Bored Feet

We face a number of issues in the harvesting, mining and other “extraction” of natural resources. We’ve overfished some species to extinction or near extinction, fossil fuels have taken millions of years to create and are thus non-renewable, we’ve ravished lands to access some of those resources, we’ve added chemical and biological agents plus cross-breeding and (more recently) genetic modification to increase yields and resist disease/insects and we have decimated oxygen-purifying, CO₂ absorbing jungles and forests to make way for “civilization.” Forests – through photosynthesis – actually negate greenhouse emissions. But we’ve got to live somewhere, eat foods, stay warm and basically live our lives. It is difficult balancing act.

With masses of people, increasingly scarce resources and serious environmental transitions that threaten the way we live, perhaps our own survivability as a species, the notion of governmental laissez-faire – getting out of the way of progress – appears no longer to be a viable track. It is just too easy for a few business decision-makers to have deep, often irreversible impacts on the health, life-span and quality of living of too many people who were not included in part of that decision-making process. The extractors reap the rewards; the rest of us pay in oh-so-many ways. In the end, it is the aggregation of those “use those natural resources without too many rules” decisions that have led to the climate-disrupting-results – floods, fires, storm surges, weather catastrophes, droughts and resulting political and economic violence – which we have witnessed all over the world.

One of those categories of life-impacting decisions has been the expansion of urbanization and agriculture at the expense of forests. Nowhere is the more evident than in South America, where indigenous peoples and esoteric specifies have seen their habitats destroyed, pushing them to the edge of extinction… and beyond. There are occasional rays of hope. In September, for example, Norway pledged up to $300 million to restore Peru’s Amazon jungle. Yet, we are constantly reminded how the rich developed world made its fortune by voraciously consuming natural resources but are now asking the undeveloped and developing world to bear the burden of preserving what’s left.

“The U.N. estimates it could cost $10 billion to $15 billion a year for the next 10 years to significantly reduce deforestation rates around the world. As the [early December, U.N.-sponsored negotiations over South American deforestation issues pressed on], the question of where these funds will come from, and how much protection is afforded people who live in these forests—which are, essentially, the Earth’s insurance policy—[were] be hotly debated.” Newsweek, December 6^th.

But lest we think that these are only third world issues, we are reminded that even here in the United States there are massive remaining privately-owned forests that perform the same CO₂ absorbing functions as those massive rain forests. Over time, those private holdings have dissipated, parcels with remaining trees have gotten smaller year-by-year. Some are harvested and replanted… some are just harvested as the land is converted to other purposes. The future of those parcels is very much in doubt as ownership (especially through division of parcels through inheritance) and exploitation patterns, combined with a new surge of deregulation sweeping through the majority of state assemblies in in the U.S., have combined to create an uptick in harvesting.

“The concerns of forestry professionals are more subtle than the typical worries over large-scale development: As the parcels of land get smaller, the people who own them might not have the same commitment to the forests as the previous landowners.

“‘Our alarm bells are starting to go off, not because landowners are suddenly older but because it’s been going on long enough now that we are really beginning to see the impacts,’ said Mary Sisock, assistant professor of extension forestry at the University of Vermont, who has worked on the issue across the country.

“Owners of smaller parcels are less likely to invest in forestry management plans, Sisock said, and managing for wildlife is more difficult than on larger plots. And once the land gets cut up, it’s more likely it will be developed and never again be a working forest, she said.

“Brett Butler, coordinator of the U.S. Forest Service’s National Woodland Survey, said there’s a common misconception that the majority of forest land is owned by the government. Nationally, more than half of the 766 million acres of forest land is owned privately by proprietors whose average age is 62.5… ‘It’s really families and individuals that control the fate and the future of the forests,’ Butler said.” The AP in the Washington Post, December 7^th.

It is too easy to suspend environmental rules for short-term gain, ignoring the vast multiple of hard costs we are all going to have to pay from the direct and immediate impact of environmental degradation. When we have to pay trillions of dollars more than the billions of dollars some at the top slice of the economic ladder will earn from unchecked and uncontrolled exploitation of resources, one has to wonder why the government seems to be unable to explain, dollar-for-dollar, what such decisions are costing individual taxpayers. It’s time to develop and debate those metrics to the same credible level that has established the reality of global climate change.

 I’m Peter Dekom, and if we don’t gather together to preserve the heritage here on earth that was God’s gift to us all, we are to lose those gifts and perhaps ultimately ourselves.