Let's talk about the environment here

[Olaf Hart]

There is obviously a good deal of interest amongst scantlingers on environmental issues, so I thought we could take it here.

There are some really big picture problems, like dealing with unlimited consumption of energy and other resources, in an economic structure predicated on constant growth.

There is the problem with energy security, which seems to have driven every conflict in this world since the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour.

And global warming, which unfortunately hasn't reached Tasmania yet.

But what really pisses me off is cars. When I grew up all the fun cars I had weighed around half a ton. Porsche 356, BMW 1602 and 2002, Mini Cooper, Bugeye Sprite, even beetles weighed 12 to 14 cwt.

Now everything on the market is two tons, even small cars are one and a half tons.

Now I know those early cars weren't safe, but surely technology has progressed over 50 years to the point where we can have a safe half ton car?

[Orestes Munn]

Thanks, Olaf. This will be interesting. Environmental questions, like everything else, have become totally politicized in this country, but this group seems mature and of good will enough to have a respectful and constructive discussion.

I am a pretty strong Green type who sees clean air and water as fundamental human rights and do not buy most of the economic arguments against the preservation of natural resources. I sail in filthy water and breath crap air and walk the conservation walk in my daily life. However, I am so desperately and destructively over-regulated at work that I also sympathize somewhat with the other side and am ready to believe that many environmental regulations are unduly burdensome and mis-drawn.

[Jamie]

My opinion is that with the right tools, strong economic arguments can be made for the preservation of natural resources. Most cost calculations don't include the negative externalities which means that the real costs are underestimated. Tools like cap and trade go a long way to remedy this. Too bad everyone treats these tools as an anathema.

What is really scary to me is seeing Asia, with a very large population, come on-line with very old school views of the environment: ie, exploit it until it's gone, dump it and it dissapears. I grew up along the Connecticut River and while it has come back to a certain extent, it's taken upwards of 50 years and I still wouldn't eat the fish. But despite the fact that the US has a poor environmental history, I would hope that something has been learned along the way and the attitude should be to help others avoid the damage that we've caused.

[Olaf Hart]

I see the environment as a subset of politics and economics, on a local, national and global stage.

It's hard to see how to deal with environmental issues without also dealing with the other two variables.

[SloopJonB]

My dad was a government agro research scientist and did a lot of work for a big juice manufacturer in the Okanagan. Back in the day they would squeeze the fruit and dispose of the residue by dumping it in a large stream that passed through their property on its way to Okanagan lake. That stream basically ran black ooze. Dad came up with a number of things they could do to mitigate it and even profit from it. In the end they were making more money from those "byproducts" than they were from juice.

The same thing happened with the smelter in Trail. At one time the air was so poisonous with sulfur dioxide there that it would literally lift the paint from cars - you could always tell a car from Trail because of the eruptions all over the body. They finally put scrubbers on their stacks and recovered so much material that, again, they were making more from the former waste than from their smelting. Lots of gold mine tailing ponds are & have been reprocessed to extract the previously unprofitable levels of gold remaining in them.

In general, business people are notoriously short sighted and have to be dragged to the well before they will drink. Finally though, it appears large numbers of people have woken up to the fact that there is money to be made from what was formerly waste.

The one thing about it that I don't like is old glass sailboats being ground up and mixed into pavement.

[Orestes Munn]

Business people are several steps up from politicians (even though they are often the same people), who have made (anti)conservation a matter of identity politics.

[LarryHoward]

Good discussion.

Like HB, We do what we can. One benefit here is trash collection is not part of our property tax so you have a choice of a private service or utilizing a transfer station and hauling out your own stuff. We have a compactor and a regular trashcan that is designated for recycleables. Single Stream really helps because you don't have to separate glass/plastic/paper. We generally take 2 30 gallon bags of recycling and one partial compactor bag to the transfer station each week. When you pack your own trash out, you see a lot more of what you are contributing to the landfill. Even for "large trash" the "solid waste facility" has you separate metal, tires, wood and general trash when you dump. Untreated wood goes to a shredder and becomes free mulch that they will load into your truck or trailer.

