The Survivalists

Alternatives to Environmental Regulations

From Science and Environmental Health  Network April 7, 2009 (with permission): Much of SEHN's work on the rights of future generations is the result of a 2 ½ year collaboration with Harvard Law School’s Center for International Human Rights. Together, they recently released two documents.  The first is a model statute and constitutional provision granting future generations a legal, enforceable right to a healthy and clean environment.  This document can be used by any governmental body that seeks new and innovative ways to mold its environmental policies.  The second document describes mechanisms like the legal guardian for carrying out the rights of future generations. 

Future Higher Education

Whether getting ready to go to the college or university, taking an Internet pathway to education, advising people about aids and resources to help, using knowledge effectively after getting started, or making network connections for the educational system for the future, there is an excellent emerging resource now available. It is AcademicInfo - Online Degrees, Online Schools and Student Resources. It is a vast, diverse resource.

From the history of online education within the site: In the 1990s  Jones International University, was launched as the first accredited fully web based university. AcademicInfo, maintained by Mike Madin, launched a free accessible resource for teachers, students and researchers. In the 2000s with the millennium a distant memory, Microsoft released its new classroom curriculum management platform called, Microsoft Encarta Class Server with designs to help “integrate daily curriculum with the digital age.” It released version 4.0 in 2005.

Bad lectures placed on the Internet do not make them better ... or even ok. Reading is usually faster than listening to lectures, but it still takes time to internalize material. Whether potential learners will take the time (if they can find a quiet place) to do the memory and making connections and analogical work remains an open question. I'll bet on an optimum combination of personal education and that via the Internetfor individuals and small groups.

Charging for Environmental Services

Roanoke Times presented my recent ideas on ecological Services .

There has been several articles in the mail in a few months, too many suggesting that this concept will not go away and that many new articles will emerge in "environmental economics" about the topic of ecological or environmental services..

Ask, is "pumping" a service of the heart? What is a heart to the person if not with "pumping?" Things provide service. Service is also a function, a namable action. Can they be separated; need they be separated?

Are  "retarding erosion" and "providing housing for insect-eating birds" not services of forests? The forest with its trees is a resource. It provides many goods and services, among a list of other generalized "benefits."

If we must pay for the benefits derived from forests, let us pay for forests, the well-known resource and then let each person benefit and appreciate as they may be able.

If we need forests for many public benefits, then let us deduct from landowner real-estate or land-use taxes an amount that wise people think appropriate, the amount we the people are willing to forego in public tax income for the likely un-named gains we will receive. The public thus pays for the general public welfare gained from the retained forests of the land owners. If they remove and convert them to other land uses, then let those new  tax rates prevail.

Take erosion, costs or water treatment, loss of crop land richness, damage of certain floods as the costs of not having retained forests.

Dare we say "providing many logging jobs" is a service of the forests of the state?

Take the statewide taxes on the financial gains (I-O analyses)from the forest industry and the forest-game hunting industry as the extra monetary gain from forests.

There are alternative ways to value and "pay" for goods and services. Trying to separate them for specific charges requires too many "Solomons," and there are few.

Things Change

Two days ago there was a convergence. A retired professor friend bragged of being computer illiterate. A relative, expert at e-mail, had no notion of what a "web site" was and was astonished that the 20th birthday of www had occurred during the week. I told him of the start so few years ago, sharing my amazement; he thought it had been over 50 years ago. Another person asked me what a "blog" was, quite uninterested in the answer, and late in the day's night, Craig Ferguson of TV's Late, Late Show joked about "blogs on the tweetie," I presume having heard about Twitter and tweets.

The convergence: I do not know my audience, perhaps never have. Aspirations for the benefits of an Internet-based social network are fanciful. Dreams of improved decision making aided by computers and their data bases were just that. "Globalization" rolls out of every conversation while nationalization is at work. The world is not flat and has hidden spaces like those for broadband reception; many people hear nothing. And now computer users pass non-users in the dark, speeding to ever-increasing social differences in knowledge, safety, comfort, and freedom.

Tomorrow will be a better day.

More Home-Place Hints for Survivalists

The word conservation does not show up much these days. “Greening” has taken over as if everyone understood its meaning.

Let’s return to thinking about saving things, being more economical, listening to old wisdom like “a penny saved is a penny earned.”  We have to penny pinch, to be smart, and save for the sure hard time ahead.

Coupons sound great but they may lead you to buy foods and products you would never need or never use even when times were better. Only use coupons when the product is exactly what you need. Now is not the time to gamble on things sounding too new for comfort. Find the most economical grocery store for your top 10 important items (a quick kind of shopping-cart analysis). Lowest (travel cost + 10-item bill = best place to buy).

