Eagle counting

If you want to feel like a 19th Century gentleman naturalist, come along on one of the eagle counts held on the lower Wisconsin River during the winter months. We went with fellow bookies Sherry & Doug (who are "in charge" of the group counting the Lone Rock roost), Caroline & Frank, and Margie & Dave. On some Sundays we have seen as many as 97 eagles in the two-hour, pre-sunset counting period. This time because the river was frozen, the eagles landed elsewhere, so we saw about a dozen. But the weather was (relatively) warm, the sunset beautiful and the company great. And, in some small way, we are contributing to a long-term study of eagle behavior on the river. Makes you feel warm on the inside, even when you're cold on the outside.

Why we can't have better schools, roads & health care

US War Costs in Iraq Up

Washington (23 January 2008) Reuters- The Congressional Budget Office said in a report released on Wednesday that Iraq war funding, which averaged about $93 billion a year from 2003 through 2005, rose to $120 billion in 2006 and $171 billion in 2007 and President George W. Bush has asked for $193 billion in 2008.

Since the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, Congress has written checks for $691 billion to pay for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and such related activities as Iraq reconstruction, the CBO said. Of the total, the CBO estimated that $440 billion had been spent on fighting in Iraq.

All of the Iraq and Afghanistan war money - about $11 billion a month - is being put on a government credit card. U.S. government debt stands at more than $9 trillion, up from around $5.6 trillion in January 2001. The CBO estimated that the interest payments on the debt would total $234 billion this year. Interest payments will total an estimated $2.7 trillion over the next decade, the CBO said.

Why writing matters

Here’s the paradox of Decade of the Wolf. Interesting story, tinged with the sense of wonder and amazement that so often hits us in the face when we actually get out into the wild – or what passes for wild these days. But the language gets in the way – it’s almost the pedestrian narrative style of Dick & Jane. This paragraph is about the best the book has to offer, but it plods when it should sing! Unfortunately, it is the writing itself that lies "heavy as a stone."

The fact that it’s become unusual for people to have any sort of regular dose of nature, let alone trading stares with wolves, leaves me acutely aware of how much the culture has lost. Gone from most people’s lives are the simple, wondrous prompts of nature, triggers that once sparked in us not just a sense of beauty, but the pleasures of place. Therein sits the weight, the burden of these times. And it lies heavy as a stone in the heart of even the richest life.

Yellowstone wolf updates

Here is a recent NY Times story updating the Yellowstone wolf project:

January 2, 2008
A Divide as Wolves Rebound in a Changing West
By KIRK JOHNSON

CHEYENNE, Wyo. — Sheltered for many years by federal species protection law, the gray wolves of the West are about to step out onto the high wire of life in the real world, when their status as endangered animals formally comes to an end early this year.

The so-called delisting is scheduled to begin in late March, almost five years later than federal wildlife managers first proposed, mainly because of human tussles here in Wyoming over the politics of managing the wolves.

Now changes during that time are likely to make the transition even more complicated. As the federal government and the State of Wyoming sparred in court over whether Wyoming’s hard-edged management plan was really a recipe for wolf eradication, as some critics said, the wolf population soared. (The reworked plan was approved by the federal government in November.)

During that period, many parts of the human West were changing, too. Where unsentimental rancher attitudes — that wolves were unwelcome predators, threatening the cattle economy — once prevailed, thousands of newcomers have moved in, buying up homesteads as rural retreats, especially near Yellowstone National Park, where the wolves began their recovery in 1995 and from which they have spread far and wide.

The result is that there are far more wolves to manage today than there once would have been five years ago — which could mean, biologists say, more killing of wolves just to keep the population in check. And that blood-letting might not be quite as popular as it once was.

“If they’d delisted when the numbers were smaller, the states would have been seen as heroes and good managers,” said Ed Bangs, the wolf recovery coordinator at the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. “Now people will say they’re murderers.”
From the 41 animals that were released inside Yellowstone from 1995 to 1997, mostly from Canada, the population grew to 650 wolves in 2002 and more than 1,500 today in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. The wolves have spread across an area twice the size of New York State and are growing at a rate of about 24 percent a year, according to federal wolf-counts.

Human head counts have also climbed in the same turf. From 1995 to 2005, a 25-county area, in three states, that centers on Yellowstone grew by 12 percent, to about 691,000 people, according to a report earlier this year by the Center for the Rocky Mountain West at the University of Montana. That compares to a 6 percent growth rate for Wyoming as a whole in that period, 7.5 percent for all of Montana, and 19 percent for Idaho. The wolf population has grown faster in Idaho than any place else in the region, doubling to about 800 in the past four years.