What dismays us is the political expediency. As waterfront property owners with a 62 YO house that predates any environmental mandates, we are in violation of most of the provisions of the "Save the Bay" regulations but are grandfathered in. A permit and mitigation is required for anything we do and under the law "cost of compliance is not a factor" in what we are required to do. Folks here who have visited know I have a a number of sheds, several of them are in a dilapidated state. The quirks of the law provide that I can maintain that footprint and "trade it" for other impervious surfaces but if I voluntarily remove it, I lose the right to that footprint forever, so I'm not a slovenly hick, I'm protecting my right to use that footprint in the future..... Increasing regulations means that my septic system is at risk and any significant repairs will require $35,000 upgrade that will eliminate less than the amount of fertilizer applied in one application to a 1/4 acre suburban lawn. All while the greatest percentage of our water quality problem comes from non point sources, especially the dense suburban development along the Patuxent watershed in Laurel, Columbia, etc., the industrial runoff from Baltimore City and the overflowing sewers of DC. Even our local sewer commission regularly has failures that dump 20-30,000 gallons of raw sewage into the Bay but it's easy for the politicians to "do something" with laws pointed at the "rich waterfront homeowners who are ruining the Bay." All while Tyson dumps hundreds of tons of manure into settling ponds on the Eastern Shore and the annual "Dead zone" from excess nitrogen and algae blooms grows significantly.

We also work to establish and maintain protected oyster beds in the creek. We used to get help from the State with free "spat on shell" each summer. Now that it's proven the process works, they no longer provide any support so we do it ourselves. We and our neighbors "foster" cages of spat on shell for a year to get them to the "small oyster" stage and each August, we collect the cages and add the young oysters to the growing reef, refill the cages with new spat and return them to the foster parents.

Blathering on but it takes local action AND policies and incentives for business to "do the right thing." Like Jamie, I worry that developing countries with literally billions to feed see environment stewardship as a ploy to "keep them down." After all, the first world raped and pillaged natural resources to get where they are. Telling Brazil that the Olympics aren't happening because the venue is an open sewer is "racist" so folks wring their hands and nothing gets better. Look at Qingdao. Should we really have staged Olympic sailing where algae blooms were so thick they had to be sucked up like so much trash and athletes had to worry about their health. I guess it's OK because we're ramping up the risks in Rio.

Anyway. I've been on and off the Chesapeake since 1972. By the mid 80's things were pretty ugly but it has improved, despite explosive population growth. The slow exchange rate and circulation patterns in the Bay means it takes years to flush. Osprey and eagles are back. Rockfish are plentiful and Virginia has finally stopped dredging winter female crabs. Even watermen are recognizing that we have to limit crab harvest, particularly females and most locals won't eat females on principal. Oysters are still a real problem due to pollution, over harvesting and MSX/Dermo but are making a very slow comeback from the 1% of historical population levels we are at.

I guess that's my speech. If you are not actively working to improve your environment, you are part of the problem. It really does require us to "think globally and act locally."

[Orestes Munn]

Yup. Our main problem on the Chesapeake is not the Larrys of this world, great villains though they be, but the dumping of phosphorus and nitrogen in the Susquehanna watershed and Northern tributaries by farms, municipalities, golf courses, etc., and the aforementioned chicken producers who have enormous political power in Del, Mar, and VA. What has the response from the polluters been to the crisis? Lawsuits and congressional action to gut the EPA's authority to regulate water quality in the Bay and patriotic appeals to the constitutional right of parties to shit in other parties' living rooms. In fairness, I think Agribiz et al. might be willing to write the Chesapeake off as a sewer of convenience and clean it up, because it's both high visibility and doable, but they fear having to clean up the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico if we are successful in making them do it here.

I am waiting to see what Ohio does for Lake Erie after the algae scare in Toledo. My bet's on nothing.

[LarryHoward]

OM,

Both good and bad in our watershed. It's vast and includes DC, Northern VA and other paved wastelands in addition to the agribusiness contributions. On the other hand, we got the Susquehanna, Patuxent and upland Potomac and not the Delaware. The only real "urban challenge" is the DC and Baltimore corridor with a contribution from Richmond and a significant part of that population at least understands the issues.

