Across the Great Divide

Forget Climate Change if You Have the Right Insurance Policy.

Private contractors aren't only in Iraq. They're on the scene wherever public resources are deemed not sufficient  to serve the needs of the wealthy. In this case, in the wildfire-threatened American West:

New Jersey-based Chubb Corp. [...] began offering free fire protection to its clients in 13 Western states in March. Already 11,000 homeowners have signed up, more than a third of those in wealthy and fire-prone enclaves like Lake Tahoe and Marin County. The company plans to expand the service to other states before the start of next fire season.

Chubb hired Montana-based Wildfire Defense Systems Inc. to protect homes with a replacement value of $1 million or more. The company is now subcontracting a pool of 50 fire engines throughout the West dedicated exclusively to Chubb policyholders.

A relative and career forest fire fighter confirms that insurance company crews have been showing up to foam the roofs of multi-million-dollar houses in places like Big Sur. In California, public agencies trying to manage fire on a broader scale have already run through half their budgets before reaching the main fire season, which starts in August.

My brother-in-law, recently in Wisconsin from the wildfires of California, says he stopped seeing smoke in the sky only after he crossed the Black Hills of South Dakota.

Environmentalism as Guilt Management.

The “be less bad” environmental approaches to industry have been crucial in sending important messages of environmental concern— messages that continue to capture the public’s attention and spur important research. At the same time, they forward conclusions that are less useful. Instead of presenting an inspiring and exciting vision of change, conventional environmental approaches focus on what not to do. Such proscriptions can be seen as a kind of guilt management for our collective sins, a familiar placebo in Western culture.

In very early societies, repentance, atonement, and sacrifice were typical reactions to complex systems, like nature, over which people felt they had little control. Societies around the world developed belief systems based on myth in which bad weather, famine, or disease meant one had displeased the gods, and sacrifices were a way to appease them. In some cultures, evens today, one must sacrifice something of value in order to regain the blessing of the gods (or god) and reestablish stability and harmony.

Environmental destruction is a complex system in its own right — widespread, with deeper causes that are difficult to see and understand. Like our ancestors, we may react automatically, with terror and guilt, and we may look for ways to purge ourselves — which the “econ-efficiency” movement provides in abundance, with exhortations to consume and produce less by minimizing, avoiding, reducing, and sacrificing. Humans are condemned as the one species on the planet guilty of burdening it beyond what it can withstand; as such, we must shrink our presence, our systems, our activities, and even our population so as to become almost invisible. (Those who believe population is the root of our ills think people should mostly stop having children.)

The goal is zero: zero waste, zero emissions, zero “ecological footprint.” As long as human beings are regarded as “bad,” zero is a good goal. But to be less bad is to accept things as they are, to believe that poorly designed, dishonorable, destructive systems are the best humans can do. This is the ultimate failure of the “be less bad” approach: a failure of the imagination. From our perspective, this is a depressing vision of our species’ role in the world.
— Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, William McDonough & William Braungart

I’ll confess: there’s just a bit of the eco-purgative in my cycling, recycling, composting and ratcheting down consumption. And I agree with McDonough that it all falls short as an effective strategy for redirecting entire global systems — just as prayer, smaller government or “drill more” are inadequate responses to impending collapse. Such acts soothe individual souls and perhaps stave off doom for a moment, but do not separate us from its grim trajectory.

McDonough aims for new principles of eco-effectiveness — and more important — putting them into systemic practice. If we were to believe the salvation doctrine of the free market, this new sustainability is where energy company profits, venture capital and government policy should be fast converging.

It may yet. Right now, 12 new cities are being designed to apply McDonough’s ideas. In China.

Hail Size Estimator.

The hail chasers were already in the neighborhood when the hail came again. A neighbor said she'd seen golf-ball-sized hailstones less than a mile away.

I'd say ours was no more than fingernail-sized.

Hail is always golf-ball-sized, I said. People expect hail to be golf-ball-sized, so that's what they see. Besides, they like to exaggerate how bad it was. Nobody will feel sorry for you if you were hit with pea-sized hail or popcorn-sized hail. But a golf ball, everybody knows how bad that would hurt.

