It seems there are getting to be more and more people unwilling to "suspend disbelief" long enough to buy in to the various Global Warming/Green Energy/Gaiea/Earth Mother foolishness. A recent story in American Thinker has a number of good links (http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/05/the_alice_in_wonderland_world.html
This one is by Chiefio and reviews all of the energy sources available to us in the United States
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/there-is-no-energy-shortage/
And another by Chiefio about the fallacy of shortages
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/05/08/there-is-no-shortage-of-stuff/
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Environmentalists: What Are They Good For? (Part three of three)
John Stuart Mill said that, “… truth can only be established through free and frank public debate, and unless truth is ‘vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice’.
The received truth of environmentalism – that The Science has indicted mankind as a plague on the planet and we must atone for our sins by reducing our carbon emissions and reining in development – is indeed little more than a prejudice
There are, literally, hundreds of examples in the past 35 plus years, of the duplicity of the environmental community to use fear and lies to further their agenda. A recent scare involves the amount of pthalates in a clear plastic used extensively in water bottles and baby bottles and their movement into humans when using the bottles (You know the ubiquitous Nalgene bottles you see all the “healthy” people packing around and sipping on all day long in order to get their 8 glasses of water per day which recommendation itself is reputedly a recommendation, not from current highly researched sources, but from Aristotle). Studies are vague about any danger and speak of “large doses” fed to laboratory animals. The Alar studies showed that mice had to be fed the equivalent of what a human being would absorb by eating fourteen tons of apples, every day, for seventy years to show an effect. On the other hand, potatoes contain arsenic; lima beans contain cyanide; nutmeg contains a hallucinogen; broccoli contains a substance that causes cancer in animals.[1]
In another, more recent trend, parents are refusing to allow their children to get immunizations because of a fear of those shots causing autism in children. That connection has recently been shown to have resulted from erroneously reported results of the applicable research.
What do we know about the toxicity of substances? Well, we know that all chemicals are toxic but that the single factor which determines the level of that toxicity is the dose of that compound. That is, the amount we take over what time period (for instance we know that two glasses of wine can be therapeutic but two bottles will bring on intoxication). The chemical and physical behavior of a compound in the body is not a simple fact of exposure=problem. To assess impacts, one has to know how or how much chemical is adsorbed (attached to) what tissues, how they are then transported in the body, which tissues are they stored in, the extent of that storage (vs. how much is eliminated), how or how much the chemical physically binds to specific biological molecules, how much is converted to other more or less toxic groups and the excretion route and rates. Each of these has an effect on toxicity or lack of it. Some chemicals, when combined have a synergistic effect (larger impact than either alone would have) and some have antagonistic effects (one cancels out the effect of the other). Such things as existing internal problems (i.e. kidney or live disease), sex, race, hormonal status (puberty, pregnancy, etc.) age, body weight, etc. may multiply an effect. It is known that the ability to injure genetic material and, hence, injure a fetus is most critical in the first trimester. Whether a compound is ionized (carries a charge) is important. All of these things are tested for each compound over years, sometimes decades, before a compound is released for use.
The list of catastrophes goes on with new examples every day. It involves chemicals, wildlife, forests, climate, oceans, air, water and everything that you touch or that touches you in your life. Including you and yours. We are all obese, we smoke to much (unless it’s pot), we don’t exercise enough, we eat too much sugar, we eat too much red meat, etc., ad infinitum. And don’t for a minute assume that these last listed represent different people. Environmental activists=social activists=climate activists=social justice activists. All of these “crises” share a number of characteristics:
John Stuart Mill said that, “… truth can only be established through free and frank public debate, and unless truth is ‘vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice’.
The received truth of environmentalism – that The Science has indicted mankind as a plague on the planet and we must atone for our sins by reducing our carbon emissions and reining in development – is indeed little more than a prejudice
There are, literally, hundreds of examples in the past 35 plus years, of the duplicity of the environmental community to use fear and lies to further their agenda. A recent scare involves the amount of pthalates in a clear plastic used extensively in water bottles and baby bottles and their movement into humans when using the bottles (You know the ubiquitous Nalgene bottles you see all the “healthy” people packing around and sipping on all day long in order to get their 8 glasses of water per day which recommendation itself is reputedly a recommendation, not from current highly researched sources, but from Aristotle). Studies are vague about any danger and speak of “large doses” fed to laboratory animals. The Alar studies showed that mice had to be fed the equivalent of what a human being would absorb by eating fourteen tons of apples, every day, for seventy years to show an effect. On the other hand, potatoes contain arsenic; lima beans contain cyanide; nutmeg contains a hallucinogen; broccoli contains a substance that causes cancer in animals.[1]
In another, more recent trend, parents are refusing to allow their children to get immunizations because of a fear of those shots causing autism in children. That connection has recently been shown to have resulted from erroneously reported results of the applicable research.
What do we know about the toxicity of substances? Well, we know that all chemicals are toxic but that the single factor which determines the level of that toxicity is the dose of that compound. That is, the amount we take over what time period (for instance we know that two glasses of wine can be therapeutic but two bottles will bring on intoxication). The chemical and physical behavior of a compound in the body is not a simple fact of exposure=problem. To assess impacts, one has to know how or how much chemical is adsorbed (attached to) what tissues, how they are then transported in the body, which tissues are they stored in, the extent of that storage (vs. how much is eliminated), how or how much the chemical physically binds to specific biological molecules, how much is converted to other more or less toxic groups and the excretion route and rates. Each of these has an effect on toxicity or lack of it. Some chemicals, when combined have a synergistic effect (larger impact than either alone would have) and some have antagonistic effects (one cancels out the effect of the other). Such things as existing internal problems (i.e. kidney or live disease), sex, race, hormonal status (puberty, pregnancy, etc.) age, body weight, etc. may multiply an effect. It is known that the ability to injure genetic material and, hence, injure a fetus is most critical in the first trimester. Whether a compound is ionized (carries a charge) is important. All of these things are tested for each compound over years, sometimes decades, before a compound is released for use.
The list of catastrophes goes on with new examples every day. It involves chemicals, wildlife, forests, climate, oceans, air, water and everything that you touch or that touches you in your life. Including you and yours. We are all obese, we smoke to much (unless it’s pot), we don’t exercise enough, we eat too much sugar, we eat too much red meat, etc., ad infinitum. And don’t for a minute assume that these last listed represent different people. Environmental activists=social activists=climate activists=social justice activists. All of these “crises” share a number of characteristics:
- All were initiated, basic storylines developed, and hyped (with the able assistance of an increasingly inept journalism class) by environmentalists. All of them were proved to be false. But, in nearly every case, the final proofs of their deceptiveness came too late to defeat what had become “common wisdom”. In a brilliant display of Lenin’s maxim, “A lie told often enough becomes the truth”[2]
- All of them, regardless of the formative issue, have a root problem: corporate malfeasance and greed, and human stupidity.
- The root solution in all cases was more government control and restricted access and use. The universal result was increased inefficiency, increased costs, and decreased individual freedom.
This all seems to defy any conception of reasonableness and fair play. That’s because environmentalists don’t actually care about science at all. They simply recognize that, in a society built on science, they have to use the language to further their aims, “…marketing it with the trappings of science in order to ensnare the unwary, the insufficiently educated and the too-easily impressed.”[3]
It is inherently dishonest to sell a political ideology through the use of science.[4] Politics is the art of answering for society the questions of “should”. Science cannot efficiently answer whether we should do anything. Science when used ethically does excel at informing the “should” discussions with objective “what’s” and “how’s.
The truth is, environmentalists see the protection of nature to revolve around protecting it from man, not for man. Environmentalism insists that we give up the value of material comfort and the expectation of material progress. We must distrust modern science and modern technology, since they only distance us from nature. We must live "in harmony" with nature.
In the discussions about cutting yew trees to produce Taxol, a compound discovered to have potential for cancer treatment, Al Gore, in his book Earth in the Balance,[5]”… declares himself incapable of choosing between people and trees:
“It seems an easy choice—sacrifice the tree for a human life—until one learns that three trees must be destroyed for each patient treated. . . . Suddenly we must confront some tough questions.” [6]
So, science is prostituted to an agenda. Dishonesty, as one of these pseudo-scientists explains, is their best policy: “We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being right.”[7] In the end, they find “harmful” man’s liberation from a life of primitive labor. To them, the “harm” lies in the very existence of technology, wealth and progress; it lies in the fact of industrialization per se. Paul Ehrlich, for instance, declares:
“We’ve already had too much economic growth in the United States. Economic growth in rich countries like ours is the disease, not the cure.”[8]
It is, therefore, a mistake to believe we simply have a disagreement about how to achieve the same end – a way to have and use our natural environment at the same time. That’s not correct. The ends are radically different.[9]
The basic problem in fighting the lies and distortions is that, in exposing these activist lies and machinations, it is the activists initiate the issues using easily grasped and intellectually simplistic concepts that appeal to the audience on an emotional level. These, however, can only be refuted by reference to scientific concepts which are, inherently, “dense webs of linked ideas”. Scientists can look at the activists’ stories and can immediately see the fallacies and fabrications but to convey that knowledge to the lay public requires either assuming a substantial scientific background in that audience, which is not feasible, or developing a semblance of that background in the response. Few in the public will stand for that level of explanation in this “sound bite” world. The ready complicity of the media and politicians in this “groupthink” is a catalyst to the substitution of myth for science in the making of policy in the social and environmental arenas.
We will, however, “persevere to persevere.”[10]
[1] Elizabeth M. Whelan and Frederick J. Stare, Panic in the Pantry, (Prometheus, 1992), pp. 66-76.
[2] Also Goebbel’s Principles of Propaganda: “To be perceived, propaganda must evoke the interest of an audience and must be transmitted through an attention getting communications medium.”
[3] Vox Day, Prostituting science, World Net Daily Exclusive Commentary, Posted: July 02, 2007
[4] Ibid.
[5] Al Gore, Earth in the Balance (Houghton Mifflin, 1992), pp. 105-106.
[6] Peter Schwartz, In Moral Defense of Forestry, Delivered to the California Forestry Association, Napa, California, January 28, 2000
[7]Stephen Schneider, quoted in "Our Fragile Earth" by Jonathan Schell, Discover, Oct. 1987, pp. 47-50.
[8]Paul Ehrlich, quoted in "Journalists and Others for Saving the Planet," by David Brooks, Wall St. Journal, Oct. 5, 1989, p. A28.