What gets me is the loopholes and dichotomy between the designated Critical Area (1,000' from the water) and anything else. We have an example on the road to my house. A developer bought land that borders and includes the critical area limit with steep slopes and "highly erodible" soil. He sought and received approval for a dense "Planned Urban Development" despite local opposition and against the recommendation of the critical area commission. Only routine erosion control measures were imposed and they failed during the first strong rainstorm, dumping tons of sediment into our creek. He was successfully sued and fined but nobody dredged the sediment out of the creek and he kept his permits to continue doing the same. Fast forward a few years and a developer purchased land outside the critical area (and butting against it) for a shopping center and dodged the requirement for progressive clearing to limit potential for erosion by getting a "logging permit" that allowed him to clear cut the entire property. At least the brown water flowing out of the creek all the way to the Solomons Bridge aftermath of the next major rainstorm allowed us to seek and obtain a change to the county master plan to limit dense development in sensitive areas including around our creek, the headwaters of the St Mary's river, etc.

We had to get organized, track permit applications and then make sure folks attended the zoning and plan approval meetings and spoke out forcefully against inappropriate development. We found developers putting required zoning hearing signs down in ditches, angled so they couldn't be read from the roads, etc. It was close in a couple of cases, but we are making progress and I'm fortunate to have neighbors with the time and energy to step up and say "no" when necessary. At the very least, developers and local politicians are starting to recognize that there are folks in the area who will show up and call them out for bad decisions.

I guess I'm becoming a rabid environmentalist but I still eat red meat.....

[Orestes Munn]

Yeah, there are bright spots and it could be and has been worse. DC is investing something on the 8 figure order of magnitude in new sewage handling, which should make a difference. Perhaps one good thing to come from increasing residential development on the water is better recognition of point sources like your developers. DC is investing something on the 8 figure order of magnitude in new sewage handling capacity, which should make a difference in the South.

[BeauV]

A couple of comments from a retired bidnuzz guy:

1) We bidnuzz guys are quite willing to "do the right thing" if and when it's profitable, and are willing to measure something being profit able in a relatively long term. If we weren't, then we wouldn't build factories that take many years to pay off. The challenge is building a political structure that makes doing the "right thing" profitable and the "wrong thing" expensive. There are a lot of short sighted bidnuzz guys who will do stupid stuff, but Boards of Directors are pretty motivated to kill those guys off. At the root of it is to set up the way things are measured and make that public. From Bosun Terry, a retired Bosun of the deck on the USS Lexington who worked with me: "You get whatever you measure. If you don't like what you're getting, change what you're measuring."

2) When your people as literally starving - the environment doesn't matter. Regardless of who much folks in 3rd world places would like to do the right thing, and I believe they do, they simply can not do that if it means killing off their own people. Let's get real - people believe that people are more important than other animals. Well, at least most do. They also believe that "their people" are a lot more important than "other people's people". So, until we can get folks fed, housed and taken care of to the minimum level of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, not much will happen. What this means, IMHO, is that any real environmentalist needs to be working their asses off to insure that the massive polluters in the 3rd world get the luxury of worrying about the environment. China has lifted more people out of poverty in the last twenty years than any country EVER. We may not like their politics or business style, but at making new middle-class citizens out of impoverished people they are without peer in history. This will solve the problem, and we're seeing the beginning of it as the intensely unpopular smog in Bejing is causing the Gubmnt to finally FINALLY start to address it. The faster we can get folks past the lower levels of Maslow's list - the sooner they'll have the luxury of becoming environmentalists as opposed to survivalists.

3) Democracies aren't good at making decisions about really hard problems. Structurally, it just doesn't work. This is the reason that during war time Athens appointed a Dictator (Pericles being one of the most famous) who ran everything until the war was over. Then they either banished or executed him and returned to Democracy. This works really well - but it's rather hard on dictators.

