Great post, and this: In the 2004 general election, every city in the United States with more than 500,000 inhabitants returned a majority vote for John Kerry. The election was won for Bush and the Republicans in the outer suburbs and the rural hinterlands. is why the Republicans have a fit when anyone mentions transit or helping the cities.  They know what that means.

is, I think, a better term than 'ghost' species, and also used by ecologists to describe species that have no real chance of escaping near-term extinction.

Whiskerfish

The West is in the middle of a furious conflict between the city and the country, in part a class war, in part a generational one, which has significant political consequences ... The ESA [Endangered Species Act] was an easy way to stop Federal logging, but at a great cost. It made all the rural voters hate endangered species, because besides losing their logging and mill jobs, their schools and county services are starving without federal timber receipt money; the Forest Service staffs are a fraction of what they were a decade ago, the logging simply shifted to private timber lands, and the situation is primed for Bush to sell off National Forest land.

This raises some tough issues.  If we oppose logging, we're being hypocritical unless we also refrain from using wood products.  And shifting logging to private lands is almost always worse than allowing it on federal lands, because private lands have even fewer regulations.  There is also the issue that the timber companies, through their lackeys in government, made schools and county services dependent on logging revenues, creating a situation where few if any rural residents would be brave and self-sacrificing enough to oppose logging.

But the bigger issue here is that European-Americans invaded the Americas with the same attitudes with which they destroyed the natural environments in Europe.  The Native Americans of the northwest did not kill trees in any noticeable numbers, nor did they mine or graze non-native animals like cattle.  Unfortunately, white people don't seem to know how to live without destroying everything natural (thus the question from a 19th century Native American, "Why do white people hate everything in nature?"), so now we have a situation where when environmentalists try to protect the natural world, rural people are up in arms.  And to make matters worse, it's not just rural people, but everyone who consumes the products that are a result of environmental destruction, and most of those live in cities.

This shows just how screwed up things are.  It's not that these problems can't be solved, but doing so will take major changes in our societies and how we all live.  We must stop consuming things like large numbers of dead trees, and learn to live a lot more simply.  Otherwise, we will continue to be the cause of the sixth great extinction, with humans almost certainly being one of the extinct species.

an obscure region of U.K., the Norfolk Fens, not far from WalesThough by American standards nothing in the UK is very far from anything else, this is an oddly misleading statement. Wales and the Norfolk Fens are on opposite sides of the British mainland. Not an auspicious beginning to a report on environmental politics. Could this be Stolz's careless misreading for the Wash, a wide estuarine region just north of the Fens?

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Spaceshaper is correct: it's corrected above.

I would not swear to it, but I think the opening episode of Dickens's "Great Expectations," in which Pip meets the escaped convict, and, whether through terror or pity, brings him food, and tools to break his shackle, with terrific consequences later on, is supposed to take place in the Fens.  Anyway the scene is definitely some remote seaside wetland.

Cf. also Ralph Vaughan Williams's moody fantasia of 1904, "In the Fen Country."  That is what the musicians in the band on board the Titanic wanted to play, though they were directed to play "Nearer My God to Thee," and obediently did so.

On Barred Owls vs. Spotted Owls: The Barred Owls are indeed well established in the eastern US, but they are also well established across Canada's boreal forest, all the way to the Alaskan panhandle.  Those that are moving into the traditional range of the Spotted Owls are moving southward from British Columbia, not westward from the Mississippi valley.

On the term "invasive": Is that term used accurately of wild animals and plants that happen to be expanding their ranges purely through "natural" conditions and circumstances, without conscious human assistance?  A good argument could be made that that is an OK usage; but it is possible that, technically, some specifically human agency is required.

On "ghosts": Another ecological term which it is vitally important to define.  Kit Stolz does well to quote Robert MacFarlane on that.

We need always to ask ourselves if conservation efforts on behalf of any species are inevitably going to be futile, because the species' ecosystem has changed in some crucial way.  But it is not easy to answer that.  Are Spotted Owls "ghosts" now?  Are Africa's rhinos and cheetahs "ghosts," as some suggest?  Perhaps; but that is hardly obvious to everyone.  And meanwhile, the ethical guideline should be Dum spiro, spero -- So long as I am breathing, I have hope.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.