PROTECTED BIRDS VERSUS TREASURED TREES -- ANOTHER GREENIE DILEMMA

The birds are no longer rare so could well be shot -- horrors!

Birds and trees usually go together like fish and water, but in this environmental conflict with a twist, night-herons and egrets might be killing a prized oak grove in Davis. The grove, formally known as Shields Oak Grove, is at the secluded west end of the University of California, Davis, arboretum. It contains 89 kinds of oaks collected from around the world since the 1960s. Now filled with mature trees, the grove has become a magnet for leggy wading birds. The birds are nesting and roosting in such abundance that their droppings are turning the soil salty and acidic, possibly threatening the health of the trees. Last summer, 2,400 adult birds took up quarters in the four-acre grove, producing more than 850 chicks, campus biologists estimate.

By season's end, the ground beneath the trees was white with guano, its musty odor, sharp with ammonia, almost intolerable to the human nose. A nearby gazebo used for weddings had to be closed to public use. "It's called 'White Flower Garden,' " said Kathleen Sokolofsky, the arboretum director. "Well, it was a little too white last year to do any weddings!"

As is their habit, the night-herons and egrets migrated to other roosts in the winter. With the return of spring, they are coming back. Amanda Castaneda, a research assistant at the UC Davis Museum of Wildlife and Fish Biology, counted 35 nests in mid-April, 60 at the end of the month. Guano is beginning to coat tree leaves, the breeze wafting a pungent scent. The case of birds vs. oaks poses quite a dilemma for the arboretum. "We're UC Davis and we want to do the right thing with the trees and the wildlife," Sokolofsky said. "In some cases we've heard, (the birds) actually kill the trees and go to a new site. The question for me is, do you let it get to that point?"

She is not apt to. Originating as a cluster of native oaks growing along the old north channel of Putah Creek and dating to the turn of the last century, the grove has grown into a nationally recognized collection of trees from California and beyond. Some of the acorns from which the oaks grew were collected from around the state four decades ago for the research of John Tucker, a UC Davis botanist who served from 1972 to 1984 as arboretum director. Arboretum staff members acquired exotic species through a seed exchange with other institutions. The trees number 365 today; their origins include Portugal, Spain, Israel, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Iran and Big Bend National Park in Texas. "These trees are analogous to a group of Dutch paintings in an art collection," Sokolofsky said, noting that the arboretum recently received two federal grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services totaling $106,000 to care for the oaks. In 2000, Tucker, now retired, donated $250,000 to establish an endowment to maintain and enhance the grove for education. Arboretum officials planned to showcase the grove by extending trails to entice the public beneath its canopy.

About the same time, the first black-crowned night-herons began moving in. Egrets followed. Campus wildlife biologists identified them as snowy egrets, cattle egrets and great egrets, all birds with showy white plumage. Plumage was their downfall a century ago: People killed the birds to supply the millinery industry with feathers. Laws eventually were adopted to protect the birds, enabling their populations to rebound. To this day, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 prohibits interfering with the birds when they nest. Night-herons and egrets, which are closely related, are colonial by nature, meaning they nest together, sometimes quite densely. In Shields Grove, those trees that drew birds last year - not all did - hosted an average of 25 nests each, said Ellen Zagory, the arboretum director of horticulture.

The problem in Davis is not common in California, but other states have struggled with "nuisance heronries." Ray C. Telfair II, a wildlife biologist retired from the Texas Wildlife and Parks Department, spent much of his career studying heron nesting and roosting behavior. Of 53 heron nesting spots documented in Texas, Telfair has classified 33 as nuisances. The "nuisance" tag is a social, not biological, description. The 20 cases that aren't a nuisance are "in locations where nobody's complained about them," Telfair said.

A colony has the power to rearrange the landscape. On a pair of islands in a man-made waterway called Cedar Creek Reservoir south of Dallas, Telfair watched over 30 years as native trees gave way to an exotic tree, the chinaberry, brought in as twigs with berries by nest-making egrets and herons. Many of the native oaks, elms and ash could not tolerate changes in the soil chemistry caused by the abundant bird guano, Telfair said, while the chinaberry did just fine. Intolerant trees can die quickly. Telfair has seen four species of oaks in Texas succumb in one or two years after bird colonies were established.

Mindful that in an environmentally sensitive community such as Davis the birds will have as many champions as the trees, the arboretum staff is not given to precipitous action. The one step it has taken so far is to remove remnants of last year's nests and twigs from beneath the trees to reduce the amount of nesting material.