[Orestes Munn]

I agree with all you say, Beau, but the literally valid "environment doesn't matter when people are starving" argument is close kin to the one used to justify outright despoliation (e.g. mountaintop removal) in the name of employment and cheap energy. When do people stop starving?

[BeauV]

I agree with all you say, Beau, but the literally valid "environment doesn't matter when people are starving" argument is close kin to the one used to justify outright despoliation (e.g. mountaintop removal) in the name of employment and cheap energy. When do people stop starving?

Well, what I mean is "literally staving" meaning that they are not eating enough to sustain life. I do not mean that they're not getting their Prime Rib cooked the way they like it.

Folks seeking gain will quickly seek to corrupt any measurement criteria one uses, including starvation. After all, we now have folks who quite seriously propose that TV and Internet are "requirements" for life. We see the inflation of what we consider "poverty" constantly. But, when it comes to a fight all that BS goes out the window and Maslow takes over. Air, Water, Food, and then everything else. In Bejing, the population finally figured out that the Gubmnt was messing with Maslow's #1 and they forced the rich dudes to start doing something about it.

[LarryHoward]

Beau,

Agree completely on the Biznut thing. You get what you measure and it is all about making bad behavior unprofitable. As long as influencing legislation is a better path to profitability than compliance, businesses will choose that path. Offshoring jobs is good an bad. Bad when it is a way to move dirty manufacturing to a locating with lax environmental rules. Seen any radiator shops in the back of gas stations int eh last 20 years? Turns out acid tanks were really bad from an environmental perspective. Same way most folks sub out plating operations. It's just too dirty a process for multiple sites. Use one well designed and maintained site and capture the pollution and treat it there. What's not OK is for Southern California businesses to use NAFTA to ship stuff across the border to Mexico for the dirty processing and pollute there with no control or clean up.

Your points are valid. I don't support "rabid conversationalists" because they generally just want to change the world with no regard to the economic, social or cultural impacts. Same way I don't support the slash and burn capitalists who want to strip mine the country with no restoration.

Want to change my behavior? Make it good for me to behave in a way you want me to. Want me to upgrade my septic? Give me a tax break for doing it so my net cost is close to neutral. Last permit I pulled required me to plant 3 trees (on a 4 acre lot with 80% forest coverage). I didn't mind that much but the $160 compliance inspection charge to have someone come out and look at the trees was a bit much. Especially since it was the same inspector on the same visit who signed off the electrical and plumbing permits.

In the same manner, make the developers in the watershed "upstream" capture and treat runoff before it enters the river. In a lot of places, farmers are subject to significant runoff control requirements but far too many parking lots, malls and office parks, more than 100 miles from the bay, send their runoff into the ditch to a stream to the river unimpeded.

[Tucky]

I'm actually confident that the world is getting better and that our problems, environmental and otherwise, will be solved. I'm comfortable that the world my grandchildren will live in will be better than mine. I base that on looking at history- Violence has decreased since we crawled out of trees (http://www.npr.org/2013/05/31/175619007 ... lent-place). We have never run out of a resource (see Julian Simon vs. Paul Erlich). In our lifetimes the greatest percentage of humanity has seen the biggest improvement in health and longevity ever.

I've come to believe that my fears are just that, though I expect another nuclear bomb will be set off in anger and that lots of bad things will happen. We will lose further species of plant and animal. I don't see any evidence of an arc that will end in disaster i.e. Malthus. I'm not at all confident that the USA will be in the lead or even the best place in the world to live 50 years from now, but I see nothing that leads me to believe that their won't be leaders and peoples making great progress.

My favorite recent read was Junkyard Planet (http://shanghaiscrap.com/books/junkyard-planet/). Quietly worldwide, people trying to make their individual lives better have without any mandate or dramatic leadership set up a fantastic world wide recycling system, and China shows plenty of evidence that they are moving through the "world is ours to use" phase to environmental awareness within a generation, where the west took hundreds of years.

The phrase has been "Wall Street climbs a wall of worry". I believe humanity does as well. Thats my story and I'm sticking to it

[Joli]

Nice write up Tucky, pretty much agree, humans find a way to make it work when we need to.