[9] Peter Schwartz, In Moral Defense of Forestry, Delivered to the California Forestry Association, Napa, California, January 28, 2000
[10] Chief Dan George in “The Outlaw Jose Wales”
Monday, May 18, 2009
Environmentalists: What Are They Good For? (Part two)
With the DDT battles as a highly successful prelude, the environmentalists took off, flags flying. Next on the list was Cyclamate. This sugar substitute was another of those substances discovered in the mid thirties that were on track to make human life more convenient, but like DDT it was banned in 1969 over fears of cancer. Discovered serendipitously in 1937, cyclamates were by the 50’s being used as a sugar substitute for the obese and as an additive in products from soft drinks to salad dressing. Between 1963 and 1970 cyclamates production and use had blossomed to 21 million pounds per year.
Then, in 1969, FDA scientist Jacqueline Verrett appeared on the TV show Nightline with malformed chicks that had been injected with cyclamates (a result that could also be reproduced with injections of air or water). A few days later, Abbott Laboratories which manufactured cyclamates produced a study showing that of 240 lab rats that were fed cyclamates and saccharin, 8 had developed kidney tumors (No one made the connection then that that feeding had been the equivalent of humans drinking 350 cans of soda per day). Secretary Robert Finch of Health, Education and Welfare banned the drug immediately.
Studies over the next 20 were unable to show that neither cyclamates nor its metabolite was carcinogenic. The U.S. ban stands to this day.
In subsequent years, dozens of other studies reported no cancer risk in rats, mice, dogs, hamsters and monkeys. By the mid-1980s professional health organizations from around the world agreed with the National Academy of Sciences that "the totality of evidence from studies in animals does not indicate that cyclamate (or its metabolite) is carcinogenic." More than 50 countries, including Canada, have now approved or re-approved the use of the sweetener. [1]
[1] Elizabeth Whelan ,The Bitter Truth About a Sweetener Scare, Copyright 1999 Wall Street Journal, August 26, 1999, as reproduced in www.junkscience.com/aug99/sveda
Moving forward to 1980, we come to the great acid rain scare in which most of the forests of the eastern United States would be decimated and the mountain lakes would be too acidic to support life. This was said to be a result of coal-burning factories and power plants in the Midwest (and later in China, and India) spewing all manner of acidic by-products that were then carried by air currents and dropped on the mountains and forests. Europe had its own version based on coal use in England and the Ruhr Valley.
In 1980 the U.S. Federal Government launched the National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program (NAPAP) which eventually employed 700 scientists and cost upwards of $500,000,000. After 10 years of careful study, NAPAP found that the effect of acid rain, while real (those pollutants could combine with moisture in the air to form a weak sulpheric acid solution), the effect on forests and crops was negligible. The study also found that the Nation’s lakes and streams were in much better condition than the EPA and other critics had asserted. In fact the study found that among thousands of U.S. lakes, only 4 percent were somewhat acidic. One-quarter of those were acidic due to natural causes, leaving only 3 percent somewhat influenced by human activities. One tree, Red Spruce, was suspected to be suffering some effects of acid rain, but those findings were confounded by other variables affecting the species[1].
The study found many of the Adirondack lakes (an important subset of the crisis stories) were acidic when explorers first entered the region, and likely contained few fish at the time. Logging (and burning) the virgin forests prior to 1900 reduced the regional lake acidity. Acidity then rebounded with the decline of logging. Peat bogs are common in the Adirondacks, as are cranberries and blueberries, all of which require acid soils. It is well known that glacial-influenced granitic soils, common in the Adirondacks, are typically acidic and runoff from such soils will of course collect in local surface water[2].
Among the many findings of the NAPAP study (as well as other studies in the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere in the world) were that acid rain attributed to man-caused sources were generally local in nature, not carried large distances from concentrated industrial sources[3].
The Final Report of NAPAP was never published and received very little attention from either the media or the politicians (who had already created a draconian Clean Air Act based on the fear and innuendo rather than the science that had cost them (and us) a half a billion dollars). Interestingly, the EPA still pushes the acid rain story on its website and sites aimed at schoolchildren extolling the same message abound.
Alar, a chemical used in the fruit industry to retard ripening on the tree (to gain better color and easier picking) was singled out in a 1989 60 Minutes episode as a cancer-causing chemical. The TV program was working from a report posted by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a main purveyor of environmental crisis stories over the past 35 years. In this case the story was developed and distributed by the NRDC in a carefully orchestrated campaign prepared by a company which continues to figure prominently in these types of scares, Fenton Communications. As a result of the broadcast, Uniroyal Chemical pulled the chemical from the market, and apple growers lost millions of dollars in that year. The truth, of course, was much less than the hype. Alar does have carcinogenic properties but only at fantastic and impossible doses. After the program had created its intended panic amongst the public, the truth came out about the chemical.
The lab tests that prompted the scare required an amount of Alar equal to over 5,000 gallons (20,000 L) of apple juice per day. Consumers Union[1] ran its own studies and estimated the human lifetime cancer risk to be 5 per million, as compared to the previously-reported figure of 50 cases per million.[2]
This story is one of very few that resulted in a bigger black eye for the environmentalists than the producers and users of the chemical because of the careful lab work conducted and publicized by the well respected Consumers Union and their highly influential magazine, Consumers Report.
No story of chemical scares would be complete without the mention of the archetypal chemical bogeyman of all, 2,4-D. This herbicide is another of those useful chemicals produced in the WWII era and cleared for use by the civilian population. It is widely and successfully used to control shrub encroachment in conifer plantations. During the Vietnam War it was mixed in a 50/50 ratio with 2,4,5-T to defoliate the jungles of Vietnam to reduce cover used by the Viet Cong. While this was a successful application, reports began filtering back about people developing symptoms of toxic poisoning. It turned out that, in the manufacture of 2,4,5-T a dioxin could be formed if heat balances were not properly maintained. Thus began yet another series of catastrophic stories about the deadly effect of chemicals and in this one, 2,4-D was implicated, wrongly it turned out.
At one point in my career, I oversaw brush and pest control treatments on a Ranger District and in that capacity I was required to have a pesticide applicator certification. This required yearly training to maintain the certification. I remember that at one of the courses being taught by a researcher from Oregon State University (Dr. Frank Dost). He recounted the story of the cancer scare in the southwest corner of Oregon. This was in many of the papers of the day and was characterized by a population of women whose babies purportedly showed a higher than normal incidence of teratomas at birth. I followed the stories closely because my daughter was born with a large (benign) teratoma. Local and national papers and news programs focused on the use of 2,4-D in local forests for shrub control as the obvious culprit. After the usual hue and cry and the decision of private and government foresters to curtail the use of 2,4-D in the area, Oregon State University commenced a series of studies on the effects of the chemical on human health.
What the studies found was that a person would have to ingest huge amounts of the chemical to show symptoms, that it was not persistent in the body or organs (in fact 82% is excreted in unchanged form), that the half life of residue in the bodies of living organisms is 10 to 20 hours, and that mutagenic and teratogenic responses in humans required very large and chronic doses[1].
The story about the birth defects in southwest Oregon, like most of these environmental scares, had some basis in fact. There were birth defects noted in that population. This time period, however, was the 60’s and encompassed the “back to the earth/hippy” movement of the day, and southern Oregon was one of the Mecca’s for that movement. When researchers controlled for the number of young women of childbearing age in that area, the incidence of birth defects was found to be less than would be expected in the normal population.
As respects specifically teratomas, among the known causes (all dose related) are; oxygen, 2,4D, Nicotine, caffeine, vitamin deficiency, DMSO, oral contraceptive, Vitamin A, and sucrose.[2]
It is interesting as well to note that 3% of live births have a defect identified at birth and only 3% of all defects have been identified as owing to external effects such as chemicals, malnutrition, etc. Also, about 25% of all known pregnancies fail. If you have a community made up primarily of young, child-bearing people, this effect can seem magnified and tied to something else. Added to that is the fact that 60% to 70% of all conceptions fail and the bulk of these are related to genetics.[3]
And, finally, the safety factor applied to chemicals is typically 100 times the dose that kills 50% of laboratory trial animals (LD50). Interestingly, it is 5 for aspirin, which was “grandfathered” in. That is, the aspirin in common use today is 20 times more toxic than 2,4D when used at its recommended dose.[4] Most substances tested and certified by the FDA (such as food, cosmetics, toiletries, etc.) have to reach a safety margin of 1 in 20 chances of causing a problem, it is a 1 in 100 margin for chemicals
As for TCDD, the dioxin found in 2,4,5-T? It has never been proved to be a particularly toxic substance despite the popular belief to the contrary. It is detected in low concentrations whenever organic material is burned especially if combustion is incomplete. It can, therefore, be produced in forest fires, engine exhaust and volcanic eruptions. Studies have shown that guinea pigs fed dioxin develop a variety of chronic and lethal effects but that in hamsters, it requires a dose 5000 times larger to cause the same effects[5].
The “hype” is news; the refutation isn’t. Therefore the lies live and the respect for science and scientific advancement withers. The political summary in the United Nations report on climate gains wide credence; the dissent of scientists that contributed to the main body of the report is hidden. Polar bear populations expand; they are included on the threatened species list. Wolf populations explode; environmentalists fight their removal from the list. Ospreys are as common as house flies and the new problem is that Bald Eagles are killing the Great Cormorants. Always a crisis. Never a solution.
[1] http://extoxnet.orst.edu/pips/24-D.htm
[2] Dost, 1982
[3] Dost, 1982
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ray, Dixie Lee and Lou Guzzo, Trashing the Planet, 1990, Regnery Gateway Press
[1] Consumers Union is an independent, nonprofit testing and information organization serving consumers in the United States. Its mission is to test products, inform the public, and protect consumers. Its income is derived from the sale of its magazine Consumer Reports and other services, and from noncommercial contributions, grants, and fees.
[2] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Alar_and_apples#The_risks_of_Alar
[1] NAPAP, 1990 Final Report (unpublished), see Wall Street Journal editorial, “No PAP From NAPAP, 26 January 1990.
[2] Ray, Dixie Lee and Lou Guzzo, Trashing the Planet, 1990, Regnery Gateway Press
[3] Ibid.
[1] Elizabeth Whelan ,The Bitter Truth About a Sweetener Scare, Copyright 1999 Wall Street Journal, August 26, 1999, as reproduced in www.junkscience.com/aug99/sveda
With the DDT battles as a highly successful prelude, the environmentalists took off, flags flying. Next on the list was Cyclamate. This sugar substitute was another of those substances discovered in the mid thirties that were on track to make human life more convenient, but like DDT it was banned in 1969 over fears of cancer. Discovered serendipitously in 1937, cyclamates were by the 50’s being used as a sugar substitute for the obese and as an additive in products from soft drinks to salad dressing. Between 1963 and 1970 cyclamates production and use had blossomed to 21 million pounds per year.