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EXTREMISM OVER LEAD



Ah, the magnificent din of a good pipe organ in full cry, one moment all bells and bird chatter, the next a thunderous rumble from the lower registers and a subterranean boom that sounds like a large ship is docking somewhere nearby. Needless to say, it's a sound that has underpinned church and choral music for centuries. And yet in a bizarre legal quirk, the future of the instrument has been called into question in Britain, Europe's largest organ-building nation, as a result of an opaque European ruling governing the substances used to construct organ pipes.

Two European Union directives, which come into force in the 25 EU countries in July, ban the manufacture of "electrical equipment" containing more than 0.1 percent lead. The statutes are intended principally to reduce the volume of lead seeping back into the environment mainly from discarded mobile phones and other disposable modern technologies. But the 1,000-year-old art of organ-building appears to have been swept up in the legislating zeal. Most organs these days are powered by electricity and use a certain amount of lead in their extensive run of pipework to achieve the appropriate musical voicing. Old pipes aren't discarded but are instead melted down and reused.

Senior EU officials have insisted that they do not want to penalize organ-builders, and it seems highly unlikely that "eurocrats" will start snooping around churches, ready to pounce the moment an organist strikes up with a Bach voluntary. But the British organ-building industry is alarmed at the way the EU laws (entitled the Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) and Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directives) are being interpreted in Britain. British officials say that organs are indeed affected. "If an organ has electrical components, then in theory it is likely to come under the remit of the directive," says one government official on customary condition of anonymity. He adds that special exemptions will be required for any of the 80-odd companies that build organs in Britain.

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LEFTIST ELITISM VERSUS GREENIE ENERGY RELIGION

If there is one thing that Senator Edward Kennedy is adamant about, it is that government officials play by the rules. "The vast majority of Americans share our commitment to basic fairness," he lectured his fellow senators last May, when Republicans were threatening to trigger the "nuclear option" -- to change the Senate's rules to prevent judicial nominations from being filibustered. "They agree that there must be fair rules, that we should not unilaterally abandon or break those rules in the middle of the game."

There was nothing clandestine about that no-filibuster threat. Senate Republicans had been discussing it publicly for more than two years. Nevertheless, the senator from Massachusetts blasted the idea as egregious and underhanded. "Every child," he thundered, "knows that you don't change the rules in the middle of the game."

But Kennedy's antipathy to furtive rules changes and backroom power plays, it turns out, stops at the water's edge -- specifically, the edge of Nantucket Sound, which separates Cape Cod (where the Kennedy family has an oceanfront compound in Hyannis Port) from the islands of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard. A shoal in the center of the Sound is where Boston-based Cape Wind Associates hopes to build the nation's first offshore wind farm -- an array of 130 wind turbines capable of generating enough electricity to meet 75 percent of the Cape and Islands' energy needs, without burning any oil or emitting any pollution. The turbines would be miles from any coastal property, barely visible on the horizon. In fact, Cape Wind says they would be farther away from the nearest home than any other electricity generation project in Massachusetts.

But like a lot of well-to-do Cape and Islands landowners and sailing enthusiasts, Kennedy doesn't want to share his Atlantic playground with an energy facility, no matter how clean, green, and nearly unseen. Last month he secretly arranged for a poison-pill amendment, never debated in either house of Congress, to be slipped into an unrelated Coast Guard funding bill. It would give the governor of Massachusetts, who just happens to be a wind farm opponent, unilateral authority to veto the Cape Wind project.

When word of the amendment leaked out, environmentalists were appalled. The wind farm proposal is supported by the leading environmental organizations, and they never expected to be sandbagged by one of their legislative heroes. Even if Kennedy would prefer to see Cape Wind plant its windmills in somebody else's sailing grounds, he has always claimed to support the development of wind power ("I strongly support renewable energy, including wind energy, as a means of reducing our dependence on foreign oil and protecting the environment" -- Cape Cod Times, Aug. 8, 2003). And what happened to all those righteous words about not throwing out the rulebook in the middle of the game?

If ever a project and its promoters have "played by the rules," Cape Wind has, and in spades. Its plans have undergone more than four years of scrutiny by federal, state, and regional regulators, with another year or more of evaluations, hearings, and studies to come. At least 18 government bodies -- from the Army Corps of Engineers to the Environmental Protection Agency to the Massachusetts Coastal Zone Management Office -- have been involved in reviewing the wind farm proposal. Cape Wind has had to surmount an astonishing variety of regulatory and due-diligence hurdles. So far it has successfully met every one.