For the rest of the story, go to: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/02/us/02wolves.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

For some of the passion surrounding wolves, check out the comments (not included here) attached to this NY Times blog: http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/
January 24, 2008, 5:40 pm
Howling Over Federal Plan to Expand Wolf Killing

The gray wolf has been trying to reclaim its place as alpha predator in parts of Idaho and the Greater Yellowstone Region ever since 65 members of this endangered species were reintroduced in the 1990s. The wolves are doing too good a job, perhaps.

Under pressure from another alpha predator, human hunters (along with state officials eager to keep hunters happy), the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has changed a rule in a way that has wildlife campaigners howling.

The complaints are not about the section allowing someone to kill a wolf attacking, say, a dog or livestock. It’s the part about states and tribal governments having the right to allow greatly expanded killing of wolves in “non-essential” populations where local officials determine that wolf packs are taking too big a share of deer and elk herds also coveted by hunters.

In a news release, the Fish and Wildlife Service said the states needed more flexibility to allow them to “manage” and “remove” wolves (euphemisms for shooting them) where their predatory skills are too effective.

“The states have done an excellent job managing wolves, and this revision will provide the extra flexibility they may need to manage wolves for some time in the future,” said Jay Slack, acting regional director for the service’s Mountain-Prairie Region, in the release.

The Sierra Club complained bitterly today in its own release, estimating that the action could result in the killing of all but 600 of the approximately 1,500 wolves in the region.

“If we call open season on wolves now, we could soon find ourselves back at the starting line. It’s a tremendous waste of taxpayer dollars,” said Sierra Club representative Melanie Stein. “Deer and elk populations are thriving in this region. There’s absolutely no reason to begin slaughtering wolves, other than to please a handful of special interests.

Season of the Wolf

The Drinking and Reading Society is visiting the topic of wolves for, I think about the third time, reading Decade of the Wolf by Douglas Smith and Gary Furguson, the story of the return of wolves to Yellowstone.

I don’t suppose there is an animal that arouses so much passion. Those who have seen wolves, or even heard them, are transfixed by their wild beauty. I don’t get the same sense of awe from people who have seen lions. On the other hand, those who hate wolves are also passionate – to the point of psychopathy. Wolves, it seems are either our wild blood brothers or the Devil’s own hounds.

Meanwhile, there’s this AP story: Wisconsin Considers Timber Wolf Hunting.

MADISON, Wis. — Outdoorsmen will be asked this spring whether the state should set a hunting season for timber wolves, whose numbers are rebounding here even though the species is endangered in most other states.

As many as 575 timber wolves roam the north woods and the population is growing about 12 percent annually, the state Department of Natural Resources estimates. The state's management strategy calls for hunting if the population exceeds 350 animals.

There are lots of links to the full story in case you missed it; I included this one from the San Jose Mercury News just to show how widespread is the interest in wolves: www.mercurynews.com/nationworld/ci_7987815.

I can understand why people who live around wolves may be afraid – I would be pretty nervous if they were in my woods, and my horses would be even more nervous. But I never cease to be amazed that the first response by some people to any animal is “let’s shoot it!” I suppose evolution is to blame for the “shoot first” gene, but if so, I’ll admit I didn’t inherit it.

For the record, it is no longer true that there has never been a documented fatal wolf attack in North America.

The jury at a coroner's inquest has ruled engineering student Kenton Carnegie was killed by a pack of wolves on Nov. 8, 2005 in northern Saskatchewan, making it the first documented case of a fatal wolf attack in the wild in North America.

Carnegie, a 22-year-old student on a work term from the University of Waterloo, was last seen alive as he headed out for an afternoon hike from the Points North Landing supply depot. Two hours later, worried co-workers found him mauled to death in the bush, less than a kilometre from the work camp.

Gunslinger II

Plenty of other people, from Thomas Jefferson to Bill Wineke have criticized Mike Huckabee for advocating “amending the Constitution so it is to God 's standards.” I don’t feel I have to add much to that discussion. Obviously, Mr. Huckabee didn’t study much history at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary or Ouachita Baptist University. But the flap did call my attention to something else that is, or should be, troubling – Huckabee’s swagger. He hides it behind a wry sense of humor and the ability to deftly turn aside a serious question with a flip quip – not only refusing to answer, but effectively cutting off any further questioning. But it is still swagger. Did we learn nothing from the past seven years of the gunslinger?

Books we didn't read

There are a lot of good science and nature books out there and we in the Drinking & Reading Society have read many of them, as this photo from Dan shows and as the October 26 blog listed, but there are a couple we didn't read that some of us think we did. One that I listed on the Oct. 26 post was: The Land We Share: Private Property and the Common Good, Eric T. Freyfogle. For the record, we didn't read it, although it would be up our alley. Dan's photo shows Monsters of God by David Quammen. We didn't read that either, although Dan did and obviously liked it. We did read Quammen's Song of the Dodo.