Then, in 1969, FDA scientist Jacqueline Verrett appeared on the TV show Nightline with malformed chicks that had been injected with cyclamates (a result that could also be reproduced with injections of air or water). A few days later, Abbott Laboratories which manufactured cyclamates produced a study showing that of 240 lab rats that were fed cyclamates and saccharin, 8 had developed kidney tumors (No one made the connection then that that feeding had been the equivalent of humans drinking 350 cans of soda per day). Secretary Robert Finch of Health, Education and Welfare banned the drug immediately.
Studies over the next 20 were unable to show that neither cyclamates nor its metabolite was carcinogenic. The U.S. ban stands to this day.
In subsequent years, dozens of other studies reported no cancer risk in rats, mice, dogs, hamsters and monkeys. By the mid-1980s professional health organizations from around the world agreed with the National Academy of Sciences that "the totality of evidence from studies in animals does not indicate that cyclamate (or its metabolite) is carcinogenic." More than 50 countries, including Canada, have now approved or re-approved the use of the sweetener. [1]
[1] Elizabeth Whelan ,The Bitter Truth About a Sweetener Scare, Copyright 1999 Wall Street Journal, August 26, 1999, as reproduced in www.junkscience.com/aug99/sveda
Moving forward to 1980, we come to the great acid rain scare in which most of the forests of the eastern United States would be decimated and the mountain lakes would be too acidic to support life. This was said to be a result of coal-burning factories and power plants in the Midwest (and later in China, and India) spewing all manner of acidic by-products that were then carried by air currents and dropped on the mountains and forests. Europe had its own version based on coal use in England and the Ruhr Valley.
In 1980 the U.S. Federal Government launched the National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program (NAPAP) which eventually employed 700 scientists and cost upwards of $500,000,000. After 10 years of careful study, NAPAP found that the effect of acid rain, while real (those pollutants could combine with moisture in the air to form a weak sulpheric acid solution), the effect on forests and crops was negligible. The study also found that the Nation’s lakes and streams were in much better condition than the EPA and other critics had asserted. In fact the study found that among thousands of U.S. lakes, only 4 percent were somewhat acidic. One-quarter of those were acidic due to natural causes, leaving only 3 percent somewhat influenced by human activities. One tree, Red Spruce, was suspected to be suffering some effects of acid rain, but those findings were confounded by other variables affecting the species[1].
The study found many of the Adirondack lakes (an important subset of the crisis stories) were acidic when explorers first entered the region, and likely contained few fish at the time. Logging (and burning) the virgin forests prior to 1900 reduced the regional lake acidity. Acidity then rebounded with the decline of logging. Peat bogs are common in the Adirondacks, as are cranberries and blueberries, all of which require acid soils. It is well known that glacial-influenced granitic soils, common in the Adirondacks, are typically acidic and runoff from such soils will of course collect in local surface water[2].
Among the many findings of the NAPAP study (as well as other studies in the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere in the world) were that acid rain attributed to man-caused sources were generally local in nature, not carried large distances from concentrated industrial sources[3].
The Final Report of NAPAP was never published and received very little attention from either the media or the politicians (who had already created a draconian Clean Air Act based on the fear and innuendo rather than the science that had cost them (and us) a half a billion dollars). Interestingly, the EPA still pushes the acid rain story on its website and sites aimed at schoolchildren extolling the same message abound.
Alar, a chemical used in the fruit industry to retard ripening on the tree (to gain better color and easier picking) was singled out in a 1989 60 Minutes episode as a cancer-causing chemical. The TV program was working from a report posted by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a main purveyor of environmental crisis stories over the past 35 years. In this case the story was developed and distributed by the NRDC in a carefully orchestrated campaign prepared by a company which continues to figure prominently in these types of scares, Fenton Communications. As a result of the broadcast, Uniroyal Chemical pulled the chemical from the market, and apple growers lost millions of dollars in that year. The truth, of course, was much less than the hype. Alar does have carcinogenic properties but only at fantastic and impossible doses. After the program had created its intended panic amongst the public, the truth came out about the chemical.
The lab tests that prompted the scare required an amount of Alar equal to over 5,000 gallons (20,000 L) of apple juice per day. Consumers Union[1] ran its own studies and estimated the human lifetime cancer risk to be 5 per million, as compared to the previously-reported figure of 50 cases per million.[2]
This story is one of very few that resulted in a bigger black eye for the environmentalists than the producers and users of the chemical because of the careful lab work conducted and publicized by the well respected Consumers Union and their highly influential magazine, Consumers Report.
No story of chemical scares would be complete without the mention of the archetypal chemical bogeyman of all, 2,4-D. This herbicide is another of those useful chemicals produced in the WWII era and cleared for use by the civilian population. It is widely and successfully used to control shrub encroachment in conifer plantations. During the Vietnam War it was mixed in a 50/50 ratio with 2,4,5-T to defoliate the jungles of Vietnam to reduce cover used by the Viet Cong. While this was a successful application, reports began filtering back about people developing symptoms of toxic poisoning. It turned out that, in the manufacture of 2,4,5-T a dioxin could be formed if heat balances were not properly maintained. Thus began yet another series of catastrophic stories about the deadly effect of chemicals and in this one, 2,4-D was implicated, wrongly it turned out.
At one point in my career, I oversaw brush and pest control treatments on a Ranger District and in that capacity I was required to have a pesticide applicator certification. This required yearly training to maintain the certification. I remember that at one of the courses being taught by a researcher from Oregon State University (Dr. Frank Dost). He recounted the story of the cancer scare in the southwest corner of Oregon. This was in many of the papers of the day and was characterized by a population of women whose babies purportedly showed a higher than normal incidence of teratomas at birth. I followed the stories closely because my daughter was born with a large (benign) teratoma. Local and national papers and news programs focused on the use of 2,4-D in local forests for shrub control as the obvious culprit. After the usual hue and cry and the decision of private and government foresters to curtail the use of 2,4-D in the area, Oregon State University commenced a series of studies on the effects of the chemical on human health.
What the studies found was that a person would have to ingest huge amounts of the chemical to show symptoms, that it was not persistent in the body or organs (in fact 82% is excreted in unchanged form), that the half life of residue in the bodies of living organisms is 10 to 20 hours, and that mutagenic and teratogenic responses in humans required very large and chronic doses[1].
The story about the birth defects in southwest Oregon, like most of these environmental scares, had some basis in fact. There were birth defects noted in that population. This time period, however, was the 60’s and encompassed the “back to the earth/hippy” movement of the day, and southern Oregon was one of the Mecca’s for that movement. When researchers controlled for the number of young women of childbearing age in that area, the incidence of birth defects was found to be less than would be expected in the normal population.
As respects specifically teratomas, among the known causes (all dose related) are; oxygen, 2,4D, Nicotine, caffeine, vitamin deficiency, DMSO, oral contraceptive, Vitamin A, and sucrose.[2]
It is interesting as well to note that 3% of live births have a defect identified at birth and only 3% of all defects have been identified as owing to external effects such as chemicals, malnutrition, etc. Also, about 25% of all known pregnancies fail. If you have a community made up primarily of young, child-bearing people, this effect can seem magnified and tied to something else. Added to that is the fact that 60% to 70% of all conceptions fail and the bulk of these are related to genetics.[3]
And, finally, the safety factor applied to chemicals is typically 100 times the dose that kills 50% of laboratory trial animals (LD50). Interestingly, it is 5 for aspirin, which was “grandfathered” in. That is, the aspirin in common use today is 20 times more toxic than 2,4D when used at its recommended dose.[4] Most substances tested and certified by the FDA (such as food, cosmetics, toiletries, etc.) have to reach a safety margin of 1 in 20 chances of causing a problem, it is a 1 in 100 margin for chemicals
As for TCDD, the dioxin found in 2,4,5-T? It has never been proved to be a particularly toxic substance despite the popular belief to the contrary. It is detected in low concentrations whenever organic material is burned especially if combustion is incomplete. It can, therefore, be produced in forest fires, engine exhaust and volcanic eruptions. Studies have shown that guinea pigs fed dioxin develop a variety of chronic and lethal effects but that in hamsters, it requires a dose 5000 times larger to cause the same effects[5].
The “hype” is news; the refutation isn’t. Therefore the lies live and the respect for science and scientific advancement withers. The political summary in the United Nations report on climate gains wide credence; the dissent of scientists that contributed to the main body of the report is hidden. Polar bear populations expand; they are included on the threatened species list. Wolf populations explode; environmentalists fight their removal from the list. Ospreys are as common as house flies and the new problem is that Bald Eagles are killing the Great Cormorants. Always a crisis. Never a solution.
[1] http://extoxnet.orst.edu/pips/24-D.htm
[2] Dost, 1982
[3] Dost, 1982
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ray, Dixie Lee and Lou Guzzo, Trashing the Planet, 1990, Regnery Gateway Press
[1] Consumers Union is an independent, nonprofit testing and information organization serving consumers in the United States. Its mission is to test products, inform the public, and protect consumers. Its income is derived from the sale of its magazine Consumer Reports and other services, and from noncommercial contributions, grants, and fees.
[2] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Alar_and_apples#The_risks_of_Alar
[1] NAPAP, 1990 Final Report (unpublished), see Wall Street Journal editorial, “No PAP From NAPAP, 26 January 1990.
[2] Ray, Dixie Lee and Lou Guzzo, Trashing the Planet, 1990, Regnery Gateway Press
[3] Ibid.
[1] Elizabeth Whelan ,The Bitter Truth About a Sweetener Scare, Copyright 1999 Wall Street Journal, August 26, 1999, as reproduced in www.junkscience.com/aug99/sveda
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Environmentalists: What Are They Good For? (Part one of three)
Think back. How many catastrophes can you remember that environmentalists predicted or identified and how many of them were eventually found to be real? I’m 65 years old and I can’t think of very many.
Oh, there certainly were a few. Even a blind pig finds some acorns and as I indicated in my first post, when the environmental movement first got started, there certainly were some egregious examples of environmental problems. To everyone’s credit those were relatively quickly cleaned up without a lot of dissention. Along the way, however, a much larger number of “problems” were generated out of whole cloth and, though it never received the same level of scrutiny from the press, were later proved to be misinterpreted at best and outright fabrications at worst.
Perhaps the initial national level broadside in the environmental movement was the DDT scare of 1962 brought on by the release of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring. Carson had worked for years at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and eventually became the head of their publications department. By the end of the nineteen fifties, she had become a successful author in her own right after publishing two books: The Sea Around Us and The Edge of the Sea. The success of these books allowed her to leave government service and go out on her own as an author.
