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Guest Columnist
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The Recession and the Chesapeake |
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By John R. Wennersten
During the depression of the 1930s, the Chesapeake Bay thrived largely because people let it alone. They quit punishing the bay with overharvesting, and industrial pollution and construction diminished. The result was a maritime environmental bonanza. After the end of World War II, watermen were reporting record strikes of oysters, crabs, and rockfish.
A roundtable of “experts,” including this writer, mulled this scenario at a “Chesapeake Futures” conference held by the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum in St. Michaels, Maryland.
We concluded the same could happen today on the bay and its rivers as the result of our current recession. Rivers like the Anacostia in Washington, DC, the Elizabeth in Virginia, and the Monocacy in Maryland will improve wondrously, if we quit punishing them with pollution and if growth slows.
Recessions, of course, cause great economic hardship. But they also temper the impact of growth on the environment. They have unexpected spin-offs like reduced traffic noise and diminished pollution and they provide an hospitable climate for initiatives like surcharge fees to eliminate plastic bags.
Recessions also prompt real estate developers to come up with better ways of dealing with housing construction and sanitation. Developers are more amenable to the use of solar panels because of tax credits and are installing toilet systems that minimize water use. Furthermore, the economic slowdown gives Smart Growth advocates a chance to test new civic designs without having to fight developers in the courts.
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Fireflies Light the Way Back to Life |
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By Liza Field
Among the environmental losses that rarely make the news, our world's firefly populations are dropping like—leaves?
Fireflies aren't actually “flies,” but luminous beetles. About 2,000 species of them exist globally, in the “shining” family “Lampyridae.”
In the mid-Atlantic, this summer, wet weather brightened prospects for the region's firefly species, which prefer damp soils. Worldwide, however, scientists report a steady plummet of firefly numbers, as their woodland habitats fall.
Brief Candles
“It is quite clear they are declining,” says Stefan Ineichen, a firefly researcher in Switzerland. “When you talk to old people about fireflies, it is always the same. They saw so many when they were young; now they are lucky if they see one.”
Why? Fireflies live in a cycle—most of it as tiny larvae Americans commonly call “glowworms.” These eerily-glowing larvae feed off the slugs, worms and snails of rotting logs and humus, particularly along water edges.
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Trees: On the ground aid for an ailing planet |
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By Liza Field
How long does it take to make the woods?
As long as it takes to make the world.
Wendell Berry, “Sabbaths”
This upcoming Friday (April 24th), National Arbor Day will bring thousands of Americans outdoors to dedicate that most vibrant and useful of monuments to the future—a living tree.
Why? Each end-of-April, I find myself on a school campus or riverbank with buckets of sap-odored seedlings and shovels, trying to articulate the ever-expanding answer.
“The parking lot will stay cooler.” “Your real estate value will increase.” “You can lower your power bill.” “Trees buffer noise and wind.” “They absorb carbon dioxide and pump out oxygen.” “Trees help attract rainfall and combat drought.”
As I hold up a limp little seedling and clump of dangling roots, lag-jawed teenagers and bright-faced grannies listen to its nearly-unbelievable powerhouse of capacities: “It absorbs storm-water back into the aquifer.” “It can keep riverbanks from eroding.” “Songbirds can someday nest here.” “It feeds pollinators, wildlife, soil—and us!”
Frankly, a tree can do so much good, simply by existing, I can think of no act more directly useful in helping the whole world, local and global, than planting one.
Particularly as a teacher, I find tree-planting a great way to bridge the abyss between academia and action, information and how-to-respond. Tree-planting provides one small act almost anyone in the U.S. can undertake to balance the deluge of environmental bad-news.
And for a “small act,” tree-planting potentiates monumental relief. From a local heat-island effect to global warming, urban run-off to coastal dead zones, local habitat loss to mass extinctions, trees offer direct, on-the-ground aid for what ails this planet.
Trees act as vertical vents and water pumps, moderating a climate's aridity and temperature, releasing or storing moisture and shading the summer landscape. They filter particulate matter and decrease ozone levels, reducing respiratory illness and health-care costs.