The list of permits, approvals, licenses, and reports that regulators are requiring Cape Wind to file or obtain would overload a library. First and foremost, there is the exhaustive environmental impact statement required under federal and state law, the first draft of which, 3,800 pages long, was released in November 2004. Then there is also the Approval to Construct Jurisdictional Facilities from the Massachusetts Energy Facilities Siting Board. And the Chapter 91 Waterways License from the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection. And the General Stormwater Permit from the US Environmental Protection Agency. And many more, too numerous to list here.

Cape Wind has invested millions of dollars in this project, and no small part of that cost has gone to dotting every legal "i" and crossing every regulatory "t." But if Kennedy gets his way, all of Cape Wind's time, money, and effort will have been for naught -- crushed in a naked abuse of political power. And when that happens, it isn't only a Nantucket wind farm that will be dead, but another piece of the public's dwindling faith that the men and women it elects to office can be trusted to do the right thing. "Every child knows that you don't change the rules in the middle of the game," Kennedy says. Indeed. Grown senators are supposed to know it too.

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Who's afraid of economic growth?

Behind today's trendy arguments about environmentalism, ethical living and happiness, there lurks a deep disdain for material progress

We live in a world in which there is an unprecedented degree of cynicism about the benefits of economic growth. Even though increasing affluence is still generally accepted as a worthwhile goal in principle, it is typically subject to numerous caveats. Among other things it is accused of damaging the environment, leading to inequality and failing to make people happy. Rapid economic growth is said to be unsustainable and, in any case, allegedly fails to raise our real standard of living. Will Hutton, a columnist on the London Observer, was right when he recently argued that 'the allegedly futile and empty materialist culture [is] deplored by conservative, liberal and religious fundamentalist alike'.

How did this situation come about? From an objective perspective it should be clear that economic growth has brought enormous social benefits and could bring many more in the future. Increasing affluence has enabled us to live longer and healthier lives than ever before. It has generally allowed a shortening of working hours and therefore more time for individuals to spend on leisure. Economic growth is also closely related to the development of science and culture. It is not growth itself that has gone wrong.

The aim of this essay is to examine how cynicism about growth has become a central element of contemporary anti-humanism. It will examine the indirect forms that growth scepticism takes while pointing out its link to environmentalism. It will then consider how anti-growth thinking has moved from being an elite middle-class phenomenon to an idea widely held throughout society. A key factor in this shift was the capitulation of the left to environmentalist and anti-growth thinking from the 1970s onwards. The slowdown in economic growth over the same period, which in turn helped undermine the legitimacy of the market, was also important.

What is growth scepticism?

It is necessary to start with a clarification of what is meant by 'growth scepticism' or 'anti-growth thinking'. It is used here to mean sets of ideas which question the benefits of economic growth. The term growth scepticism, used by Geoff Mulgan, a former senior government policy adviser in Britain, is perhaps a more accurate term than 'anti-growth thinking' as it captures the combination of formal support and questioning (2). Arguably better still would be 'growth cynicism', as that implies that negative views towards growth are part of a more general cynicism that pervades society.

It is important to recognise that direct attacks on economic growth have always been rare. The 'deep green' perspective, to use contemporary terminology, is relatively marginal. Few growth sceptics argue consistently for an end to economic growth, let alone for the economy to shrink. Instead, both historically and more recently, growth is typically linked to negative effects or qualified in some other way.

UK prime minister Tony Blair gave a typical example of growth scepticism in his speech to the G8 climate change conference on 2 November 2005. For him it is necessary to support economic growth while at the same time respecting the environment. He posed this approach in terms of a dilemma: 'How do we combine the need, not just for developed economies to grow, but in particular for the developing world to grow, and the need for people through economic growth to lift themselves out of poverty, to improve their living standards, with a proper responsible attitude to the environment?'

Similarly the doctrine of 'sustainable development', the mainstream conception of development for over two decades, both supports economic growth and calls for limits. For example, the Brundtland Report of 1987, a key official report on sustainability commissioned by the United Nations, at some points emphasises the need for growth and at others stresses environmental limits. Its favoured formula for reconciling the two is to call for the need for development, 'to ensure it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs'.