In the decades just prior to her literary success, the world saw the creation of a number of synthetic pesticides that were to lead to an explosion of farm production and the virtual elimination of a number of the diseases that had plagued mankind for centuries.
“In 1952 insects, weeds, and disease cost farmers $13 billion in crops annually. Since gross annual agricultural output at that time totaled $31 billion, it was estimated that preventing damage by using pesticides would boost food and fiber production by 42%.”[1]
DDT’s efficacy on insects was discovered in the 1930’s and it was used extensively by the U.S. Army in its push through Europe during WWII (many probably remember the pictures of civilian populations lining up to be “fogged” by soldiers manning large hoses leading from tanks of the chemical) to prevent insect-borne diseases like typhus and malaria.
“In 1943 DDT famously stopped a typhus epidemic in Naples in its tracks shortly after the Allies invaded.”[2]
After the war and after testing by the Food and Drug Administration found no serious problems in human toxicity, DDT was approved for general use, replacing the existing arsenic-based insecticides (such as Paris Green) in general use. In short order, malaria was virtually eliminated from the United States.
For all the good they do however, the problem with pesticides is that, used improperly, they can harm beneficial as well as harmful organisms and Carson made this connection in her book in a way that was assured to gain public support for her thesis. “She painted a scenario in which birds had all been poisoned by insecticides, resulting in a ‘silent spring’ in which ‘no birds sing.’”[3]
Along about this same period, Congress passed the Delaney Clause which “forbade the addition of any amount of chemicals suspected of causing cancer to food.”[4] Feeding on this legislation, Wilhelm Hueper, chief of environmental cancer research at the National Cancer Institute, had become convinced that exposures to synthetic chemicals were a major cause of cancer in humans. His work became a major source for Carson in the research for her book.
The juxtaposition of an obscure federal law and the legitimizing cover of a leading researcher at a leading institute allowed Carson to make the connection between DDT as a danger to human life and a potential avenue to eliminate its use (Where many of the public may not be moved by the death of birds, everyone was concerned about themselves and their children)
The book was a bombshell. President Kennedy, who read the book, asked for testing of the chemicals she called to task in the book and the EPA, in 1970, undertook a 3 year review of DDT which in 1972 led to its ban after seven months of hearings. William Ruckelshaus, head of the EPA at this time, signed the ban but had never attended any of the hearings, did not read the transcripts and refused to release the materials he used to make his decision. He was later shown to have been a member of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) at this time and used the ban to personally appeal for donations to the group. EDF, by the way, was a group of Long Island lawyers financed by the Ford Foundation and the Rachel Carson Memorial Fund of the National Audubon Society to file suits that led to bans on DDT and the establishment of precedents in environmental law. Supporters of DDT, of course, appealed the ban but were unsuccessful because Ruckelshaus had appointed himself as appeal judge.
For all her passion Carson was wrong in nearly all the particulars in her book. A trained biologist, she willingly used the research available incorrectly and based her writing on unsupported and one-sided information.
“…Silent Spring is also chock full of other "untruthful and misleading" statements that have absolutely no grounding in scientific reality whatsoever, said San Jose State University entomologist Dr. J. Gordon Edwards. Edwards is an environmentalist "with a desire to keep truth in science and environmentalism." He has even has a book published by the Sierra Club.
Edwards at first supported Carson but quickly changed his mind once he began checking her sources. What he discovered was not only did Carson rely upon "very unscientific sources," but she cited many of the same sources over and over again in order to make her book appear incontrovertible. Even more startling is that Edwards "found" many of Carson's statements based upon sound, scientific sources were actually -- his word -- "false."
"They did not support her contentions about the harm caused by pesticides," Edwards said. "She was really playing loose with the facts, deliberately wording many sentences in such a way as to make them imply certain things without actually saying them, carefully omitting everything that failed to support her thesis that pesticides were bad, that industry was bad, and that any scientists who did not support her views were bad..."[5]
Perhaps the main contention of Carson’s that has lasted over the years is that of the alleged thinning of raptor eggs caused by exposure to DDT and its persistence in the food chain. This, too, was eventually discounted as poor science rather than poor regulation.
“…the evidence regarding the effect of DDT on eggshell thinning among wild birds is contradictory at best. The environmentalist literature claims that the birds threatened directly by the insecticide were laying eggs with thin shells. These shells, say the environmentalists, would eventually become so fragile that the eggs would break, causing a decline in bird populations, particularly among raptors (birds of prey).
In 1968 two researchers, Drs. Joseph J. Hickey and Daniel W. Anderson, reported that high concentrations of DDT were found in the eggs of wild raptor populations. The two concluded that increased eggshell fragility in peregrine falcons, bald eagles, and ospreys was due to DDT exposure.9 Dr. Joel Bitman and associates at the U.S. Department of Agriculture likewise determined that Japanese quail fed DDT produced eggs with thinner shells and lower calcium content.
In actuality, however, declines in bird populations either had occurred before DDT was present or had occurred years after DDT’s use. A comparison of the annual Audubon Christmas Bird Counts between 1941 (pre-DDT) and 1960 (after DDT’s use had waned) reveals that at least 26 different kinds of birds became more numerous during those decades, the period of greatest DDT usage…
In 1942 Dr. Joseph Hickey—who in 1968 would blame DDT for bird population decline—reported that 70 per-cent of the eastern osprey population had been killed by pole traps around fish hatcheries.14 That same year, before DDT came into use, Hickey noted a decline in the population of peregrine falcons”.15[6]
Also,
And, finally,
When carefully reviewed, Dr. Bitman’s study revealed that the quail in the study were fed a diet with a calcium content of only 0.56 percent (a normal quail diet consists of 2.7 percent calcium). Calcium deficiency is a known cause of thin eggshells. After much criticism, Bitman repeated the test, this time with sufficient calcium levels. The birds produced eggs without thinned shells.[8]
In terms of human lethality, I find that a lethal dose of DDT for me is 3.4 pounds. I don’t know how it tastes, but I’m reasonably sure I couldn’t finish that serving in one sitting, or even the 2 oz. that would be required to produce symptoms such as headache, nausea, confusion and tremors.[9] It's difficult to see how a human could get a lethal or harmful dose of the stuff. But, what of the initial line of Carson’s attack concerning DDT’s influence on cancer in humans? That, too, seems to be at best an exaggeration, and at worst outright dishonesty.
In addition, Dr. Robert Golden of Environmental Risk Studies in Washington, DC, reviewed the research of numerous scientists and concluded that DDT and DDE (a breakdown product of DDT) have no significant estrogenic activity. A recent article in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives suggested that the ratio of natural to synthetic estrogens may be as much as 40,000,000 to 1.
The 1996 book Our Stolen Future speculated on a link between DDT and breast cancer, noting that DDE has been found in some breast tumors. Breast cancer…may be a risk factor for elevated DDE, rather than DDE’s being a risk factor for breast cancer.
In a 1994 study published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, researchers concluded that their data did not support an association between DDT and breast cancer. ..the data also indicated that the higher levels could be accounted for by nonenvironmental factors among women living in these regions—factors such as higher socioeconomic status and deferral or avoidance of pregnancy, both of which increase the risks of breast cancer by up to twofold.
In October 1997 the New England Journal of Medicine published a large, well-designed study that found no evidence that exposure to DDT and DDE increases the risk of breast cancer.[10]
Regardless of all this, the battle against DDT continues.
Rachel Carson Set the bar for all of the environmental movement to come after her. Those that followed learned their lessons well. It’s not the actual information that’s important, but the value that any information has to achieve political ends. With a few large successes to provide their bona fides and, we were to find, their cover, the movement moved on.
(Contd.)
[1]Ronald Bailey, 6/12/2002, WWW.Reason Magazine.com/34823
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid
[5] Lisa Makson - FrontPageMagazine.com Thursday, July 31, 2003
[6] Extract from the American Council on Science and Health publication "Facts Versus Fears" - Edition 3, June 1998. © American Council on Science and Health
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid
[9] http://www.chem.duke.edu/~jds/cruise_chem/pest/effects.html
[10] Ibid.
Think back. How many catastrophes can you remember that environmentalists predicted or identified and how many of them were eventually found to be real? I’m 65 years old and I can’t think of very many.
Oh, there certainly were a few. Even a blind pig finds some acorns and as I indicated in my first post, when the environmental movement first got started, there certainly were some egregious examples of environmental problems. To everyone’s credit those were relatively quickly cleaned up without a lot of dissention. Along the way, however, a much larger number of “problems” were generated out of whole cloth and, though it never received the same level of scrutiny from the press, were later proved to be misinterpreted at best and outright fabrications at worst.
Perhaps the initial national level broadside in the environmental movement was the DDT scare of 1962 brought on by the release of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring. Carson had worked for years at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and eventually became the head of their publications department. By the end of the nineteen fifties, she had become a successful author in her own right after publishing two books: The Sea Around Us and The Edge of the Sea. The success of these books allowed her to leave government service and go out on her own as an author.
In the decades just prior to her literary success, the world saw the creation of a number of synthetic pesticides that were to lead to an explosion of farm production and the virtual elimination of a number of the diseases that had plagued mankind for centuries.
“In 1952 insects, weeds, and disease cost farmers $13 billion in crops annually. Since gross annual agricultural output at that time totaled $31 billion, it was estimated that preventing damage by using pesticides would boost food and fiber production by 42%.”[1]
DDT’s efficacy on insects was discovered in the 1930’s and it was used extensively by the U.S. Army in its push through Europe during WWII (many probably remember the pictures of civilian populations lining up to be “fogged” by soldiers manning large hoses leading from tanks of the chemical) to prevent insect-borne diseases like typhus and malaria.
“In 1943 DDT famously stopped a typhus epidemic in Naples in its tracks shortly after the Allies invaded.”[2]
After the war and after testing by the Food and Drug Administration found no serious problems in human toxicity, DDT was approved for general use, replacing the existing arsenic-based insecticides (such as Paris Green) in general use. In short order, malaria was virtually eliminated from the United States.
For all the good they do however, the problem with pesticides is that, used improperly, they can harm beneficial as well as harmful organisms and Carson made this connection in her book in a way that was assured to gain public support for her thesis. “She painted a scenario in which birds had all been poisoned by insecticides, resulting in a ‘silent spring’ in which ‘no birds sing.’”[3]
Along about this same period, Congress passed the Delaney Clause which “forbade the addition of any amount of chemicals suspected of causing cancer to food.”[4] Feeding on this legislation, Wilhelm Hueper, chief of environmental cancer research at the National Cancer Institute, had become convinced that exposures to synthetic chemicals were a major cause of cancer in humans. His work became a major source for Carson in the research for her book.
