I don’t believe global warming (or global change) is a threat, but I do believe in taking care of the environment.
It’s obvious that the government is trying to control the environment given all the recent government activity around carbon caps, alternative fuel funding, oil drilling restrictions on federally protected land, etc, under the guise of global warming concern. I thought it would be fun to look at a test case where the government has tried to control a smaller amount of “environment” than the entire U.S. – Yellowstone.
“Yellowstone Park was the first wilderness to be set aside as a natural preserve anywhere in the world…in 1872. Theodore Roosevelt visited the park in 1903 and saw a park teeming with wildlife…soon after that, the Park Service was formed, a new bureaucracy whose sole job was to maintain the park in its original condition.
Within ten years, the teeming landscape that Roosevelt saw was gone forever… the park managers had taken a series of steps that they thought were in the best interest of the park and its animals. But they were wrong.
[First], the early park managers mistakenly believed that elk were about to become extinct. So they tried to increase the elk herds by eliminating predators. To that end, they shot and poisoned all the wolves in the park. And they prohibited Indians from hunting in the park.
Protected, the elk herds exploded, and ate so much of certain types of trees and grasses that the ecology of the area of the area began to change. The elk ate the trees that the beavers used to make dams, so the beavers vanished…which lead to the meadows drying up… [which led to] the trout and otter vanishing… which led to soil erosion increasing.
By the 1920’s… there were too many elk, so the rangers began to shoot them by the thousands. But the plant ecology seemed to be permanent. It also became increasingly clear that the Indian hunters of old had exerted a valuable ecological influence on the park lands by keeping down the numbers of elk, moose, and bison.
These were just some of the many mistakes. Grizzlies were protected, then killed off. Wolves were killed, then brought back. Animal research involving field study and radio collars was halted, then resumed after certain species were declared endangered. A policy of fire prevention was instituted. When the policy was reversed, thousands of acres burned so hotly that the ground was sterilized. Rainbow trout was introduced in the 1970’s, soon killing off the native cutthroat species.”
And all this caused specifically by the government group charged with “protecting and preserving” the park. In case you’re not convinced yet, here’s a couple more:
The banning of CFCs to protect the ozone layer…harmed Third World people by eliminating a cheap refridgerant, so their food spoiled more often and more of them died of food poisoning.
The banning of DDT led to the death of over 50 million from malaria. The push for the ban came from environmentalists who claimed DDT was a carcinogen despite widely known scientific knowledge that it was not. In the months following the ban, over a hundred farmers died because they were unused to handling the more toxic pesticides.
Do we really believe they can do any better on a national scale? Are we the next “protected species”?
Note: The above quote and examples were taken from “State of Fear” by Michael Crichton. Impressively, the footnotes to each example contain the reference to the respective scientific study.
Last 3 posts by Eric B.
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When I went to BYU-I I took a Field Biology class (anything to get some easy general ed science credit.) We took field trips every week to different parks, lakes, etc and learned all about the wildlife. We took an overnight field trip to Yellowstone and learned all about everything you explained in this post. It really made me think about my views on hunting (no longer against it) and also controlling these environments. It seems like in most cases the natural progression is best.
Obama’s social agenda is like the park manager. I think you are right. Obama thinks we are an endangered species and that he needs to protect us.
While I agree that some conversation groups go too far to “protect” species, I’d suggest that you give concrete references to State of Fear by Crichton. Actual page numbers and or the actual foot references would help you case. Just saying that this stuff is in the Crichton’s text isn’t very convincing.
Good point Fernando. I’ll def get around to adding the references to the Crichton pages and the names of the studies. I didn’t the first go round because really what I read just seemed to confirm what I had grown up learning about from annual family trips to Yellowstone. I guess, fairly, that doesn’t make me any better than someone who believes rhetoric to the other side because it seems to validate what they felt.
Either way, really good book which, through conversations between characters, discusses topics from the increasing number of violent storms (not true), the Kyoto protocol (intended to reduce the global temp by 0.15 to 0.004 degrees by 2100), etc.