[Joli]

Nice write up Tucky, pretty much agree, humans find a way to make it work when we need to.

[Olaf Hart]

Optimists are the last sort of people environmentalists want.

All my life there has been some sort of Armageddon lurking in the background.

Now the possibility of nuclear war has faded, I don't know what to do without another catastrophic belief.

I suppose there is always Hell.

[Orestes Munn]

Optimists are the last sort of people environmentalists want.

All my life there has been some sort of Armageddon lurking in the background.

Now the possibility of nuclear war has faded, I don't know what to do without another catastrophic belief.

I suppose there is always Hell.

You and me both, colleague. But I do appreciate the optimists and sometimes I believe.

[BeauV]

A lot of folks in San Francisco thought AIDS was the end of society as we knew it. Then a doctor I knew well started giving lectures that pretty much said: "It's hard to catch and easy to avoid, just sit down and close your mouth." His humor wasn't appreciated by many, but I thought it was a great outlook. The dooms day virus is now something thousands are living with, if they have money for drugs. Ebola is the new dooms day virus, yet technology seems to be standing buy to address that one too. There does seem to always be a dooms day scenario - almost as if such thing sold ads in newspapers and on TV. Image that!!?!

I actually have very high hopes for solving a lot of these problems. We have learned so much in the last 200 years, and it's now almost all available to anyone with the intellect and drive to learn it. It's difficult for my kids to imagine a world in which they couldn't just look things up on their phones. That's a gigantic improvement.

As to macro environmental items, I am certain that the climate will change. Indeed, there has never been a time when it wasn't changing. I think that we are certainly polluting our planet, and that is bound to change things, but I'm not sure that is the dooms day scenario either. After all, if there hadn't been and ice age, my Cherokee ancestors wouldn't have walked over here from Asia, and if there hadn't been a middle-ages warm spell my Viking ancestors wouldn't have been able to farm Greenland. The real difficulty is trying to understand causality in such a complex system, and then decide if where we're headed is "bad" or just "different".

For some odd reason folks think that everything should be preserved: "Just as it was" without a lot of thought about the exact point it is they wish to preserve, or if that even makes sense. Frankly, the only thing I'm absolutely certain of is that our environment will change. It will change if we do things and it will change if we don't do anything. I suppose there are some changes that are better than others, and we should try to avoid causing bad changes, but it will NOT ever be the way it was. That's actually a good thing.

[Olaf Hart]

For forty thousand years the Australian Aboriginies used fire as an agricultural tool, they were nomadic but burnt out an area as they left it to encourage new growth.
As a result the Australian forests changed to comprise mainly fire resistant species, such as eucalypts and acacias, the old species burnt out.
It is also possible that the extensive desert areas were the result of this practice.
In Tasmania, the land bridge across Bass Strait closed before Aboriginies had found how to make fire, they collected and carried it, but couldn't make it.
So many areas of Tasmania, the wilder areas, still have original flora such as Huon Pine, Celery Top pine and King Billy Pine, as well as Beech forests, Sassafras and other ancient species. The Tasmanian Aboriginies managed to burn out the forests and have eucalypt grasslands in the middle of the Island, but the highlands remained untouched.
It's not a recent story, this deforestation thing.

[bob perry]

I live outside the environment.

[Joli]

I've been to Bad Axe Michigan in February and it reinforced my feeling of insignificance in the greater scheme of things. Folks living amidst the urban bustle of a major city might feel differently about mans ability to affect nature if they found a Bad Axe to spend some time in. I also believe men are inventive and can find solutions to most any problem when pressed to do so. Why worry about alternate fuels when known reserves of contemporary fuels continue to expand?

[LarryHoward]

Its good to be optimistic but just hoping isn't really a strategy. I agree that we, and the earth, will adapt. After all, the earth adapted to large asteroid strikes. Shame about the dinosaurs but without that die off, life would be a lot different today.