Morality check

Perhaps you saw Steven Pinker’s long treatise on morality in Sunday’s NY Times magazine. We read a little about the evolution of morality when we read "Our Inner Ape" by Frans de Waal in ’06, although I think his book "Good Natured" is better in that respect. Anyway, I wanted to single out Pinker's citation of Jonathan Haidt, Associate Professor of Psychology University of Virginia, because Haidt makes two really important points for this political season.

First is that emotion trumps reason. Coming from the world of advertising and marketing, that is no surprise to me, although I continually find people who insist that their decisions are entirely rational.

Second, he touches on what divides liberals and conservatives. Research I have been involved in has shown that liberals tend to identify a problem in society and say that “we” have to do something about it. Conservatives see the same problem and say “they” ought to stop doing whatever it is that causes the problem – speeding, having children, taking drugs, whatever. Haidt gets more sophisticated. He identifies five primary kinds of moral sense: harm, fairness, community (or group loyalty), authority and purity. They continually appear in cross-cultural surveys, including our own. Pinker quotes Haidt thus:

The ranking and placement of moral spheres divides liberals and conservatives in the United States. Many bones of contention, like homosexuality, atheism and one-parent families from the right, or racial imbalances, sweatshops and executive pay from the left, reflect different weightings of the spheres. In a large Web survey, Haidt found that liberals put a lopsided moral weight on harm and fairness while playing down group loyalty, authority and purity. Conservatives instead place a moderately high weight on all five. It’s not surprising that each side thinks it is driven by lofty ethical values and that the other side is base and unprincipled.

The lesson is that if you’re trying to convince a liberal of something, argue for fairness; if you’re talking to a conservative, try group loyalty. Haidt gets way more sophisticated than this, of course. Here’s an interview with him: http://www.believermag.com/issues/200508/?read=interview_haidt

Why the new look?

In recognition of the unfortunate fact that we are all getting older and some of us have a hard time reading white type reversed out of a dark background, I have chosen a less graphically interesting, but more readable template for the blog. Read on!

The Forgotten George Kennan

There's more to the story than we learned by reading Tent Life in Siberia. Harry sends this link to "The Forgotten George Kennan". http://www.worldpolicy.org/journal/articles/wpj02-4/maier.html. I have posted a short excerpt below. For more on Tent Life in Siberia, see the blog posts for Oct. 13 and 15.

It has been the posthumous misfortune of George Kennan (1845–1924), the American author and traveler, to share the name and even the same birthday (February 16) with his great-nephew, George Frost Kennan (born 1904), the distinguished diplomat and historian. By double misfortune, the two shared the same special association with Russia, its politics and culture, indeed the coincidence of birth helped incline the younger Kennan to take up Russian studies. As a result, few are aware that the elder and forgotten George Kennan did not simply chronicle Russian life, but became an assiduous campaigner for democracy and human rights in the tsarist realm, and that he contributed crucially to putting the issue on the American legislative agenda.

As a journalist and lecturer, Kennan reached a wide public. In the late nineteenth century, lectures served the purpose that educational television does today, and Kennan was among the most popular lecturers in the country. During the 1890– 91 season, he set the record for the most consecutive appearances—200 evenings straight, except for Sundays! These lectures drew crowds of as many as 2,000 people.

Kennan’s travels in Kamchatka and the Caucasus had left him impressed with Russian government policies, and he had subsequently publicly defended the tsar against criticism in the American press. But 14 months of research (10 months of it in Siberia, and some of the rest interviewing disaffected émigrés in London) convinced him he had been wrong about the Siberian exile system, and he now saw that the treatment of political dissenters proved the empire was rotten.

Kennan became a passionate crusader for Russian revolutionaries and a friend of émigré radicals, including Catherine Breshkovskaia, Peter Kropotkin, and the terrorist Sergei Kravchinskii (a.k.a. Stepniak), helping them raise money for their cause and assisting them personally.

An impossible vision?

Paul Hawken’s chronicle of the worldwide movement for social and environmental justice concludes with what seems an impossible vision:

While so much is going wrong, so much is going right. Over the years the ingenuity of organizations, engineers, designers, social entrepreneurs and individuals has created a powerful arsenal of alternatives. The financial and technical means are in place to address and restore the needs of the biosphere and society. Poverty, hunger and preventable diseases can be eliminated in a single generation. Energy use can be reduced 80 percent in developed countries within thirty years with an improvement in the quality of life, and the remaining 20 percent can be replaced by renewable sources. Living wage jobs can be created for every man and woman who wants one. The toxins and poisons that permeate our daily lives can be completely eliminated through green chemistry. Biological agriculture can increase yields and reduce petroleum-based pollution into soil and water. Green, safe, livable cities are at the fingertips of architects and designers. Inexpensive technologies can decrease usage and improve purity so that every person on earth has clean drinking water. So what is stopping us from accomplishing those tasks?