The juxtaposition of an obscure federal law and the legitimizing cover of a leading researcher at a leading institute allowed Carson to make the connection between DDT as a danger to human life and a potential avenue to eliminate its use (Where many of the public may not be moved by the death of birds, everyone was concerned about themselves and their children)
The book was a bombshell. President Kennedy, who read the book, asked for testing of the chemicals she called to task in the book and the EPA, in 1970, undertook a 3 year review of DDT which in 1972 led to its ban after seven months of hearings. William Ruckelshaus, head of the EPA at this time, signed the ban but had never attended any of the hearings, did not read the transcripts and refused to release the materials he used to make his decision. He was later shown to have been a member of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) at this time and used the ban to personally appeal for donations to the group. EDF, by the way, was a group of Long Island lawyers financed by the Ford Foundation and the Rachel Carson Memorial Fund of the National Audubon Society to file suits that led to bans on DDT and the establishment of precedents in environmental law. Supporters of DDT, of course, appealed the ban but were unsuccessful because Ruckelshaus had appointed himself as appeal judge.
For all her passion Carson was wrong in nearly all the particulars in her book. A trained biologist, she willingly used the research available incorrectly and based her writing on unsupported and one-sided information.
“…Silent Spring is also chock full of other "untruthful and misleading" statements that have absolutely no grounding in scientific reality whatsoever, said San Jose State University entomologist Dr. J. Gordon Edwards. Edwards is an environmentalist "with a desire to keep truth in science and environmentalism." He has even has a book published by the Sierra Club.
Edwards at first supported Carson but quickly changed his mind once he began checking her sources. What he discovered was not only did Carson rely upon "very unscientific sources," but she cited many of the same sources over and over again in order to make her book appear incontrovertible. Even more startling is that Edwards "found" many of Carson's statements based upon sound, scientific sources were actually -- his word -- "false."
"They did not support her contentions about the harm caused by pesticides," Edwards said. "She was really playing loose with the facts, deliberately wording many sentences in such a way as to make them imply certain things without actually saying them, carefully omitting everything that failed to support her thesis that pesticides were bad, that industry was bad, and that any scientists who did not support her views were bad..."[5]
Perhaps the main contention of Carson’s that has lasted over the years is that of the alleged thinning of raptor eggs caused by exposure to DDT and its persistence in the food chain. This, too, was eventually discounted as poor science rather than poor regulation.
“…the evidence regarding the effect of DDT on eggshell thinning among wild birds is contradictory at best. The environmentalist literature claims that the birds threatened directly by the insecticide were laying eggs with thin shells. These shells, say the environmentalists, would eventually become so fragile that the eggs would break, causing a decline in bird populations, particularly among raptors (birds of prey).
In 1968 two researchers, Drs. Joseph J. Hickey and Daniel W. Anderson, reported that high concentrations of DDT were found in the eggs of wild raptor populations. The two concluded that increased eggshell fragility in peregrine falcons, bald eagles, and ospreys was due to DDT exposure.9 Dr. Joel Bitman and associates at the U.S. Department of Agriculture likewise determined that Japanese quail fed DDT produced eggs with thinner shells and lower calcium content.
In actuality, however, declines in bird populations either had occurred before DDT was present or had occurred years after DDT’s use. A comparison of the annual Audubon Christmas Bird Counts between 1941 (pre-DDT) and 1960 (after DDT’s use had waned) reveals that at least 26 different kinds of birds became more numerous during those decades, the period of greatest DDT usage…
In 1942 Dr. Joseph Hickey—who in 1968 would blame DDT for bird population decline—reported that 70 per-cent of the eastern osprey population had been killed by pole traps around fish hatcheries.14 That same year, before DDT came into use, Hickey noted a decline in the population of peregrine falcons”.15[6]
Also,
“Other observers also documented that the great peregrine decline in the eastern United States occurred long before any DDT was present in the environment.16,17 In Canada peregrines were observed to be “reproducing normally” in the 1960s even though their tissues contained 30 times more DDT than did the tissues of the Midwestern peregrines allegedly being extirpated by the chemical.18 And in Great Britain, in 1969, a three-year government study noted that the decline of peregrine falcons in Britain had ended in 1966 even though DDT levels were as abundant as ever. 19…”[7]
And, finally,
“In addition, later research refuted the original studies that had pointed to DDT as a cause for eggshell thinning. After reassessing their findings using more modern methodology, Drs. Hickey and Anderson admitted that the egg extracts they had studied contained little or no DDT and said they were now pursuing PCBs, chemicals used as capacitor insulators, as the culprit.
When carefully reviewed, Dr. Bitman’s study revealed that the quail in the study were fed a diet with a calcium content of only 0.56 percent (a normal quail diet consists of 2.7 percent calcium). Calcium deficiency is a known cause of thin eggshells. After much criticism, Bitman repeated the test, this time with sufficient calcium levels. The birds produced eggs without thinned shells.[8]
In terms of human lethality, I find that a lethal dose of DDT for me is 3.4 pounds. I don’t know how it tastes, but I’m reasonably sure I couldn’t finish that serving in one sitting, or even the 2 oz. that would be required to produce symptoms such as headache, nausea, confusion and tremors.[9] It's difficult to see how a human could get a lethal or harmful dose of the stuff. But, what of the initial line of Carson’s attack concerning DDT’s influence on cancer in humans? That, too, seems to be at best an exaggeration, and at worst outright dishonesty.
“…A 1978 National Cancer Institute report concluded—after two years of testing on several different strains of cancer-prone mice and rats—that DDT was not carcinogenic
In addition, Dr. Robert Golden of Environmental Risk Studies in Washington, DC, reviewed the research of numerous scientists and concluded that DDT and DDE (a breakdown product of DDT) have no significant estrogenic activity. A recent article in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives suggested that the ratio of natural to synthetic estrogens may be as much as 40,000,000 to 1.
The 1996 book Our Stolen Future speculated on a link between DDT and breast cancer, noting that DDE has been found in some breast tumors. Breast cancer…may be a risk factor for elevated DDE, rather than DDE’s being a risk factor for breast cancer.
In a 1994 study published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, researchers concluded that their data did not support an association between DDT and breast cancer. ..the data also indicated that the higher levels could be accounted for by nonenvironmental factors among women living in these regions—factors such as higher socioeconomic status and deferral or avoidance of pregnancy, both of which increase the risks of breast cancer by up to twofold.
In October 1997 the New England Journal of Medicine published a large, well-designed study that found no evidence that exposure to DDT and DDE increases the risk of breast cancer.[10]
Regardless of all this, the battle against DDT continues.
Rachel Carson Set the bar for all of the environmental movement to come after her. Those that followed learned their lessons well. It’s not the actual information that’s important, but the value that any information has to achieve political ends. With a few large successes to provide their bona fides and, we were to find, their cover, the movement moved on.
(Contd.)
[1]Ronald Bailey, 6/12/2002, WWW.Reason Magazine.com/34823
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid
[5] Lisa Makson - FrontPageMagazine.com Thursday, July 31, 2003
[6] Extract from the American Council on Science and Health publication "Facts Versus Fears" - Edition 3, June 1998. © American Council on Science and Health
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid
[9] http://www.chem.duke.edu/~jds/cruise_chem/pest/effects.html
[10] Ibid.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Fun With Numbers
Environmentalists have harangued us all over the past 30+ years with fears of timber harvest run amok, which fact is attended by various natural calamities from the collapse of “native ecosystems, to the barren landscapes left by clearcutting; from the total elimination of “ancient forests” to the elimination of the last remnants of the original forests on the continent. As Rosie McDonald says: “you could Google it.”, so it might be useful to take her advice and use some information easily found on the internet to get a bit of a handle on the devastation.
All good stories should start at the beginning and so shall we. The total land area of the United States is 2.3 billion acres[1]. Of that total, forest land (land that is at least 10% stocked with trees) comprises 749 million acres. So, one third of the United States is forested. Within this forested portion of US land we find that 504 million acres is considered timberland. Timberland is defined as forestland that is capable of producing 20 ft3/acre/yr of wood under natural conditions (that is, each acre can grow the equivalent of 30 2x4’s a year). Therefore, two-thirds of the forested land and 22% of the total national land base is forested to the extent that the average person would consider it to be a forest.
So where does the idea come from that only (fill in the blank, but keep it low) of the original forests in the United States are left?[2] One of my unattributed sources states, “Since 1600, 90% of the virgin forests that once covered much of the lower 48 states have been cleared away.” Another[3] says that only 16% of the original 800 to 850 original acres of “well-formed, commercial forests” were left by 1920. My goodness, surely we must all be looking out our windows at huge expanses of desert and devastation. No, of course we aren’t.
Where do these horrendous numbers come from? Well, it’s important to keep in mind that the first statistically valid measurements of forests of any kind were done in the mid-20th century. Everything prior to that is an estimate of greater or lesser reliability. In fact prior to 1800 the area west of the Mississippi was not part of the U.S. and few people had ever seen it. Even up to the Civil War, very little was known of the area in a statistical sense. Many, if not most, of the current estimates of the extent of the original forests come from this antebellum period. Given that, it is probably reasonable to say that 40% to 50% of the country was covered by forests of some structure that was sufficiently stocked to engender the basic idea of forest in the minds of people who observed them.
Definitions. As a forester, I can accept the specific, concrete descriptions of forestland and timberland, indicated above, and understand that for the purposes of my work, other more finite descriptions may be necessary depending on management objectives and communication needs with my clients (ie, I might describe a particular forest as a 2-cohort stand in a Western White Pine Forest type). Alternatively, the U.N. and many of the environmentalist organizations have the following descriptions:
- Primary forest: is a forest that has never been logged and has developed following natural disturbances and under natural processes, regardless of its age.
- Secondary forests: are forests regenerating largely through natural processes after significant human or natural disturbance, and which differ from primary forests in forest composition and/or canopy structure
- Disturbed forests: Any forest type that has in its interior significant areas of disturbance by people, including clearing, felling for wood extraction, anthropogenic fires, road construction, etc.
Frontier forests: large, ecologically intact, and relatively undisturbed forests that support the natural range of species and forest functions (WRI definition).
These definitions have no useful meaning to me in that they don’t convey useful information in a general discussion about how much timberland there may be on a national basis. They may be useful, as in my own example above, for a discussion in a client-based situation. In a larger context, they are political.
So, with those two caveats in mind, we can say that “it is estimated” that in 1630 there were about 1 billion acres of forestland in the United States and since then about 300 million acres were converted to (mostly) agriculture and (mostly) in the East. By 1920, the clearing of forests for agriculture had largely subsided[4]. What of the 700 million acres that were left after that? Are they “virgin” forests from the 1600’s? Well, no. Forests are born, grow, senesce and die just as people do, and any forest that was mature in 1630 would necessarily be 500+ years old now and, regardless of the hype, most temperate forests just don’t live that long.
