Enviro Law - Frack Hue

Living in the Pacific Northwest has introduced me to first hand experience with nature. I grew up back east, but moved here in 1980 - long enough to appreciate the contrasts between urban and rural lifestyles. Being able to evaluate the best of the old and the best of the new leads me to different conclusions than others - or should i say different paths to the same conclusions. There is a major disconnect that can be bridged, but we need new thinking, not just a regeneration of the same old crap we have been getting.

Michael Donnelly takes on advocates and activists in his Truthout piece on the Public Interest Environmental Law Conference. I like what he says, but he doesn't go far enough. Big green is an arm of corporate culture and until we look at the science of everything, we have a cobble of policy that works for nobody. The small groups of concerned activists know what they are facing, but money talks and theory walks - there is confusion and people easily gravitate to what they already believe. How many times does a repetition of a lie take before it is accepted as truth? Wanna make a ruckus, just say the word hatchery.

Public Interest groups - PIRGs - have poisoned the well with so much disinformation, that we just ought to throw it away and start all over again. If you cut a 50 year old tree as opposed to a 200 year old tree - what is the age of the tree that you replant? The idea that the rate of growth of a young tree compensated for the volume of an old tree is nonsense - the mass balance takes many years to catch up.

An overstocked forest is as much a hazard as a treeless forest. If we cut trees, we get less oxygen production and more carbon dioxide accumulation. But they are both in flux with each other - neither is a pollutant. The game is all false and the interest groups each have their well-staked out positions. Each clear cut is an absolute win for the timber industry, each forest saved is another future battle. Nature has no long run chance here - another stacked game that cannot continue.

But it will, because we don't know what we are doing compared to nature's wrath. There is a point where the strange attractors of chaos theory kick in and everything changes. Today - that is the real world. I wish that we could address the real world, but that time will come. Right now, there is too much money at stake to be real.