I feel pretty strongly that we should be better stewards of what is here. Certainly we keep finding energy reserves and that's a good thing. It's a lot more expensive to extract and has become a major driver in the economy and in geopolitics, but it's available. I'm sure Australians will eventually adapt to the ozone hole by developing more pigment but it will take a few generations of Darwin weeding out the fair through skin cancer to get there. Man is certainly inventive and I don't any of use are pushing to ban many of life's conveniences but we should make intelligent decisions and do what we can to minimize or mitigate our individual impact. Life didn't end for farmers because we banned DDT and we figured out how to air condition buildings and cars and keep refrigeration without Freon 12.

Old timers on the creek tell me there was 10 feet of water at my dock and native oyster beds here just 30 years ago. Today I have just over 6' and the water runs brown if we get a 3-4" rainfall. If we maintain the same practices, it will be a fetid ditch in another 30 years.

I guess my optimism is that people will take reasonable steps and apply "active optimism", not just wait and see.

[Orestes Munn]

The Earth, per se, doesn't adapt and biological adaptation (if you believe it, unlike most people on earth) is too slow to be of use to species threatened by human activity today. Even though extinction is natural, most of us do not view our own extinction or that of species with utility for us--nearly all, if you think about it--as non-significant, value-free, events. I certainly don't and, moreover, I think that view, carried to its logical conclusion, would greatly devalue human life.

Obviously, if one views events on a geological timescale, human activity isn't very significant. Unfortunately, future generations of humans, including the young ones here and on their way, are our rightful concern and they are going to grow up in a very crowded, dirty, and expensive planet (think NYC) if present trends continue.

[JoeP]

So many discussions of the environment seem to avoid one of the key players, overpopulation. The earth as a closed system can only support a finite amount of us, but population equals power to governments, business, politicians, and religion so it is rare to see anyone truly trying to achieve ZPG anywhere in the world. My wife and I made a conscious decision to have only two children because of this.

[Orestes Munn]

So many discussions of the environment seem to avoid one of the key players, overpopulation. The earth as a closed system can only support a finite amount of us, but population equals power to governments, business, politicians, and religion so it is rare to see anyone truly trying to achieve ZPG anywhere in the world. My wife and I made a conscious decision to have only two children because of this.

I would just note that exponential population growth has brought about the downfall of governments in Africa and the Middle East and China has been deadly serious about limiting it.

I seem to be taking up more than my share of bandwidth here, but I am really passionate about this stuff and there is a moratorium on ranting at my house.

[Olaf Hart]

The creepy thing about overpopulation is that it is tied to decreased child mortality...

The good news is educated women have fewer children.

So education of third world people is one way to deal with overpopulation.

And China does it too, a different way.

OM , rant away, we can take it.

[SloopJonB]

So many discussions of the environment seem to avoid one of the key players, overpopulation. The earth as a closed system can only support a finite amount of us, but population equals power to governments, business, politicians, and religion so it is rare to see anyone truly trying to achieve ZPG anywhere in the world. My wife and I made a conscious decision to have only two children because of this.

Us too - two kids is actually less than ZPG due to those who die young - IIRC it nets out around 1.9 replacement. We need a few generations of that and soon.

Overpopulation is at the root of ALL the problems under discussion here and it hardly ever gets mentioned anymore. 30 or 40 years ago it was a hot topic but it seems everybody decided to just keep having big families instead. I still see people proudly proclaiming their 6 & 7 & 8 kids - are they stupid or just selfish, greedy & unconcerned about the world those offspring will have to live in?

When I was a kid in the 50's the human race was 3 billion, now it's 7 and I fully expect it to hit 10 in my lifetime. More than tripled in one lifetime and it hardly rates a mention. All the environment discussion is about the symptoms, not the cause, which is US breeding ourselves out of existence.

Well over 1/2 of all the people who ever lived are alive right now - pretty scary stuff.

[Orestes Munn]

I don't know if any of you remember "Seven Beauties", the Lina Wertmüller film, but there's a moment where the anti-hero and a fellow prisoner in a Nazi prison camp are talking about a terrible future, where a hundred people will be struggling for a single apple. The protagonist sees this as an argument for reproducing prolifically because he wants as many of his progeny as possible in the scrum, in order to maximize his chances for genetic success. This has always been my own grubby, ethnic, take on the population question.