In other words, mainstream politicians and thinkers have maintained a formal attachment to economic growth despite any reservations they may express. A direct attack on growth would be almost unthinkable. If they argued explicitly for a levelling off of living standards, let alone their decline, it is hard to see how they could maintain popular support. This tension - between formal support for growth while expressing doubts about its benefits - is particularly worth exploring. It provides an opening for a restatement of the need for economic growth as part of a broader development of a new humanism....

First, attacks on the alleged effects of economic growth - such as environmental degradation or inequality - frequently act as a proxy for the rejection of growth as a whole. Often the critic will be cynical about growth in general, but prefer to express his criticisms in relation to one or two particular areas. Even those who start off being in favour of growth in principle often become increasingly cynical as a result of becoming preoccupied with one particular area. Specific limited attacks, which may have some truth in particular instances, tend to grow into more general critiques.

Second, growth scepticism is part of a broader disaffection with the more general idea of social progress. It is no longer widely accepted as given that the future should be better than the past. Instead a sense of social decay and foreboding has become strong. Whereas people used to imagine utopian futures full of possibilities, it has become increasingly common to fear a dystopian future.

In addition, since economic growth is central to progress the two concepts cannot be easily untangled. As Benjamin Friedman, a professor of economics at Harvard, recently argued, for thinkers in the tradition of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment: 'although their starting point was the role of knowledge and their ultimate concern was the character of society in the broadest terms, the fulcrum of their theory of progress was economic arrangements.' He goes on to quote Auguste Comte, a nineteenth-century French philosopher who followed the Enlightenment tradition in this respect, who argued that 'all human progress, political, moral or intellectual, is inseparable from material progression'.

The link between economic growth and social progress tends to work both ways. Those who are in favour of progress generally see increasing affluence as playing a key role in advancing society. In contrast, those who doubt or even reject the possibility of progress tend also to be cynical about economic growth.

Finally, the assault on growth represents an implicit attack on the destabilising tendencies inherent in the market. The very element of capitalism that has been historically progressive - its ability to raise the productive forces - has come to be seen as problematic. No systematic alternative is offered - only the imposition of restraint on the market system. In this sense, the attacks on growth have a nihilistic element. In contrast, earlier critiques of capitalism, certainly those from the left, criticised the market on the grounds that it created barriers to the raising of productivity. Often the explicit conclusion was the need for a shift to a more productive form of society such as socialism.....

It should be clear by now that growth scepticism is closely linked to environmentalism. The idea that man should live in harmony with nature, rather than striving to dominate it, is arguably the key tenet of environmentalism. Human beings are seen as destructive creatures, both to themselves and to nature, if they stray from this path. From this starting point flows ideas such as the need to place limits on human activity and hostility towards the notion of progress. Animosity towards economic growth is therefore central to environmentalist thought.

Challenging the growth sceptics

If these are the arguments of the growth sceptics how can they be tackled? In many cases they seem to have a strong case. The world is highly unequal and there are numerous examples of environmental degradation. It is also indisputable that, despite growing affluence, a huge number of people feel unhappy in some way.

Perhaps the best starting point is to remind ourselves that economic growth and affluence have had enormous social benefits. These are all too easily forgotten in a society with little sense of history. Our lives are substantially better than those of any previous generations. Anne Krueger, first deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), looked at some of the key global indicators over the previous half century in a speech in 2002. She is worth quoting at length

'Infant mortality has declined from 180 per 1000 births in 1950 to 60 per 1000 births. Literacy rates have risen from an average of 40 per cent in the 1950s to over 70 per cent today. World poverty has declined, despite still-high population growth in the developing world. Since 1980, the number of poor people, defined as those living on less than a dollar a day, has fallen by about 200 million, much of it due to the rapid growth of China and India.

'If there is one measure that can summarise the impact of these enormous gains, it is life expectancy. Only 50 years ago, life in much of the developing world was pretty much what it used in be in the rich nations a couple of centuries ago: "nasty, brutish and short." But today, life expectancy in the developing world averages 65 years, up from under 40 years in 1950. Life expectancy was increasing even in sub-Saharan Africa until the effects of years of regional conflicts and the AIDS epidemic brought about a reversal. The gap between life expectancy between the developed and developing world has narrowed, from a gap of 30 years in 1950 to only about 10 years today.'

Of course there is still a huge amount to do despite the successes of the past half-century. According to the World Bank some 2.7 billion people still lived on less than $2 a day in 2001, of which 1.1 billion lived on less than a dollar (23). But the growth sceptics are not arguing for ambitious new development to bring Third World living standards up to those in the West. On the contrary, at every stage they cast doubt on the benefits of growth. However, while it is important to use facts to help refute growth scepticism such a procedure is insufficient on its own. It is also necessary to separate the negative forms that growth can take - for instance inequality or environmental degradation - from the principle of affluence itself. It also means spelling out the broader benefits of growth such as its link to cultural and scientific advance.....