Today she sent me reports from Spokane where the hail was penny- and marble-sized. Told you, she said.

I found Kansas and Nebraska bombarded with baseball- and softball-sized hail. Suuuure. It's not as if the New York Times is going to fly somebody out there to do a confirmation.

The National Weather Service says, "We encourage measurement, not estimation, of hail size," but what fun is that? I also think this hail monitoring device is kind of a party pooper, too.

There are some standard hail estimating charts, some non-standard ones, and even a compilation of various weather report size estimations. But how many kids today play marbles or know what a moth ball is? And suppose you'd like a more colorful alternative to ping pong ball-sized hail?

I've compiled a handy comparison chart for your next hail storm, based on comparisons someone has already used. Notice it has a glaring gap between baseball and grapefruit. I don't know if that means hail is rare within that 2.75- to 4-inch range, or we lack appropriate cultural references.

Narcissism and the Commons.

Last week, Shankar Vedantam wrote a Washington Post column titled, "Clinton, Obama and the Narcissist's Tale." It appeared yesterday under a different Star Tribune headline, "Democrats face a classic 'tragedy of the commons.'" One emphasizes the self-absorption required of politicians; the other highlights its effects.

I'm more interested the commons metaphor and how it relates beyond the current presidential race because I think it helps define the great dividing line of our time. Parties and candidates have clustered at the poles of the real divisions among us — whether to value the big picture over the short run and place collective interest on at least a par with self-interest.

Vedantam invokes the tragedy of the commons to explain the dangerous trap of this "fault line" between individual and collective interest:

Individuals embroiled in similar dilemmas find them impossible to solve on their own, because they are confronted by a Hobson's Choice: Act selfishly and cause collective disaster, or act altruistically and aid someone else who is acting selfishly. Either way, selfishness wins.

"The way the system is set up, the more-selfish person has a higher probability of winning," social psychologist W. Keith Campbell said of the Democratic primary. "You end up with the more narcissistic, belligerent candidate."

He cites an experiment by Campbell in which volunteers were tasked as timber companies to manage a forest in perpetuity.

[Since] the volunteers did not know whether their kindness would be reciprocated by others or exploited by competitors, people raced to cut as much timber as they could and quickly razed the forests to the ground. Groups with volunteers more willing to think about the collective good preserved their forests longer. But selfish people within these groups had a field day exploiting the altruists — and the forests perished anyway.

Much of the conflict in the public domain mirrors this dynamic. Free market vs. government regulation. Energy development vs. conservation. The individual or family vs. the collective. The castle vs. the commons.

Government and other social institutions, especially religion, have developed to regulate or redirect behavior from the destructive effects of selfishness. But Reaganism has led an all-out assault on the notion of "the commons," associating it with failed socialist states instead of with managing, in Jedediah Purdy's* phrase,  "the things that we cannot avoid having in common and whose maintenance or neglect implicates us all." That is, the legal system, the economy, public health and the natural world to name a few.

The attack on the commons has been prosecuted against and through those very institutions charged with keeping it — school boards, churches, local governments and federal agencies — abetted by think tanks, pundits and pollsters who retail to the public simpleminded formulations of complex problems and then pretend to discover them as the will of the people.

Public opinion, Purdy says, "has become shorthand for uninformed attitudes dignified by statistical aggregation." And the "Public,"  he says, is increasingly defined in Libertarian terms to be whatever government provides to people who are too lazy or weak to get a share of the "Private."

Although unregulated behavior can be modeled and the consequences predicted, before they will act, cultures of heightened self-interest demand proof, which practically means collapse of fisheries or financial systems. In Garrett Hardin's term, "intrinsic responsibility" can be clearly grasped when an act is straightforward and the consequences are immediate. But those who most loudly espouse personal responsibility and accountability for actions rarely see their own complicity in causing harm when the effects are indirect — through consumption, financial manipulation, disinvestment or discrimination.

We cannot and should not legislate away self-interest, but neither can we blithely continue to grow population, consume energy and amass wealth as if we were the planet's sole occupants — or, alternatively, as if we all have our own personal savior waiting in the wings.