Moreover, they mix deep, subterranean layers of inert minerals, sunlight and CO2 into food that becomes living organic matter. An urban or rural forest literally enriches the land and its inhabitants, proving that something better than money grows on trees.
“The civilized nations....have been sustained by the primitive forests which anciently rotted where they stand. They survive as long as the soil is not exhausted,” wrote Henry David Thoreau, exulting in the rich humus continually renewed by his woods. “The same soil is good for men and for trees....fitted to raise not only corn and potatoes, but poets and philosophers for the coming ages.”
Thoreau found trees good instructors in wise living. But especially to our high-speed information age, today, trees teach the ability to stand in one place, roots underground, branches to heaven, connecting our higher lights with ground-level usefulness.
Their shade, vertical beauty and loft appear to calm and uplift us. Research indicates that wooded settings can lower blood pressure, improve student concentration, reduce employee sick-time, quicken recovery for hospital patients, and lower neighborhood crime rates.
And trees deepen our sense of place. My students often recall favorite trees from childhood more vividly than buildings. Folk songs, classic poetry and scripture through the ages often include a sacred tree, a world tree, a tree-of-life.
Perhaps most usefully in these discontent days, trees demonstrate how to make do with whatever soil, weather, atmosphere and problems they find themselves among, turning trouble into benefits for others, now and future.
This quality offers hope to counter the gloomy global news of our day. It's become dauntingly clear that the problems of Earth's oceans, climate, soil, waters, and vanishing biodiversity are too big for any one person or nation to solve. But wherever one person happens to stand, Earth is underfoot, her climate overhead. From what better perch could we grapple with change?
Though few individual Americans can save large tracts of forest, most developed landscapes include countless collective acres of potential, future shade, bird habitat and beauty. Churchyards, cemeteries, hospital and nursing home grounds, industrial parks, road and creek corridors, colleges and schoolyards could easily grow something besides flat, useless, high-maintenance lawn and asphalt.
A simple nursery order, some volunteers young and old, and a dig-in party could be the start to a wildlife sanctuary, shady summer grove, prayer garden, outdoor classroom, or mere treasury of great soil—fit to feed new generations of poets, philosophers, problem-solvers and tree-planters.
Liza Field is a hiker and conservationist. She teaches English and philosophy in the Virginia Governor’s School and Wytheville Community College. This column is distributed by BayJournal News Service. |
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On Earth Day, Don't Buy into the Eco-Doomsaying |
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By Sally C. Pipes
What would Earth Day be without handwringing over the supposedly dire state of the planet?
Concern over climate change seems to have reached a fever pitch. And the American economy has been fingered as the culprit.
President Obama's recent budget proposal pours a whopping $150 billion into clean energy technologies and another $75 billion into tax incentives for "alternative" energy research. It also includes a national "cap-and-trade" program for greenhouse-gas emissions that would demand an estimated $79 billion from American industry.
Before we commit hundreds of billions of dollars to cleaning up the planet to fight global warming, it's important check the facts. The United States -- and indeed the rest of the world -- has made remarkable environmental progress over the last few years.
Take climate change. The climate-induced catastrophes we've been conditioned to fear appear to be founded on little more than hype.
According to a recent report from the U.S. Climate Change Science Program, there is "no evidence" of a change "in the severity of tornadoes and severe thunderstorms" over the past few decades. The Program's report also found that over the last 150 years, the rate of U.S. hurricane landfalls has actually been declining.
Indeed, many in the scientific community have begun to speak out against climate-change hysteria. Noted physicist Freeman Dyson, for example, blames "lousy science" on global warming for "distracting public attention" from "more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet."
Among those other dangers is pollution. But America has achieved remarkable success in curbing pollutants, particularly airborne ones. The Environmental Protection Agency reports that the nation's total emissions of six common air pollutants -- including carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, and lead -- dropped 41 percent from 1990 and 2007. And the atmospheric level of chemicals harmful to the ozone fell 12 percent from 1995 through 2006.
Even Los Angeles -- the most polluted city in America -- has cleaner air. According to the American Lung Association, Los Angeles has experienced a 27 percent drop in particle pollution over the last decade.
There's good news on the ground, too.