The importance of economic growth to providing a better environment should be clear. As a general rule the environment in the developed world is far better for humans than in the poorer countries. For many people in the world, malnutrition, as well as a lack of clean water and modern sanitation, are key killers. In addition, the World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that 1.6 million people a year - that is one person every 20 seconds - dies as a result of indoor air pollution. As WHO notes:

'More than half of the world's population rely on dung, wood, crop waste or coal to meet their most basic energy needs. Cooking and heating with such solid fuels on open fires or stoves without chimneys leads to indoor air pollution. This indoor smoke contains a range of health-damaging pollutants including small soot or dust particles that are able to penetrate deep into the lungs.'

Yet those of us lucky enough to live in the developed world do not need to cope with such problems. Since the overwhelming majority of us are connected to the electricity grid, gas mains or both, the scourge of indoor air pollution is not a killer. Economic development has played a key role in improving the environment for many millions of people, although many more could gain from its benefits in the future.

Nor is material development just about economics in the narrow sense of the term. Greater affluence, including more consumer goods and better infrastructure, should certainly be welcomed, but there is also a wider story. Economic growth is also linked to broader scientific and cultural advance. Greater material development provides the resources for science to develop and provide even further benefits for humanity. As humans become free from the tyranny of scarcity, they are also better able to spend time engaging in cultural pursuits.....

Environmentalism, and with it growth scepticism, developed as a mainstream force in two phases from the 1970s. In the first stage, from the early 1970s, there developed an emphasis on the need to place limits on human activity. There are many indicators of how, after being a minority force in the 1960s, it became mainstream in the following decade. For instance, in 1970 the US celebrated its first Earth Day. In 1972 the United Nations proclaimed its Stockholm Declaration of the United Nations on the environment. Best-selling texts, such as The Limits to Growth (1972) and Small is Beautiful (1973), emphasised the dangers of resource depletion and pollution. By the mid-1970s, many prominent economists, usually from a conservative perspective, were attempting to defend the benefits of growth, including Wilfred Beckerman, Gottfried Haberler, William Nordhaus, Mancur Olson, and Robert Solow.

Growth scepticism found its way into both radical economics and public policy. It was in this period that the left gave up on the vision of socialism as a more productive alternative to the market. Instead the emphasis shifted towards regulating the market to curb its most destructive tendencies.

In the second stage, which roughly dates from the late 1980s the idea of precaution became accepted within the mainstream. It emphasised not only the actual damage being done to the environment by humanity but potential threats in the future. The increasing institutionalisation of the precautionary principle, as well as the notion of sustainable development (for example, in the 1987 Brundtland Report), were expressions of this growing consensus. Both stressed the need to place limits on human activity to thwart potential threats to future generations.

It was also implicit, and sometimes even made explicit, that the Third World could not expect to reach the economic level of the West. For example, the influential Brandt Report of 1980 argues that: 'We must not surrender to the idea that the whole world should copy the models of highly industrialised countries.'....

The defeat of the left and radical movements.

The left's capitulation on growth from the 1970s onwards was a precondition for growth scepticism becoming a mainstream outlook. As it said farewell to the working class, it gave an increasingly warm welcome to ecology. The capitulation of the left on economic growth parallels its defeat and marginalisation in political struggles. As the remnants of the old labour movement were defeated from the 1970s onwards, they became increasingly receptive to anti-growth and more generally environmentalist ideas.

Under such conditions the left stopped providing social alternatives. Instead its focus turned to the most destructive aspects of the market. At the same time as accepting that there is no alternative to the market it became a staunch advocate of regulation and restraint.

The demise of 1960s radicalism. The defeat of the student and youth radicalism of the 1960s also bolstered the mood of pessimism and so strengthened environmentalism. The strong element of anti-consumerism in the 1960s counterculture - the assumption that individuals were too preoccupied with the pursuit of material goods - helped facilitate this process....

For anyone committed to human progress it is imperative to launch a counter-attack against growth scepticism. Anti-growth thinking is a central part of the narrow consensus that nowadays passes for politics. Growth scepticism is integral to the idea that human potential should be constrained as a dangerous force. Therefore restating the case for growth is a central part of arguing for the power of humanity to create a better world.

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

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