The environmentalist community has apparently picked up on the silliness of all of this and have largely dropped that general construction in favor of more specific descriptions. They are now pitching ideas such as “Ninety five to ninety eight percent of forests in the continental United States have been logged at least once since settlement by Europeans”, implying that the very fact of logging destroys a forest forever (See “Primary Forests”, above). O.K. in this case we can say that any forest logged in the 1600’s would be about 300 years old now; in the 1700’s, 200 years old; “between 1850 and 1900”[5] (when the ostensible forest devastation which led to the formation of the National Forests occurred), would be 100 to 150 years old now. In a White Pine dominated 100 year old second-growth forest, whether it originated from logging or natural disturbance, you would typically see trees averaging 20”+ in diameter and over 100 feet tall spaced 16’ to 25’ apart. To those without the ultra-discerning eye of the environmentalist, I would contend that that’s a forest.
Thomas Pynchon, in Gravity’s Rainbow, has a list of “Proverbs for Paranoids” one of which states, “If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.” The idea that the virgin forests of the 1600’s are mostly gone seems to me to fit that idea. My response has always been, and I contend that yours should be as well, “…of course they are. What’s your point?” There’s no need to argue the point that they’re gone because the real revelation would be that they still existed.
Forests which are large expanses of land stocked with trees, are made up of stands which are management units within these forests which are differentiated by age, composition (types and ages of trees), structure (age, density, condition, etc.), site quality and geography[6]. Stand development is characterized by, among other criteria, by a successional pathway which begins with establishment and progresses through various stages to death, typically by some sort of disturbance (and logging qualifies as a disturbance). In general, we can describe these developmental stages as:[7]
- Stand Initiation – the initial establishment of a new stand after a disturbance
- Stem Exclusion – a period of competition of the trees in the stand for available growing space
- Understory Re-initiation – as the stand ages competition and microsite disturbances open up gaps within which new seedlings become establishe
- Old Growth – Trees are typically large (compared to other trees within the stand) and vigor has decreased. Insects and disease take their toll and overstory trees die at an increasing rate from these and other disturbance agents
Each of these stages lasts for a variable time period based on myriad of influences and the total sequence in temperate forests is typically from about 120 years to over 600 years, Complicating this is the fact that disturbances such as fire, wind and epidemic insect and disease attack can set the process back to zero or to any of the stages at any time. Also individual trees or groups of trees may escape the general consequences of these processes for an extended time or may be growing on an especially favorable site so that they may grow larger than their contemporaries.
Generally, in the U.S., the stand initiation stage is relatively short (15 to 30 years), stem exclusion is relatively long (50 to 100 years), stand re-initiation variable (30 to 100 years) and old growth moderately to very long (30 to 80 years and, in some cases longer). Therefore, it can be seen that each of these stages will occupy a different percentage of a given forest, that these percentages will change dynamically over time, and the percentages are not necessarily comparable between or even within larger geographical units (in fact, the larger the unit, the less comparable). The large, very old forest stands in the Pacific Coast interior forests cannot be compared to those in the inland Rocky Mountain forests, and White Pine forests in the northern Rocky Mountains are not the same the high subalpine forests of the Central Rockies. Likewise, it should be clear by now that western softwood forests are not comparable to eastern hardwood forests. In the end, forests are immensely complex, dynamic organisms that are not particularly susceptible to much human change on a macro level and only for a relatively short period on a micro level.
To say, then, that “…only 1-4% of the original forests in the United States are left…” or that the idea that “…“Ninety five to ninety eight percent of forests in the continental United States have been logged at least once since settlement by Europeans…” should be identifiable as misleading at best or flat out ridiculous at worst. Absent European influence the forests of the 1600’s would still not be the forests of today and in the pantheon of disturbances that influence forest development over the course of 150+ years, logging has no more effect than any other and would be unrecognizable over that time period.
[1] Smith, Brad W., Patrick D. Miles, John S Vissage, and Scott Pugh, Forest Resources of the United States, 2002, North Central Research Station, USDA-FS, www.ncrs.fs.fed.us
[2] Lester Brown, Michael Renner, Christopher Flavin, Vital Signs 1998, Worldwatch Institute, Washington, D.C.
[3] Williams, Michael, Americans and their Forests, Cambridge University Press, 1989
[4] Smith, Brad W., Patrick D. Miles, John S Vissage, and Scott Pugh, Forest Resources of the United States, 2002, North Central Research Station, USDA-FS, www.ncrs.fs.fed.us
[5] Ibid.
[6] Daniel, Theodore W., John A. Helms, Frederick S. Baker, Principles of Silviculture, McGraw-Hill, 1979
[7] Oliver, Chadwick Dearing, Bruce C. Larson, Forest Stand Dynamics, McGraw-Hill, 1990
Monday, May 4, 2009
Getting Started
“The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.”[1]
“Progress is science does not consist of replacing wrong answers with right answers, but in replacing wrong answers with those that are more subtly wrong”- Stephen Hawking
While this is a site dedicated to issues of forest management, I think there are some background issues we should deal with first. The first one I’d like to get into is pretty basic: What is valid knowledge?
The Dark ages were called so because the light of knowledge was forbidden to all but religious leaders and secular authorities (Royalty). To all others, what was known was a matter of received knowledge which required of them only faith or superstition.
The renaissance came as the application of reason to the natural world resulted in the discovery of a number of scientific truths (Think Gallileo, Newton, Michaelangelo, and others). These discoveries led, naturally to the idea that everything could be submitted to reason including politics and social mores and the result would be a sort of natural truth in all areas of thought and life. If reason were all that was required to discover truth it follows that any individual with the proper instruction can learn to do the same and so individuals are, or could be, released from the tyranny of the church and the King. Thus the pandora’s box of individual freedom was released. Free men could likewise form societies and political systems to their own ends and those, or at least some of them, would be so composed as to preserve that individual-ness. That led to a whirlwind of improvement to all of mankind that were willing to accept it and wealth beyond any imagined previously.
In modern times we have seen the this idea of enlightenment come full circle to where, after centuries of expanding general human knowledge, science now seems to lead to a restriction of what people can know. Knowledge has once more become the exclusive province of Priests (The U.N., The EPA, Union of Concerned Scientists) and their acolytes (researchers on the Federal dime, inexperienced recruits, various and sundry environmental groups, etc.) and the new royalty in their train (Prince Charles, Al Gore, James Hanson, Henry Waxman, Robert Kennedy Jr., etc.).
Common people are once more required to accept the pronouncements as received wisdom to be taken on faith and, for those that have yielded, to once more adopt superstition to stitch together the holes in those theories. And so we have come to a new Dark Age where real science is blasphemy and the “wisdom of our betters is to be accepted as a form of religion.
Where the heck does this come from? Well, I’m not a philosopher but I am reliably informed that a lot of it comes from a major change in the philosophy of knowledge in the early part of the last century. Scientific knowledge, to that point, had been predicated on reason. That is, everything could be subjected to a reasoned analysis through a prescribed and rigid procedure (the scientific method[2]) and would either be found baseless or “true”. Thus, a theory that was tested and found to be true would add to existing knowledge in large or small ways, and the cumulative efforts of a number of such efforts would advance overall knowledge. True knowledge, in this way, advances incrementally. As new techniques and knowledge become available, old theories may be totally replaced or changed at the margin and, over time, we come closer and closer to objective truth.
Many of those today who call themselves “Progressives”, however, subscribe to a new philosophical view called Relativism. Relativism theorizes that some elements or aspects of experience or culture are relative to other elements or aspects (ie., they are not susceptible to observable or provable truth on their own), and that humans can understand and evaluate beliefs and behaviors only in terms of their historical or cultural context. Therefore there is no absolute or concrete truth but, rather, truth is a consensus based on who is looking at it and at the time in which it is observed.
This idea has expanded in recent times to the idea that since there is no truth; science, what is, has no primacy over an idealistic conception of what should be. In terms of the environmentalist community this is combined with a fairly recent interpretation of ethics known as “situational ethics” which is concerned with the outcome or consequences of an action (the ends) as opposed to an action being intrinsically wrong.
This all translates for the environmentalist community to:
Based on our methods and interpretations we feel that this is what the truth should be
It is important to us that it be accepted as the truth by the larger community in order to effect the appropriate policy outcomes
Therefore, whatever is required to convince others to believe us is valid and ethical
Now, it’s important to understand that when the environmental movement was just getting started, it really was a mainly grass roots effort brought about by concerned citizens to curtail some very egregious environmental problems: the air was severely polluted in many areas of the United States and getting worse, the water in some areas was dangerously polluted (re: consider the famous story of the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland catching fire), dam building was a single-minded pursuit without thought to its consequences and, yes, much of the timber harvest on public lands was likewise very single-minded and carried out in an atmosphere that was relatively restrictive to substantive public input.
Gradually, though, the old established conservation groups and periodicals (ie. American Forests, Audubon, Sierra Club, etc.) were taken over by more politically oriented factions (the famous take-over of the Sierra Club is well documented), and while many of the original subscribers and members dropped away, others joined as the radical leaders traded on the good names and good will of these old conservationist icons to leapfrog their way into respectability (It’s tellingly interesting that these usurpers maintained the “conservationist” title rather than the then radical “preservationist” moniker that more accurately described them).
My own rejection of these groups, whose core arguments elicited some sympathy on my part when still a grass-roots effort, occurred when they began attacking forestry in general and the Forest Service (for whom I, by then, worked). What was abstract before became specific and I was able to see how their arguments and pronouncements followed a general and very cynical pattern based on the three points above. That is they would pinpoint a subject (clearcutting was one of the earliest ones), point out a problem with it (in many cases, a very obscure and rare problem), exaggerate its effects, and use that as a focus point to springboard to the damning of the whole field of forestry. Rhys Jaggar recently described the purpose of this tactic quite succinctly:
It’s like all religions: slip out the mantras up front, make sure you stack the evidential deck for inexperienced recruits to stop them asking awkward questions and get them on the streets unquestioningly.[3]
The audience in this case was the lay public that had an interest in the natural world but little or no scientific background in it. Their purpose was to radicalize this group and build a coalition (or a number of essentially like-minded coalitions) in order build political power to attack and destroy the existing power systems in preparation for a complete restructuring. Their methods involved reducing the public’s faith in the abilities and intentions of expert knowledge and traditional management in favor of that of the environmentalists under their own philosophy. And they have been, over the past 40 years, almost entirely successful.
