sky is! And I'll need a picture.

I took my dog, Lyra up the mountain today in the cold. There is a large letter "L" on the side of mount Jumbo which stands for Loyolla high school. It is a common thing out here to put big letters on hills. When I saw They Might Be Giants play at UM they commented that in Missoula we have an "L" right next to an "M" and wondered if we just went ahead and alphebatized all the mountains in the area.

Well mount jumbo is an open prairie, but its more complicated than that. There are huge blocky, argillite boulders jutting out of the soil. Wetter spots that caused by topography of the mountain result in trees and shrubs that need more water than the drought adapted grass that covers the exposed, dry areas. There are also long draws, like creases in the very rock, extending from the bottom to the top of the mountain. These may be categorized as 'effervescent streams' by a hydrologists survey, but they haven't had an actual streamflow in a very very long time. Though water doesn't flow through these channels, trees seem to. The discharge of any stream is a combination of sediment and water (and fish), but these streams' discharges are dry, spidery trees floating atop the bedload of dark soil. These tree streams in the range also convey something miraculously against the force of gravity. Trackers.

I wanted to make it up to the L completely unseen. I am in fact the subject of the above photo. You wouldn't know it though because I was practicing the art of invisibility at the time. Just kidding, I don't know WHO took that. How long can I keep pirating photos for my blog before the MAN gets me?

Anyway my point is that the art of invisibility is a combination of other arts.

AWARENESS: This is paramount. you can't hide from everything at once, so you need to choose when to hide and when to move, especially in the prairie. Most of the time when I mess up and become visible, it is when someone I didn't notice walks up behind me. Thats why John Young promotes the Leopard method. Walking smoothly and using lots of peripheral vision. Stopping to look in all directions while sniffing and listening at all times. It engages a lot of your brain at once. People with Attention deficit disorder are supposedly uncanny at this skill.

MAKE BELIEVE: pretend to be a mouse when hiding in the grass. think mousy thoughts not thoughts of weird tracker things and hiding practice. Think about how tasty the grass looks. Eat some.

PATIENCE: don't try to sneak by people all the time, just wait till they aren't looking! This can take a while. Oh well. My pants froze solid while practicing the art of patience today.

I made it to the L. Joggers are really easy to avoid. They stare at their feet on the uneven ground. People on first dates are harder to avoid. They look around awkwardly. I want to put on funny makeup and hide all over the place.

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Trade Offs

"Education is one of the things you will pay for and not get." - Jon Aliri, economics professor at UM.

I believe that this is true. So many students blow off their classes and homework even though they pay through the nose for them. I did it as a freshman, but now I've seen the light. Who wants to waste all that money and time?

I had my first Micro economics class today. It was very exciting and I'm sure the teacher will provide many insights for me. He is dedicated to the socratic method which is an exciting change from my lecture classes. Aliri said that everything is a trade off, but there is one fundamental trade off that all countries face today: Efficiency and Equity within a capitalist system. I am glad that he brought this up on the first day because its exciting when I get to speak my mind, especially in a class packed full of business majors who have devoted their lives to efficiency, and I have devoted mine to something else. I know that what I really want is a balance between the two with environmental conservation determining where that balance point lies. This is why when Aliri asked, "which side do you lean towards?" I suppressed the urge to yell "EQUITY!" from the back of the room.

I feel like I'm secretly taking this class in order to figure out the weaknesses in our current system and throw a monkey wrench in its gears. But What's more likely is I'll gain an appreciation for economic functions and allow the new knowledge to gently guide me in whatever way.

The world has chosen Efficiency. Which do you choose? Where is that balance?
Ad-man

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Green Christmas!

This picture demonstrates the ways we did christmas this year. What a great success! I feel proud that my badgering the family about it has yielded a more sustainable use of resources to celebrate the holiday!

There are:
wood items that my brother and I made,
a book by a local author, and CD's of local musicians (an interesting twist on buying local),
an organic T-shirt,
cloth bags that gifts were wrapped in to save on paper waste,
Vermont socks (darn tough brand),
local fudge,
a plate made of sugar maple in Vermont,
a set of reusable bags that replace the plastic bags, for grocery shopping, but they are also good for buying bulk because they function similar to plastic, and become air tight when wet.
and a few other wonderful items.

The majority of the gifts were in this vein and I'm proud of my family for that. I think it'll only get better with time.

This holiday was a great source of satisfaction for me, but it also taught me an important lesson about local economy. The paradigm that the Green Christmas is based on is that as consumers we can vote at the cash register. The things we pay for are sustained while the things we don't buy will dwindle or disappear. It's boycott theory I guess.

The idea of buying local makes a leap from this basic premise to say that supporting a local economy is good for the environment. I am not going to question that too much, but it's worth noting that these things aren't absolute, sometimes a centralized system is better environmentally than many smaller systems.

Overall though, small local systems are far more sustainable than a global economy. That being said, what part of the local economy are we supporting when we buy lots of gift type items around the holidays? So who are we voting for at the cash register now? GIFT MAKERS! musicians, soap people, scarf weavers, and the like. How far does that really go to promote sustainability? It's a start. And even just thinking about it is a start, but if you care enough about it to make it a green christmas, you should keep your pantry and your fridge green too! If Vermont is ever going to secede from the union we'll need grains, meats, and fruit a lot more than we'll need silk scarves. A local economy needs all levels, just like the global economy, the people who often win in Montpelier are the artisans, because there is a lot of money in Montpelier and a lot of tourism. And that's fine, because artisans are great, but don't forget about farmers. NEVER forget about farmers!