I’m in an ethics class and the professor is a worshiper at the altar of environmentalism. The arguments being made are so ridiculous–the government should cap and trade, it’s immoral to not pay any amount of money to save a salamander footpath, any excess money not spent on charity should be spent on environmental projects, etc.
The sad thing about the DDT debacle is that UN policy still effectively bans it in third-world countries to the point where malaria is still the fourth leading cause of death among children.
http://www.cdc.gov/malaria/impact/index.htm
@Fergie
I found those references pretty quickly here:
http://books.google.com/books?q=state+of+fear
It was not the prohibition of hunting in the park that allowed elk herds to explode; it was the removal of the apex predator, wolves. When a few indiginous peoples were hunting with bows and arrows and by running bison off “buffalo jumps” to survive, human hunting was a part of the natural way of things. With today’s modern rifles, game “management” and an influx of hunters from all over the world, many of whom hunt merely for a “trophy”, it no longer is.
While I would agree that overall the Park Service has done a less than admirable job “protecting” the Park; when I think of what the alternative might have been: sub-divisions, ranches, perhaps a ski resort or a town, private hot springs for millionaires; I’ll take the Park and the Park Service with all of their imperfections, thank you very much. When you say that they did this and then they did that, at least they have been willing to change course when mistakes were made. And they are getting better as better science has become available. Not perfect, but better. The re-introduction of wolves as well as the “let it burn unless it threatens developed areas policy” have done more to improve habitat than almost anything else they have ever done.
Sure, they have done a lot of things wrong, dead wrong; but it’s pretty easy to be a Monday morning quarterback.
Usually when the government seeks to control something, things get worse. This is nothing new, but few learn the lessons taught by history. Uncontolled hunting is bad, but regulated hunting and game management is great and I’v personally seen the results over the years. Occasionally, the government get something right, but its the exception and not the rule.
“Uncontolled hunting is bad, but regulated hunting and game management is great….” I agree (well, I don’t know that it’s ‘great’, but it is certainly preferable). My point was simply that it is not natural. A couple of hundred years ago, when small numbers of natives were hunting elk, bison and deer to survive, I would hardly call that ‘uncontrolled hunting’. Indeed, they were a part of the natural processes. Game ‘management’ might be a necessary evil in todays world where habitat has been drastically reduced while human hunters have multiplied, and their weapons have become more and more efficient; and natural predators have been exterminated in most areas, but there is certainly nothing natural about man deciding what the ‘carrying capacity’ of a range is or how many animals can or should be allowed to live on it.
I think everyone has made some really good points which could lead to a deeper discussion:
1) How can we decide what the carrying capacity of a range is any better than we can determine what the best cost/benefit ratio of carbon gases in the atmosphere are? By taking action to preserve a status quo (carrying capacity) we are exacting a cost on the land. Can any of us argue that nature wouldn’t have evolved differently without our playing land managers.
2) Why do environmentalists provide “absolute arguments” rather than cost/benefit ratios of the proposed regulation? In the Yellowstone example, there is a cost to preserving the status quo… the land does not develop naturally, which is counter to the original environmentalist cause. Is it because they don’t know how to calculate the cost (ignorance of the scientific evidence) or because they think the cost would be above what some people are willing to pay?
3) One of the most frustrating aspects of environmentalism is the inability to pin responsibility on an organization for messing things up. If regulations pass, and things get worse instead of better, they can make the argument that they were “trying to improve things” and how can that be bad? And we all think things need to be improved right? Equally frustrating is the inability to measure their results because you could only do that if you had the scientific data in the first place to formulate an expectation (it was either ignored or inconclusive despite being the basis for the initial regulation.
With all that said, I appreciate to good that some have done. Unintended or not.
It seems the emotional element is always touted as the highest value. A kind of related example is from the book “Skinny Bitch” which is a nutrition book written to convince people to become vegetarians by explaining what is in their food. One of the book’s arguments is that you should not drink milk because it has rocket fuel in it. Specifically, atmospheric impurities containing some particles of what makes up rocket fuel, which are then eaten by cows, which in turn gets into milk and could affect your child…
Emotional or rational?