Until we learn to see the systems we live within, we contribute to their ruin. And even then...

_______

* I could've sworn I'd written before about Jedediah Purdy's book, For Common Things, but apparently not. (Naturally, libertarians didn't like it; nor did  Caleb Crain. But here's another view that there are worse sins than being privileged, earnest and young.)

A Name for the Times, if Not the Place.

My long shots of Knowles Canyon in the McInnis Wilderness Area don't capture the feeling of the place, so here are some textures from a day's hike instead. It's the last one in Colorado for awhile.

One of the great ironies of life in the west is that a national conservation area can be named for a former Congressman who is a lobbyist for an oil company that wants to drill in sensitive wild areas.

In Congress, Colorado Rep. Scott McInnis ran about a 15% approval rating from the League of Conservation Voters and was a lead sponsor of the Bush Administration's Healthy Forests Initiative. He now represents EnCana Oil & Gas, perhaps the biggest leaseholder in western Colorado and the likely largest driller when the BLM opens up the Roan Plateau, a remote area north of where McInnis and I grew up. (Our families went to the same church in Glenwood Springs.)

The Roan is under management by the Bureau of Land Management, which has plans to permit more than 1,500 wells in the  area. It has thus far rejected plans by the governor and appeals from representatives of both parties to consider the state's plan for phased oil and gas development to protect wildlife. 

The log at the trail head asked for comments and got one scrawled all over the margins about the travesty of naming a wilderness area after someone who was hardly a friend of the wild when he was in office and now gets paid to advocate its development.

But his namesake is also a fitting memorial to an era when black was white, pollution-friendly legislation was called Clear Skies, and Healthy Forests was another name for clear cuts.

Two Ways to Spend Monday.

In case I haven't been improving your mind sufficiently, you have two choices Monday, April 21st, to get smarter on a couple of my favorite topics.

Energy and the Environment
Economist and Pioneer Press Columnist Ed Lotterman is doing a lecture series at the History Theatre in St. Paul (no, not the Minnesota History Center). This time — 7:30 pm, $15 a ticket — he asks how important it is to be energy independent; limiting greenhouse gas emissions; and the costs of improving air and water quality.

I haven't heard him speak, but his Real World Economics columns do a good job of bringing dismal science  and real life together in a clear, neutral fashion.

Not Again!  The Great Depression, Junk Bonds, Enron/WorldCom, and Now Sub-Prime Mortgages

If you want to scramble, you could start the evening with this public forum at the Carlson School of Management. It runs from 5:30 pm to 7:00 pm, Room 2-260T in the West Bank Campus building, 321 19th Avenue South. The event is free, but bcause seating is very limited, RSVPs to smoidstp@umn.edu are required. 

Some of the questions posed include: How and why did these markets get out of control?  How serious are the consequences? Can our economy right itself? Is new regulation needed?

The longer title reflects a larger cast of characters for the panel, including Gary Stern, president of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank; Karen Edmonds, BestBuy chief ethics officer; Carlson faculty; and others.

Layer Cake.

Man with bike and camera. Corvettes and VW squarebacks. Dirt, sand, water and rocks. Time.

[Pause and use arrows to read at your own speed.]

Leaving Las Vegas.

In arid regions, some large water users like golf courses irrigate with treated greywater — domestic waste water used for washing dishes, laundry and bathing. In places like Atlanta that have been hard-hit by drought, green homeowners are starting to install separate plumbing systems to recycle greywater for toilet flushing, which accounts for approximately 30 percent of domestic water consumption.

Now Orange County is  taking sewer water, cleaning it with reverse osmosis (RO) equipment and injecting it into an aquifer beneath Anaheim that provides drinking water for more than two million Californians.

Although reusing treated wastewater instead of discharging it to the ocean certainly makes sense, some residents are finding this difficult to swallow.

As Brian Angliss notes, RO is frequently used to treat the bottled water Pepsi and other marketers sell you at a huge premium over tap water. Sending this purified water into an aquifer from which it will be redrawn and treated once again seems like a costly and unnecessary step. But consumer distaste and irrationality may have ruled here.