Rainforests are regenerating on previously cleared land throughout the world. Scientists in Central America recently estimated that for every acre of rainforest cut down annually, more than 50 acres of new forest are growing in once-barren tropical areas.
In the United States, water quality is improving. Last year, researchers from the U.S. Geological Survey sampled 17 major water sources and tested for 258 different man-made chemicals, including pesticides and herbicides. The annual mean concentration of chemicals in all samples was less than the human-health benchmark. Roughly half the chemicals were not present at all in the samples tested.
Cleaner air and water have contributed to the recovery of many marginalized animal communities.
The Northern Rockies' grey wolf population has jumped from 66 to nearly 1,500 over the last 13 years. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service describes the repopulation as "a remarkable conservation success story" and is in the process of removing the animal from the Endangered Species List.
The Lake Erie water snake -- currently classified as a "threatened" species -- has also staged a comeback. Since 1988, the snake's population has jumped tenfold, from 1,200 to 12,000.
In many ways, environmental alarmism is beginning to backfire. Recent polls revealed that 58 percent of respondents declined to identify themselves as environmentalists. By contrast, 78 percent of those interviewed identified themselves as environmentalists as recently as 1991.
This Earth Day ought to be a day of celebration -- not consternation. America has made tremendous strides in making the planet cleaner and safer -- and is set to continue to do so.
Sally C. Pipes is president and CEO of the Pacific Research Institute, which publishes the Index of Leading Environmental Indicators each year on Earth Day.
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By Victor Kamber
If you can’t succeed, secede.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry, running for cover as federal stimulus dollars rain down on his state, was mad as hell and wasn’t going to take it anymore. That made him a heroic figure at the tea bag rebellion.
Perry said he believes the federal government “has become oppressive in its intrusion into the lives of its citizens.” In Texas, for instance, the federal government intruded by offering extended unemployment benefits to laid-off workers. He wants the Feds to butt out and do nothing, just as the Bushies did when Katrina destroyed the Gulf Coast.
“Texas can leave the union if it wants,” shouted Perry, citing state sovereignty to the boisterous cheers of angry tea baggers waving “Secede!” signs.
One thing we learned is that the craziness of Limbaugh and Hannity and the Fox Network has a contagion infecting much of the GOP leadership. Not only are several Republican governors advocating “state sovereignty” resolutions, but GOP chairman Michael Steele gave tea baggers an extra lump of satisfaction when he said it wasn’t patriotic to pay taxes. It appears the Party of No has gone from low taxes to no taxes.
While this nuttiness was going on, President Obama didn’t appear to be distracted. He was keeping up with all those mainstream chores of a busy president, such as helping free an American ship captain from pirates, offering new proposals for energy independence, pushing ahead with his plan to provide affordable health care for every citizen, orchestrating the best ever Easter Egg hunt, easing tensions with Mexico, tackling the immigration problem, loosening travel restrictions to Cuba, explaining in a Georgetown speech why government spending is necessary to revive the economy (noting for tax protesters that under his administration zero taxes have gone up while 95 percent of Americans have received a tax break), and joining the family in assuring Bo, the first dog, that he has a loving home in the White House.
What do Republicans say to that?
He’s “polarizing” America.
Is it Bo?
Karl Rove, who helped make George Bush the most unpopular president in American history, is quick to see the flaws in Bush’s successor. “No president in the past 40 years has done more to polarize America so much, so quickly,” he wrote in The Wall Street Journal.
Karl has a point, but only if the ever shrinking GOP base sees the tea baggers, the gun nuts and the “sovereign movement” as the mainstream
How about some more tea, Karl. Or is that Limbaugh kool aid you’re drinking?
For more than a quarter of a century, Victor Kamber has made headlines as a political consultant while writing several books and providing sound bites that resonate for network and cable talk shows. His substantial career achievements were recently recognized when he become the recipient of the prestigious PR News’ 2006 Hall of Fame Award for his outstanding career in labor communications and politics. Those responsibilities have included a multitude of activities including working as a consultant in more than 100 political races and establishing the award-winning communications firm, The Kamber Group. His blog can be read at www.victorkamber.com.
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