Buy solid clothes that will wear and wash well. They may cost more but will last longer and look better for the future. “Buy cheap” is a false slogan. Buy for the greatest service per dollar per year. I’ve never been convinced that “softeners” were essential but if they are, vinegar will suffice. Google “homemade detergents” for some answers to a high-priced much-used item that works on a budget. No one is now too proud to shop and buy as the thrift and good-will stores.

Always have a pot of stew cooking. This is where the scraps go … for the next meal. The next meal is always stew, but it usually tastes different and with good care and seasoning, it always gets better.

“Don’t waste” seems like a normal saying around here. Try to wear out the pans scraping them clean of food before washing them. The savings are in table-spoon amounts … that add up over the years … and these are in the nature of survivalists… plotting in many small amounts for the next years.

Paper towels in the kitchen or beside the baby provide little help and are expensive; cloth towels made from worn out shirts (or see the grocery store isle) served well for ages.

Shorten hair thereby reducing use of wash water, shampoo and soaps, and dryer's electricity. Shiny hair is the result of protein nutrition and combing, not super-expensive shampoo.

Drip, turn off the water! It’s bad water conservation not to do so and it inflates the water bill and the water-heater bill.

Turn off the lights and the TV when you leave the room. “Away” is the condition of being blown away by leaving them on.

Check out (with a slight delay)  beingfrugal.net and neverpayretailagain.net . There are good hints about food and eating.

Use a shopping list. No more impulse or binge buying! Check out the shelves for “good deals” but be careful.

Pricey but healthy trail bars, for example, and cookies can be made in the home kitchen on a weekend (with a friend, sharing results, or with youths to make it fun) to serve in lunches for weeks … for big savings.

I’m positive that we can cut the costs of surviving and, with planning, increase the quality of our life. Not a bad objective.

Coastal Flooding in Virginia

Stefan Rahmstorf of the University of Potsdam, Germany has calculated that sea level rise will be substantially higher than predicted recently and that even for low-emissions scenarios the best estimate for sea level rise is 1 meter by 2100. Sea level rise may well exceed one meter by 2100 if emissions continue unabated. For the worst-case scenario, the new calculation predicts sea level rise of 1.80 meters by 2100. There remain uncertainties, of course, but my pessimism for the coastal area of Virginia, USA, lies in the belief that emissions will continue unchanged.

It will be good for economy-stimulating people to delay bridge and highway building along our coast and to concentrate expending funds inland. The roads will be under water! Build ferries!

The Rightness of Regions

People like to think they are independent. They brag about it; folk lore praises it. Being independent wins awards. There's a problem with that. People are innately social. They form family groups. They exhibit “pack” behavior. They consistently demonstrate things that they do together that they cannot do alone. They build barns, congregate in churches, and attack fires. I think it’s a good idea to concentrate on the social rather than the singular, solitary nature of people, especially in times of widespread crisis (disease, climatic events, forest fires, and national economic crises).

There is a new way to be social. It’s blogging. I laid out a painfully long list of problems that need to be attacked in the New River Valley of Virginia (partially in North Carolina and West Virginia). They can only be attacked, maybe solved, by regional work, groups of people, and somehow building a common understanding and willingness to work in many ways to solve singular problems in the list. There have to be groups, and it now seems that one of the few realistic paths to social group formation of the scope needed now is blogging, linked by the Internet.

I blog for lots of reasons but I see that relatively new technology being useful in the Valley for:

1. a badge of togetherness (“we all do it;” “we blog best;”  “we ride the blogosphere together;” “better than blog benefits?”)
2. announcements (the hot new about inventions, products and opportunities)
3. sales (who has what for sale or barter)
4. transportation (improved efficiency and reduced energy costs; delivery … Electronic and Internet transportation rather than physical ones)
5. question asking and answering (investing, inventing, implementing)
6. offering services and tools (nursery, horse plowing)
7. things about which I have not thought nor imagined

Clelland saw blogging as a major way of developing a positive, practical regional personality and new development. Her four key thoughts rested in  connections, people, information,  and search.

People in the Valley have problems. Businesses need stability for the welfare of their communities and their citizens. People, tax payers, need jobs. These can all be addressed personally, positively, for the good on the total Valley and its people. Bad things look better with the brand new benefits of blogging.

The Changing Coyote Population

I'm not at all certain that the US could have settled by the early explorers if the coyote, Canis latrans, had been present East of the Mississippi. It was absent then but is now abundant and it could have been disastrous to early farmers and their livestock.

Here is a coyote on early patrol after a light snow in Virginia last month. The photo is shared by Mark Wiley of Radford, Virginia.

Throughout the West, attempts to exterminate the coyote were carried on for a century  by federal and state programs. It was harmful to ranchers' small animals, to sheep, rangeland calves, and to wildlife. Reduction programs could not be sustained, many were ineffective, and new public sentiment against control became strong.