We have come to this, I think, as a result of laziness in thought and practice, and the siren songs of snake oil salesmen who tell us we are better off with less, materially and intellectually – just close your eyes and listen to the soothing music. Pay no attention to the faint cries and bellows up ahead.
This site is dedicated to pointing out the foibles and fallacies contained in these pretty bottles of snake oil as regards the past three decades of management of our National Forests. As I move through this series of essays, I will restrict my efforts to real knowledge: that that has been developed through rigorous application of the scientific method and which has led to the most highly developed human society in the history of the earth.
[1] Journal of Forestry (I have unfortunately lost the issue and forgotten the author)
[2] Adapted from Wikipedia:
Define a question
Gather information and resources (observe)
Form a hypothesis (a theory to explain the observations)
Perform experiments and collect data
Analyze data
Interpret data and draw conclusions that serve as a starting point for new hypothesis
Publish results
Retest (frequently done by other scientists)
[3] In the Blog: Watts Up With That, Is Climate Change the “Defining Challenge of Our Age”? Part 1 of 3, April 28, 2009
“The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.”[1]
“Progress is science does not consist of replacing wrong answers with right answers, but in replacing wrong answers with those that are more subtly wrong”- Stephen Hawking
While this is a site dedicated to issues of forest management, I think there are some background issues we should deal with first. The first one I’d like to get into is pretty basic: What is valid knowledge?
The Dark ages were called so because the light of knowledge was forbidden to all but religious leaders and secular authorities (Royalty). To all others, what was known was a matter of received knowledge which required of them only faith or superstition.
The renaissance came as the application of reason to the natural world resulted in the discovery of a number of scientific truths (Think Gallileo, Newton, Michaelangelo, and others). These discoveries led, naturally to the idea that everything could be submitted to reason including politics and social mores and the result would be a sort of natural truth in all areas of thought and life. If reason were all that was required to discover truth it follows that any individual with the proper instruction can learn to do the same and so individuals are, or could be, released from the tyranny of the church and the King. Thus the pandora’s box of individual freedom was released. Free men could likewise form societies and political systems to their own ends and those, or at least some of them, would be so composed as to preserve that individual-ness. That led to a whirlwind of improvement to all of mankind that were willing to accept it and wealth beyond any imagined previously.
In modern times we have seen the this idea of enlightenment come full circle to where, after centuries of expanding general human knowledge, science now seems to lead to a restriction of what people can know. Knowledge has once more become the exclusive province of Priests (The U.N., The EPA, Union of Concerned Scientists) and their acolytes (researchers on the Federal dime, inexperienced recruits, various and sundry environmental groups, etc.) and the new royalty in their train (Prince Charles, Al Gore, James Hanson, Henry Waxman, Robert Kennedy Jr., etc.).
Common people are once more required to accept the pronouncements as received wisdom to be taken on faith and, for those that have yielded, to once more adopt superstition to stitch together the holes in those theories. And so we have come to a new Dark Age where real science is blasphemy and the “wisdom of our betters is to be accepted as a form of religion.
Where the heck does this come from? Well, I’m not a philosopher but I am reliably informed that a lot of it comes from a major change in the philosophy of knowledge in the early part of the last century. Scientific knowledge, to that point, had been predicated on reason. That is, everything could be subjected to a reasoned analysis through a prescribed and rigid procedure (the scientific method[2]) and would either be found baseless or “true”. Thus, a theory that was tested and found to be true would add to existing knowledge in large or small ways, and the cumulative efforts of a number of such efforts would advance overall knowledge. True knowledge, in this way, advances incrementally. As new techniques and knowledge become available, old theories may be totally replaced or changed at the margin and, over time, we come closer and closer to objective truth.
Many of those today who call themselves “Progressives”, however, subscribe to a new philosophical view called Relativism. Relativism theorizes that some elements or aspects of experience or culture are relative to other elements or aspects (ie., they are not susceptible to observable or provable truth on their own), and that humans can understand and evaluate beliefs and behaviors only in terms of their historical or cultural context. Therefore there is no absolute or concrete truth but, rather, truth is a consensus based on who is looking at it and at the time in which it is observed.
This idea has expanded in recent times to the idea that since there is no truth; science, what is, has no primacy over an idealistic conception of what should be. In terms of the environmentalist community this is combined with a fairly recent interpretation of ethics known as “situational ethics” which is concerned with the outcome or consequences of an action (the ends) as opposed to an action being intrinsically wrong.
This all translates for the environmentalist community to:
Based on our methods and interpretations we feel that this is what the truth should be
It is important to us that it be accepted as the truth by the larger community in order to effect the appropriate policy outcomes
Therefore, whatever is required to convince others to believe us is valid and ethical
Now, it’s important to understand that when the environmental movement was just getting started, it really was a mainly grass roots effort brought about by concerned citizens to curtail some very egregious environmental problems: the air was severely polluted in many areas of the United States and getting worse, the water in some areas was dangerously polluted (re: consider the famous story of the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland catching fire), dam building was a single-minded pursuit without thought to its consequences and, yes, much of the timber harvest on public lands was likewise very single-minded and carried out in an atmosphere that was relatively restrictive to substantive public input.
Gradually, though, the old established conservation groups and periodicals (ie. American Forests, Audubon, Sierra Club, etc.) were taken over by more politically oriented factions (the famous take-over of the Sierra Club is well documented), and while many of the original subscribers and members dropped away, others joined as the radical leaders traded on the good names and good will of these old conservationist icons to leapfrog their way into respectability (It’s tellingly interesting that these usurpers maintained the “conservationist” title rather than the then radical “preservationist” moniker that more accurately described them).
My own rejection of these groups, whose core arguments elicited some sympathy on my part when still a grass-roots effort, occurred when they began attacking forestry in general and the Forest Service (for whom I, by then, worked). What was abstract before became specific and I was able to see how their arguments and pronouncements followed a general and very cynical pattern based on the three points above. That is they would pinpoint a subject (clearcutting was one of the earliest ones), point out a problem with it (in many cases, a very obscure and rare problem), exaggerate its effects, and use that as a focus point to springboard to the damning of the whole field of forestry. Rhys Jaggar recently described the purpose of this tactic quite succinctly:
It’s like all religions: slip out the mantras up front, make sure you stack the evidential deck for inexperienced recruits to stop them asking awkward questions and get them on the streets unquestioningly.[3]
The audience in this case was the lay public that had an interest in the natural world but little or no scientific background in it. Their purpose was to radicalize this group and build a coalition (or a number of essentially like-minded coalitions) in order build political power to attack and destroy the existing power systems in preparation for a complete restructuring. Their methods involved reducing the public’s faith in the abilities and intentions of expert knowledge and traditional management in favor of that of the environmentalists under their own philosophy. And they have been, over the past 40 years, almost entirely successful.
We have come to this, I think, as a result of laziness in thought and practice, and the siren songs of snake oil salesmen who tell us we are better off with less, materially and intellectually – just close your eyes and listen to the soothing music. Pay no attention to the faint cries and bellows up ahead.
This site is dedicated to pointing out the foibles and fallacies contained in these pretty bottles of snake oil as regards the past three decades of management of our National Forests. As I move through this series of essays, I will restrict my efforts to real knowledge: that that has been developed through rigorous application of the scientific method and which has led to the most highly developed human society in the history of the earth.
[1] Journal of Forestry (I have unfortunately lost the issue and forgotten the author)
[2] Adapted from Wikipedia:
Define a question
Gather information and resources (observe)
Form a hypothesis (a theory to explain the observations)
Perform experiments and collect data
Analyze data
Interpret data and draw conclusions that serve as a starting point for new hypothesis
Publish results
Retest (frequently done by other scientists)
[3] In the Blog: Watts Up With That, Is Climate Change the “Defining Challenge of Our Age”? Part 1 of 3, April 28, 2009
Getting Started
“The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.”[1]
“Progress is science does not consist of replacing wrong answers with right answers, but in replacing wrong answers with those that are more subtly wrong”- Stephen Hawking
While this is a site dedicated to issues of forest management, I think there are some background issues we should deal with first. The first one I’d like to get into is pretty basic: What is valid knowledge?
The Dark ages were called so because the light of knowledge was forbidden to all but religious leaders and secular authorities (Royalty). To all others, what was known was a matter of received knowledge which required of them only faith or superstition.
The renaissance came as the application of reason to the natural world resulted in the discovery of a number of scientific truths (Think Gallileo, Newton, Michaelangelo, and others). These discoveries led, naturally to the idea that everything could be submitted to reason including politics and social mores and the result would be a sort of natural truth in all areas of thought and life. If reason were all that was required to discover truth it follows that any individual with the proper instruction can learn to do the same and so individuals are, or could be, released from the tyranny of the church and the King. Thus the pandora’s box of individual freedom was released. Free men could likewise form societies and political systems to their own ends and those, or at least some of them, would be so composed as to preserve that individual-ness. That led to a whirlwind of improvement to all of mankind that were willing to accept it and wealth beyond any imagined previously.
In modern times we have seen the this idea of enlightenment come full circle to where, after centuries of expanding general human knowledge, science now seems to lead to a restriction of what people can know. Knowledge has once more become the exclusive province of Priests (The U.N., The EPA, Union of Concerned Scientists) and their acolytes (researchers on the Federal dime, inexperienced recruits, various and sundry environmental groups, etc.) and the new royalty in their train (Prince Charles, Al Gore, James Hanson, Henry Waxman, Robert Kennedy Jr., etc.).
Common people are once more required to accept the pronouncements as received wisdom to be taken on faith and, for those that have yielded, to once more adopt superstition to stitch together the holes in those theories. And so we have come to a new Dark Age where real science is blasphemy and the “wisdom of our betters is to be accepted as a form of religion.
Where the heck does this come from? Well, I’m not a philosopher but I am reliably informed that a lot of it comes from a major change in the philosophy of knowledge in the early part of the last century. Scientific knowledge, to that point, had been predicated on reason. That is, everything could be subjected to a reasoned analysis through a prescribed and rigid procedure (the scientific method[2]) and would either be found baseless or “true”. Thus, a theory that was tested and found to be true would add to existing knowledge in large or small ways, and the cumulative efforts of a number of such efforts would advance overall knowledge. True knowledge, in this way, advances incrementally. As new techniques and knowledge become available, old theories may be totally replaced or changed at the margin and, over time, we come closer and closer to objective truth.
Many of those today who call themselves “Progressives”, however, subscribe to a new philosophical view called Relativism. Relativism theorizes that some elements or aspects of experience or culture are relative to other elements or aspects (ie., they are not susceptible to observable or provable truth on their own), and that humans can understand and evaluate beliefs and behaviors only in terms of their historical or cultural context. Therefore there is no absolute or concrete truth but, rather, truth is a consensus based on who is looking at it and at the time in which it is observed.
