A Few Shiny Pebbles

(I have been posting infrequently during the past few weeks because of family needs that had to be met. I’ll be posting more regularly now.)

We are bombarded from every side with warnings and even threats about Global Warming. I’ll have more to say in future posts about Global Warming and my reasons for not being worried, but since we should be paying attention to what we can do as conservationists, in understanding and meeting the responsibilities of overseeing the natural world, I’ll start with an important factor in all such decision-making: unintended consequences.

It’s true that some unintended consequences come out of the blue and there’s simply no straightforward way to predict them. Others come from not thinking things through, or not experimenting properly, or the problems of dealing with complicated systems. But the most easily avoided unintended consequences come from ignoring or not even seeking out information that is already in existence.

In “An inconvenient fact”, a Vancouver Sun article about what Dr. Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace and chairman and chief scientist of Greenspirit Strategies Ltd. in Vancouver, has to say about Leonardo DiCaprio’s The 11th Hour “doomsday documentary” about climate-change, Dr. Moore says:

I'm concerned that we're losing sight of some indisputable facts. Here's a key piece of information DiCaprio, collaborator and long-time activist Tzeporah Berman and the leadership of my old organization Greenpeace are ignoring when it comes to forests and carbon: For British Columbians, living among the largest area of temperate rainforest in the world, managing our forests will be a key to reducing greenhouse gases. As a lifelong environmentalist, I say trees can solve many of the world's sustainability challenges. Forestry is the most sustainable of all the primary industries that provide us with energy and materials. Rather than cutting fewer trees and using less wood, DiCaprio and Berman ought to promote the growth of more trees and the use of more wood.

Considering a lot of the news, articles and commercials about trees and forests that I’ve seen over time, this is really astonishing. It turns out that:

Trees are the most powerful concentrators of carbon on Earth. Through photosynthesis, they absorb CO2 from the atmosphere and store it in their wood, which is nearly 50 per cent carbon by weight. Trees contain about 250 kilograms of carbon per cubic metre.

This entire article is really interesting, and a “must read”. According to Dr. Patrick Moore, we should use the trees we have for materials and fuels, and plant new ones. He makes several other highly pertinent statements and arguments and concludes with the point that DiCaprio’s movie is “anti-forestry scare tactics”, and that:

. . . instead of surrendering to the terror, keep in mind that there are solutions to the challenges of climate, and our forests are among them. This film should be a good, clear reminder for us to put the science before the Hollywood hype.

Now, I completely believe that DiCaprio wants to do good. But I am reminded about one of my favorite quotes, from Eric Hoffer, a brilliant American philosopher, who wrote [my emphasis]:

We of the present have a more vivid awareness of the tragic paradox central to the human condition than had any before us. [. . .] Our increased awareness has come from new revelations not about the nature of evil but about the nature of the good. No other generation has been made so poignantly conscious of the perils of doing good. We know that to set out to do good is to run the gauntlet of baffling, grotesque side effects. [. . .] The ills and woes which beset our society at present and strain it to the breaking point were born of a concerted effort to right wrongs and do good.

“…the perils of doing good”. One of those grotesque side-effects? I live in California, and I can tell you, we have really bad brush/forest fires every year, often with numerous homes lost. According to Brad Wilmouth, at newsbusters.org, in a recent fire in the Lake Tahoe region, one woman’s house was still standing amidst her neighbor’s burned-out shells. The reason? The law didn’t allow them to clear brush and other flammable items from the adjoining Federal land, even though it abutted on their land. So the neighbors followed the law. That is, all except for the one woman that disregarded the law and cleared the entire area around her home of danger before the fire and thereby saved her home.

How about more do-gooding? Accumulated brush and old-growth in forests are easily set afire by natural as well as human causes. But do you remember all the warnings we were given about leaving old-growth forests alone? (Google has a couple million references to saving old-growth forests.) And what does Dr. Patrick Moore say? He says that new trees help take in more carbon from the atmosphere and store it than do older trees. He says that new growth is better than old growth trees because forest fires and rotting wood, both high dangers in older trees, give off their carbon back into the atmosphere when they burn or rot. Therefore, we should at least study specific forests to determine whether and how much to clear old growth forests and the old growth in forests. Maybe leaving the old-growth in place will lead to some of those pesky unintended consequences.

I never know whether to laugh or cry at this kind of news.

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