When I was a state wildlife biologist in the early '60s there were no coyotes (or only a "curiosity" and unexplained road-kill). Now they have been transplanted or they have found highway bridges and other clever ways to expand into new territory. Trappers have learned that they are very clever and prolific.

There will now emerge new efforts to keep their populations below a studied level. They cannot be allowed to increase un-regulated. They are now fearless of humans for they, now without guns, pose no perceived threat. (See Will N. Graves  2007. Wolves in Russia: Anxiety Through the Ages, Detselig Enterprises Ltd, Calgary, Alberta, Canada, 222p.)

Coyotes are now taking house cats and dogs. Small birds, rodents, reptiles and small game are usual foods. Some sheepherders in the East now have given up in the face of their losses. Rabies virus strains will shift to them as it has from raccoons to skunks and back again. Wildlife are less of a concern now to a shrinking hunter population but I think that the coyotes' effect on the deer fawn crop may be the only good thing that will result from their invasion. Their predation on fawns will limit deer population expansion (already deer heavily damage crops,forests, and landscape plants and deer populations are beyond control by current hunters).

Active groups of people in love with coyotes and wolves, seemingly uncaring about their actual and potential harmful effects, make faunal system management very difficult and make clear the essential relations of changing faunal space, populations, and human behavior cost-effectively over time toward desired ends. 

Telesco's notes on species specific management of the coyote resource may provide useful insights to the requirements ahead.

New Department of Agriculture Leadership

A recent news report (The Daily Yonder) said Nebraska farm policy reformer Chuck Hassebrook is not likely to become  Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. 85,000 people  signed a petition requesting that he be considered.

Forest Laws of the Delta Farm Press opposed Hassebrook's appointment, criticizing that what the Nebraskan refuses to recognize is that “the larger farming operations he denigrates are the norm in the Sunbelt and probably more the rule in states like Nebraska and in Iowa. (Iowa probably has more 2,000-acre farming operations than the 300- to 400-acre ones by far.)" Farms got that big, Law wrote, "so they could stay in business."

Candidates must meet many requirements and conditions but it will be too bad if only one supportive of big farms can be selected. There are alternative ways to achieve the same objectives for rural USA … stable communities, abundant and diverse employment, and superior natural resource management that includes groundwater recharge, soil protection, healthy local foods, diverse wildlife, superior scenery, and diversity that does not prepare the way for another dust-bowl national adventure and does not depend on fossil-fuel-dependent agro-industry There are new ways to do economical, rational farming, for example, computer–enhanced farm clusters of small farms. There are ways “to stay in business.” There has to be a role for someone able to address the needs of all rural people in the US and all of us that depend upon them.

Kangaroo

There was a long-standing rivalry between VPI (later called Virginia Polytechnic Institute and StateUniversity or “Virginia Tech”) and VMI, the Virginia Military Institute. It was mainly expressed once a year at Thanksgiving and in the last football game of the year in Roanoke, Virginia.

In 1955 I had been elected president of the Corps of Cadets. I somehow had to handle unusual Corps situations. One was the call from VMI: “Our mascot, the kangaroo, has been stolen and we demand its immediate return.”

There was some humor, for their cadets had stolen the VPI turkey mascot several years ago. We searched, begged for help, suggested legal action, offered freedom from disciplinary action, and generally waited for the big game when we were very unsure that the kangaroo would re-appear. (It may have been stolen and not a prank. There could have been and accidental death. )

I spent time in meetings with administrators of both schools, advisors, student body leaders. It would have been much better time spent on studying for senior exams. In the middle of three nights I got calls: “The kangaroo will be returned and you can deliver it to VMI. We will meet you at the water tower (edge of campus) in two hours. Come alone. ”

It could be a hoax, or real. I could not risk not being there. If it were left there for me, it would surely freeze. I knew nothing about kangaroo metabolism; nothing about their care and feeding. The prank could easily turn into theft. I had no idea what size it was or what I would do with the creature if it had been there.

On three nights this occurred … but no kangaroo. I did not involve the police or fellow students at 2am. My grades suffered mightily.

The day before the game, the kangaroo was returned mysteriously to VMI. Months later I learned that it had been taken to a local barn and kept there by three VPI civilian agricultural students. They returned it as some part of their “plan.”

I call it one of those university “learning experiences” that did not show up in grades. It was more negative than positive. I took the joke very personally for it was done by classmates, directly affected me, and I perceived that it affected VPI (and risked greater negative effects). I learned: “Friends”!? Caution!  The details are foggy now, but I still run through game theory options and scenarios of those stressful final days in the Corps of Cadets at Tech.