Since coastal Californians live at the end of America's pipeline, they may be a little dim on where their water comes from and what happens to it before it is piped over the mountains. Sure, some of it is from snow melt in the Rockies, but by the time it travels to Orange County, the water has been used and reused by communities all along the Colorado River from here to Las Vegas.

Get used to it. As we used to say when I was growing up in Glenwood Springs, "Flush. Rifle needs the water."

The New Anasazi.

A local columnist, western edition, last week commemorated an unusual cold spell with a predictable response. It's pretty much the same as you could get from my eastern edition conservative columnist. Although Katherine Kersten declares herself agnostic on global warming, her readers seem to fall strictly in line with the heretics.

You're familiar with the logical leaps and counter-arguments that misstate scientific findings as if they had been framed by home schooled third graders instead of by the majority of the scientific community. Why choose facts when denial is so comforting, and for much less work?

I, too, lean agnostic on global warming, but for different reasons. Whether we go Ice Age for lack of sunspots or wipe out creatures and coastal cities with excess carbon emissions seems like a choice between Dante's Inferno and Jimmy Swaggert's brimstone bathtub.

Believers in a certain highly theoretical field of study will tell you, get your life straightened out now or suffer for eternity. But when it comes to global warming, some of the same people suddenly want irrefutable evidence.

I sit out here with a billion-year cross section of geology a mile from my front door, at the very dry bottom of what was once a huge lake. Dinosaurs were unearthed three miles away. A few hours to the south, the Anasazi left their villages and disappeared. Less celebrated cliff dwellings are secreted in nearby ranches.

While the nation is slipping toward recession, business is booming in this  valley that has seen more than one grim bust. Orchards, pasture and plain useless dirt patches are being turned up left and right for new houses, shopping malls and supporting infrastructure. Even a dreary part of the county with a name but no town government has begun planning for a sparkling new downtown.

This boom will go on for awhile longer than the old ones for a simple reason. Oil is $100 a barrel, and this region has one of the last underdeveloped oil and gas fields in the lower 48.

One center of the production is a large basin where 40 years ago, I helped drill exploratory wells for a major oil company long since rolled up into Exxon. Politics and prices have finally made what we found worth pulling out of the ground, and neither condition is likely to change.

But the oil will run out, just like the dinosaurs did. The water needed for the wells and the people inhabiting the west has been an iffy resource for a millennium and is not getting more plentiful. We can't last the way we're going, and if we wait for disaster to break through the denial, it may be too late.

Does it much matter whether an oil bubble or a water bubble bursts the housing bubble? Our troubles will be far deeper by then, with far fewer options. And the folks who said just wait a minute — to conservation and alternative energy and any other responses to a threat they refused to grasp — will long be gone.

Whether their earthly bodies have been raptured into heaven or tamped down into coal will be of no consolation to the remaining tribes — or of consequence to an uninhabited planet.

The Wearing of the Green.

Senate 2008 Guru tracks the 2007 environment-related votes of so-called "vulnerable Republicans" who face re-election this year — and notes a move greenward as measured by the League of Conservation Voters' newly released National Environmental Scorecard for 2007.

Vulnerable Republican	2007 Score	'03-'04 Score
Norm Coleman (MN)	33%	16%
Susan Collins (ME)	100%	64%
Gordon Smith (OR)	73%	28%
Ted Stevens (AK)	27%	4%
John Sununu (NH)	53%	36%
Vulnerable GOP Senators' Average	57.2%	29.6%

The shift is even more apparent when you look at all the scores for Senators up for re-election. As whole, the Republicans moved from 11.3% to 23.9% while the Democrats held steady at 70.1% to 73.3%.

Does that mean Republicans are trying to look more moderate by taking positions favorable to the environment? Or were there simply more bills palatable to the GOP?

Hard to say. But Pat Roberts (KS) and Thad Cochran (MS) didn't budge off their 0% ratings, and John Cornyn (TX) and James Inhofe (OK) dropped from 4% to 0% last year.