Comments Tim Abbott has made

  • Values and Conservation

    This ethical question is a good one, and inspires the following, value-laden response:

    There is not a square inch of planet Earth - air, land or sea - that is not affected by human values and the choices they inform.  That is different from saying that the existence of the planet and all the organisms it sustains matters only to the extent that humans place some worth on them.  Nor do I subscribe to the value system that believes in a divinely reordered New Earth regardless of human intention.  However, treating humanity as somehow separate from and distinct from the environment is neither ecologically sound nor sustainable.  

    Remove pastoralists from nature preserves in East Africa and watch, as David Western recounts, overall wildlife health decline as grasses, unpalatable to antelope and elephant but browsed for at least two millennia by cattle, proliferate.  Act in self-interest only, and prove Garrett Hardin right not only about the Tragedy of the Commons, but of the Private as well.

    Human behavior reflects our values, and this is true for the choices we make as individuals and as groups.  The range of constraints and resources available to us defines our arena of choice.  If we wish to change our behaviors, and the repetitive patterns of behavior that comprise our institutions, then we need both to understand the values that inform our problematic actions and broaden our arena of choice.

    Conservation is entirely about values.  One of these is a belief that we can and should take responsibility for the consequences of our actions for the rest of the environment.  Another is that simply letting "nature take its course"  will nonetheless result in human-influenced outcomes.  Conservation is about making informed choices and recognizing the value in maintaining and promoting value-laden attributes of our environment: wilderness, biodiversity, the view from the back porch, sustainable rural economies, dark skies, community character, finite resources.

    Quantifying ecosystem services, while statistically interesting, has not been a universally convincing argument for conservation.  The invisible hand of the market has neither created just and equitable human societies nor safeguarded shared environmental resources.  It takes intentionality to achieve these values-based ends.  

    How resource users feel about their environment, their relationship with it and to other stakeholders in its conservation, is a critical determinant in how they perceive their area of choice and what outcomes they will support.  The broader lesson of the Intelligent Design controversy may be that values can trump science, but values can change. On Environmental ethics posted 3 years, 8 months ago 5 Responses

  • Alternative Energy: Where to Put It?

    Environmentalists are on the horns of a mighty sharp dilemma when it comes to alternative energy development.   We recognize the global importance of weaning ourselves and our economies from the soiled teats of Big Oil, but are alarmed at the local and regional impacts of proposed alternatives.  

    Bio-Mass? Depends on the size of the facility, whether it captures or expends thermal energy as well as electricity, its impact on rivers used to cool it, forests used to fuel it, and air quality. It may work for Finland, but its forests are managed plantations and there is little species diversity.

    Wind Power?  The areas of greatest wind generating potential in the northeast United States are ridgelines and nearshore marine, not coincidentally also a neat overlay with areas of environmental significance that are vulnerable to fragmentation and have impacts at the species and natural community levels.

    Hydro?  The trend now is toward restoring connectivity for stream and river sections and removing dams, not building new ones.

    These ecological considerations go beyond NIMBY, but nonetheless place conservation organizations and environmentalists in the awkward place of opposing each alternative energy proposal that comes along in practice while supporting it in theory.

    Some have sugested that developers of alternative energy sources and conservation organizations establish siting and design criteria that minimize
    environmental impacts and remain economically viable.  I gladly support this in theory.  It will be very, very hard to do in practice without strong incentives to compromise and confidence in the results.On Palm oil, that is posted 3 years, 9 months ago 2 Responses

  • Deer Density

    Deer thrive where there is edge habitat, and nothing creates that like suburbia.  Estimates of pre-European deer density in the Northeast are lower than 10% per square mile, not only because of predation (by hunters as well as other carnivores), but also because the landscape was heavily forested.  Even those areas managed with fire by native Americans were not broadly distributed across the landscape.

    The Adirondacks, which contain vast tracts of relatively intact, maturing forest, offer less food opportunities to deer than adjacent cleared and settled lands.  Thus deer will tend to congregate where the resources are, and rapidly expand their numbers there.  

    Other forest-dwelling species will do the same thing when presented with the buffet of food choices presented by residential areas.  I am aware of large forested areas in the Northeast where resident black bears left the interior and headed down to the settled lands during periods of drought and food shortage, and then never made the trip back up the mountain.On Hunting deer amidst strip malls posted 3 years, 10 months ago 2 Responses