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,

“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.

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

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

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