It would have been a gift to have met Barry AND your dad, Jason. Thanks as always for keeping me aware and prompting me to think. I wonder if your dad, a scientist with passion, ever felt or expressed the finer points of morality relating to our responsibility to manage what we impact? Maybe the answer is, of course -- it's all about morality. But I'm wondering if he might have discussed what that meant.
Thanks, Bryan. That's kind of you to say. As for my father, I think his perspective was really more of a fishing/hunting ethic. He was a downeast Maine kid who grew up loving to fish and hunt, and that spirit never left him, even as he was crunching numbers and shaping policy with colleagues around the North Atlantic. (There's a childhood picture of him I wanted to include but am still looking for.) Management was about fairness and common sense, making sure the fish (or deer, etc) had stable populations for the future. He certainly developed an attachment to the species he spent the most time managing (herring, salmon, and others), but it wasn't a general protective sense of all life. He liked to point out, for example, that if we really wanted to give Atlantic salmon a chance to return, one useful strategy would be to cull some seals. You can guess how well that went over...
The anecdote about Lopez and the forest fire is particularly sobering. My piece this week was on the virtues of doing nothing, but environmental destruction means all doings around us eventually come for all of us.
Indeed. The scale of what's happening means there's no place to hide. When the Poles and the ocean's temp and chemistry are rapidly changing, when the ecological complexity of air, land, and sea are all thrown into the Anthropocene etch-a-sketch, all we can do is inhabit that new reality and try to reduce the harms.
I highly recommend the book Wild Souls by Emma Marris. She discusses ethical and philosophical questions in conservation, the idea that humans are separate from nature, and instances where humans overcorrect our destruction with more destruction in the name of conservation (example: the mass killing of Barred owls in the PNW)
Thank you, Moshe. I've had her book on my radar, but my to-read pile is already precipitous. I should go ahead and pick it up anyway.
The barred owls plan is suffering piled on suffering, but apparently the folks behind the plan see it as the only way to hold back the extinction of spotted owls. I can't speak to that analysis, but the biologists involved aren't happy with their own conclusion. We can let barred owls take the spotted owls' place, or we can try to hold back the tide. There are, and will be, so many impossible decisions like this in the years and decades ahead. This is all downstream of our refusal to rein in our global impacts.
The exponential function in action: there is probably not a locale in Earth's northern hemisphere that hasn't seen all-time high temperature records broken in the last three years.
John Vaillant in his Fire Weather masterpiece, quotes physicist Albert Allen Bartlett,
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function."
We are too high already on that curve- since we collectively are slow learners and since we have inbuilt brakes in our ability to take action on what we've learned.
It would have been a gift to have met Barry AND your dad, Jason. Thanks as always for keeping me aware and prompting me to think. I wonder if your dad, a scientist with passion, ever felt or expressed the finer points of morality relating to our responsibility to manage what we impact? Maybe the answer is, of course -- it's all about morality. But I'm wondering if he might have discussed what that meant.
Thanks, Bryan. That's kind of you to say. As for my father, I think his perspective was really more of a fishing/hunting ethic. He was a downeast Maine kid who grew up loving to fish and hunt, and that spirit never left him, even as he was crunching numbers and shaping policy with colleagues around the North Atlantic. (There's a childhood picture of him I wanted to include but am still looking for.) Management was about fairness and common sense, making sure the fish (or deer, etc) had stable populations for the future. He certainly developed an attachment to the species he spent the most time managing (herring, salmon, and others), but it wasn't a general protective sense of all life. He liked to point out, for example, that if we really wanted to give Atlantic salmon a chance to return, one useful strategy would be to cull some seals. You can guess how well that went over...
The anecdote about Lopez and the forest fire is particularly sobering. My piece this week was on the virtues of doing nothing, but environmental destruction means all doings around us eventually come for all of us.
Indeed. The scale of what's happening means there's no place to hide. When the Poles and the ocean's temp and chemistry are rapidly changing, when the ecological complexity of air, land, and sea are all thrown into the Anthropocene etch-a-sketch, all we can do is inhabit that new reality and try to reduce the harms.
Thanks for the shoutout! :)
I highly recommend the book Wild Souls by Emma Marris. She discusses ethical and philosophical questions in conservation, the idea that humans are separate from nature, and instances where humans overcorrect our destruction with more destruction in the name of conservation (example: the mass killing of Barred owls in the PNW)
Thank you, Moshe. I've had her book on my radar, but my to-read pile is already precipitous. I should go ahead and pick it up anyway.
The barred owls plan is suffering piled on suffering, but apparently the folks behind the plan see it as the only way to hold back the extinction of spotted owls. I can't speak to that analysis, but the biologists involved aren't happy with their own conclusion. We can let barred owls take the spotted owls' place, or we can try to hold back the tide. There are, and will be, so many impossible decisions like this in the years and decades ahead. This is all downstream of our refusal to rein in our global impacts.
The exponential function in action: there is probably not a locale in Earth's northern hemisphere that hasn't seen all-time high temperature records broken in the last three years.
John Vaillant in his Fire Weather masterpiece, quotes physicist Albert Allen Bartlett,
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function."
We are too high already on that curve- since we collectively are slow learners and since we have inbuilt brakes in our ability to take action on what we've learned.
A central lesson in math and aftermath... Thank you, Michael.
Colombia, no "u"
Yikes. Thank you, Donna. I'm usually pretty good about these details.