This idea has expanded in recent times to the idea that since there is no truth; science, what is, has no primacy over an idealistic conception of what should be. In terms of the environmentalist community this is combined with a fairly recent interpretation of ethics known as “situational ethics” which is concerned with the outcome or consequences of an action (the ends) as opposed to an action being intrinsically wrong.
This all translates for the environmentalist community to:
Based on our methods and interpretations we feel that this is what the truth should be
It is important to us that it be accepted as the truth by the larger community in order to effect the appropriate policy outcomes
Therefore, whatever is required to convince others to believe us is valid and ethical
Now, it’s important to understand that when the environmental movement was just getting started, it really was a mainly grass roots effort brought about by concerned citizens to curtail some very egregious environmental problems: the air was severely polluted in many areas of the United States and getting worse, the water in some areas was dangerously polluted (re: consider the famous story of the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland catching fire), dam building was a single-minded pursuit without thought to its consequences and, yes, much of the timber harvest on public lands was likewise very single-minded and carried out in an atmosphere that was relatively restrictive to substantive public input.
Gradually, though, the old established conservation groups and periodicals (ie. American Forests, Audubon, Sierra Club, etc.) were taken over by more politically oriented factions (the famous take-over of the Sierra Club is well documented), and while many of the original subscribers and members dropped away, others joined as the radical leaders traded on the good names and good will of these old conservationist icons to leapfrog their way into respectability (It’s tellingly interesting that these usurpers maintained the “conservationist” title rather than the then radical “preservationist” moniker that more accurately described them).
My own rejection of these groups, whose core arguments elicited some sympathy on my part when still a grass-roots effort, occurred when they began attacking forestry in general and the Forest Service (for whom I, by then, worked). What was abstract before became specific and I was able to see how their arguments and pronouncements followed a general and very cynical pattern based on the three points above. That is they would pinpoint a subject (clearcutting was one of the earliest ones), point out a problem with it (in many cases, a very obscure and rare problem), exaggerate its effects, and use that as a focus point to springboard to the damning of the whole field of forestry. Rhys Jaggar recently described the purpose of this tactic quite succinctly:
It’s like all religions: slip out the mantras up front, make sure you stack the evidential deck for inexperienced recruits to stop them asking awkward questions and get them on the streets unquestioningly.[3]
The audience in this case was the lay public that had an interest in the natural world but little or no scientific background in it. Their purpose was to radicalize this group and build a coalition (or a number of essentially like-minded coalitions) in order build political power to attack and destroy the existing power systems in preparation for a complete restructuring. Their methods involved reducing the public’s faith in the abilities and intentions of expert knowledge and traditional management in favor of that of the environmentalists under their own philosophy. And they have been, over the past 40 years, almost entirely successful.
We have come to this, I think, as a result of laziness in thought and practice, and the siren songs of snake oil salesmen who tell us we are better off with less, materially and intellectually – just close your eyes and listen to the soothing music. Pay no attention to the faint cries and bellows up ahead.
This site is dedicated to pointing out the foibles and fallacies contained in these pretty bottles of snake oil as regards the past three decades of management of our National Forests. As I move through this series of essays, I will restrict my efforts to real knowledge: that that has been developed through rigorous application of the scientific method and which has led to the most highly developed human society in the history of the earth.
[1] Journal of Forestry (I have unfortunately lost the issue and forgotten the author)
[2] Adapted from Wikipedia:
Define a question
Gather information and resources (observe)
Form a hypothesis (a theory to explain the observations)
Perform experiments and collect data
Analyze data
Interpret data and draw conclusions that serve as a starting point for new hypothesis
Publish results
Retest (frequently done by other scientists)
[3] In the Blog: Watts Up With That, Is Climate Change the “Defining Challenge of Our Age”? Part 1 of 3, April 28, 2009
“Progress is science does not consist of replacing wrong answers with right answers, but in replacing wrong answers with those that are more subtly wrong”- Stephen Hawking
While this is a site dedicated to issues of forest management, I think there are some background issues we should deal with first. The first one I’d like to get into is pretty basic: What is valid knowledge?
The Dark ages were called so because the light of knowledge was forbidden to all but religious leaders and secular authorities (Royalty). To all others, what was known was a matter of received knowledge which required of them only faith or superstition.
The renaissance came as the application of reason to the natural world resulted in the discovery of a number of scientific truths (Think Gallileo, Newton, Michaelangelo, and others). These discoveries led, naturally to the idea that everything could be submitted to reason including politics and social mores and the result would be a sort of natural truth in all areas of thought and life. If reason were all that was required to discover truth it follows that any individual with the proper instruction can learn to do the same and so individuals are, or could be, released from the tyranny of the church and the King. Thus the pandora’s box of individual freedom was released. Free men could likewise form societies and political systems to their own ends and those, or at least some of them, would be so composed as to preserve that individual-ness. That led to a whirlwind of improvement to all of mankind that were willing to accept it and wealth beyond any imagined previously.
In modern times we have seen the this idea of enlightenment come full circle to where, after centuries of expanding general human knowledge, science now seems to lead to a restriction of what people can know. Knowledge has once more become the exclusive province of Priests (The U.N., The EPA, Union of Concerned Scientists) and their acolytes (researchers on the Federal dime, inexperienced recruits, various and sundry environmental groups, etc.) and the new royalty in their train (Prince Charles, Al Gore, James Hanson, Henry Waxman, Robert Kennedy Jr., etc.).
Common people are once more required to accept the pronouncements as received wisdom to be taken on faith and, for those that have yielded, to once more adopt superstition to stitch together the holes in those theories. And so we have come to a new Dark Age where real science is blasphemy and the “wisdom of our betters is to be accepted as a form of religion.
Where the heck does this come from? Well, I’m not a philosopher but I am reliably informed that a lot of it comes from a major change in the philosophy of knowledge in the early part of the last century. Scientific knowledge, to that point, had been predicated on reason. That is, everything could be subjected to a reasoned analysis through a prescribed and rigid procedure (the scientific method[2]) and would either be found baseless or “true”. Thus, a theory that was tested and found to be true would add to existing knowledge in large or small ways, and the cumulative efforts of a number of such efforts would advance overall knowledge. True knowledge, in this way, advances incrementally. As new techniques and knowledge become available, old theories may be totally replaced or changed at the margin and, over time, we come closer and closer to objective truth.
Many of those today who call themselves “Progressives”, however, subscribe to a new philosophical view called Relativism. Relativism theorizes that some elements or aspects of experience or culture are relative to other elements or aspects (ie., they are not susceptible to observable or provable truth on their own), and that humans can understand and evaluate beliefs and behaviors only in terms of their historical or cultural context. Therefore there is no absolute or concrete truth but, rather, truth is a consensus based on who is looking at it and at the time in which it is observed.
This idea has expanded in recent times to the idea that since there is no truth; science, what is, has no primacy over an idealistic conception of what should be. In terms of the environmentalist community this is combined with a fairly recent interpretation of ethics known as “situational ethics” which is concerned with the outcome or consequences of an action (the ends) as opposed to an action being intrinsically wrong.
This all translates for the environmentalist community to:
Based on our methods and interpretations we feel that this is what the truth should be
It is important to us that it be accepted as the truth by the larger community in order to effect the appropriate policy outcomes
Therefore, whatever is required to convince others to believe us is valid and ethical
Now, it’s important to understand that when the environmental movement was just getting started, it really was a mainly grass roots effort brought about by concerned citizens to curtail some very egregious environmental problems: the air was severely polluted in many areas of the United States and getting worse, the water in some areas was dangerously polluted (re: consider the famous story of the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland catching fire), dam building was a single-minded pursuit without thought to its consequences and, yes, much of the timber harvest on public lands was likewise very single-minded and carried out in an atmosphere that was relatively restrictive to substantive public input.
Gradually, though, the old established conservation groups and periodicals (ie. American Forests, Audubon, Sierra Club, etc.) were taken over by more politically oriented factions (the famous take-over of the Sierra Club is well documented), and while many of the original subscribers and members dropped away, others joined as the radical leaders traded on the good names and good will of these old conservationist icons to leapfrog their way into respectability (It’s tellingly interesting that these usurpers maintained the “conservationist” title rather than the then radical “preservationist” moniker that more accurately described them).
My own rejection of these groups, whose core arguments elicited some sympathy on my part when still a grass-roots effort, occurred when they began attacking forestry in general and the Forest Service (for whom I, by then, worked). What was abstract before became specific and I was able to see how their arguments and pronouncements followed a general and very cynical pattern based on the three points above. That is they would pinpoint a subject (clearcutting was one of the earliest ones), point out a problem with it (in many cases, a very obscure and rare problem), exaggerate its effects, and use that as a focus point to springboard to the damning of the whole field of forestry. Rhys Jaggar recently described the purpose of this tactic quite succinctly:
It’s like all religions: slip out the mantras up front, make sure you stack the evidential deck for inexperienced recruits to stop them asking awkward questions and get them on the streets unquestioningly.[3]
The audience in this case was the lay public that had an interest in the natural world but little or no scientific background in it. Their purpose was to radicalize this group and build a coalition (or a number of essentially like-minded coalitions) in order build political power to attack and destroy the existing power systems in preparation for a complete restructuring. Their methods involved reducing the public’s faith in the abilities and intentions of expert knowledge and traditional management in favor of that of the environmentalists under their own philosophy. And they have been, over the past 40 years, almost entirely successful.
We have come to this, I think, as a result of laziness in thought and practice, and the siren songs of snake oil salesmen who tell us we are better off with less, materially and intellectually – just close your eyes and listen to the soothing music. Pay no attention to the faint cries and bellows up ahead.
This site is dedicated to pointing out the foibles and fallacies contained in these pretty bottles of snake oil as regards the past three decades of management of our National Forests. As I move through this series of essays, I will restrict my efforts to real knowledge: that that has been developed through rigorous application of the scientific method and which has led to the most highly developed human society in the history of the earth.
[1] Journal of Forestry (I have unfortunately lost the issue and forgotten the author)
[2] Adapted from Wikipedia:
Define a question
Gather information and resources (observe)
Form a hypothesis (a theory to explain the observations)
Perform experiments and collect data
Analyze data
Interpret data and draw conclusions that serve as a starting point for new hypothesis
Publish results
Retest (frequently done by other scientists)
[3] In the Blog: Watts Up With That, Is Climate Change the “Defining Challenge of Our Age”? Part 1 of 3, April 28, 2009
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)