It has been said that we cannot save our planet unless humankind undergoes a widespread spiritual and religious awakening. Fixes won’t come unless we fix our souls as well. But would we recognize a worldwide spiritual awakening if we saw one? What is there is already in place a large-scale spiritual awakening and we are simply not recognizing it?

Of course, he doesn’t mean a return to a literal reading of “the book” coupled with the kind of self-congratulatory piety that passes for so much religion today. Rather, he comes much closer to a book I read a couple of years ago called The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard, a professor of philosophy at USC. Willard concluded that that we cannot lead moral lives by our own powers, only by the grace of God. That wasn’t exactly his original thought. Luther said much the same thing nearly 500 years ago.

Hawken argues that we cannot solve our environmental problems just by addressing the environment, only by bringing the whole social and economic structure into accord with the environment.

There can be no green movement unless there is also a black, brown and copper movement. What is most harmful resides within us, the accumulated wounds of the past, the sorrow, shame, deceit and ignominy shared by every culture, passed down to every person as surely as DNA, a history of violence and greed. There is no question that the environmental movement is critical to our survival. Our house is literally burning and it is only logical that environmentalists expect the social justice movement to get on the environmental bus. But is the other way around; the only way we are going to put out the fire is to get on the social justice bus and heal our wounds, because in the end there is only one bus.

A cellular view of life

I don't know if Richard Dawkins and Paul Hawken know each other personally, but they are in close physical contact on my book table and they both present a compelling vision of community, but in an unexpected scale. Dawkins, in The Ancestor's Tale, talks about genes, not as a coding device for building a creature, but as a community of cooperators working (not consciously of course) for their own common benefit to create a congenial environment for themselves and their offspring that may be called a cell or a beaver or a pond, depending on your point of view. Hawkens, in Blessed Unrest, expands that vision, starting with the notion that humans are ourselves mostly made up of other life forms, chiefly bacteria that perform many of our vital functions, and then expanding that notion to encompass the thousands of community groups and interests, whether fighting for indigenous peoples or endangered species or threatened places, that keep the planet healthy in the face of a relentless pressure from global capital to create a uniformity that, in his view, is has the same effect economically and culturally as monoculture has environmentally. In diversity is strength and in uniformity is fragility and ultimately danger.

Doug's picks of 2007

Doug sends his “best of 2007” list with the caveat that his record-keeping and/or memory limit the list to his “best of the past four months.” Maybe we should ask him more often. He also omitted any book we read as part of the book group.

David Halberstam, "The Coldest Winter", a retrospective on the Korean War and how it foreshadowed many of our adventures, or misadventures, on that side of the world. Also by Halberstam, "War in a Time of Peace", American involvement in the Balkans.

Walter Issacson, "Einstein", a great story of Einstein's life and times, and also by Issacson, "Benjamin Franklin”, who Franklin really was and what his contribution was.

Joseph Ellis, "American Creation", addresses the question: If you disregard the oft-invoked mechanism of Providential intervention, what then does explain the ability of a society of ordinary rural folks on the far periphery of civilization, well removed from the 18th century centers of learning and culture, to generate a set of leaders and a culture of creativity to produce the American revolutionary experiment, which Ellis views as among the 2 or 3 greatest periods of political creativity in world history?

Doug adds: "If you like fiction, Sherry and I are about halfway through the audio CD of "Middlesex" by Jeffrey Eugenides, and I highly recommend it - at least the first half."

Department of Orotundity

The Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins is the kind of book I imagine a creationist would love, if a creationist could bring herself to read 600 pages of Richard Dawkins. On the other hand, anyone who was that committed to creationism probably would find it more congenial and comforting to re-read the same number of pages in the Bible. In my micro-print Bible, that will include the entire old testament, including the apocrypha. In regular size print it would go at least to Proverbs.

One of the unfortunate things about being a famous (even is small circles) author is that editors hesitate to use the knife on your work. This book could have been improved by a whole set of Santoku blades. Dawkins has some great stuff here, but like the elusive missing link, it’s buried along with the non-essential and non-informative. Dawkins goes on like a genial professor who has more lecture hours to fill than he has germane material, so he throws in casual asides to (he imagines) amuse his students, but really just because he loves to hear himself talk. Casual readers beware: The Ancestor’s Tale should have been a 375 page précis rather than a tome.

If a creationist ever did take the time to read it, she would discover that Dawkins reveals all of evolution’s embarrassing flaws and lapses along with its marvels and complex beauty. We don’t know why humans are hairless, upright and big-brained. We don’t know why some successful animals have sex and others don’t. There’s more we don’t know than what we do. Dawkins, of course, is a confirmed evolutionist and sets out in this book to illustrate some of the fundamental, but almost universally misunderstood principles of evolution along with the gaps yet to be filled in. In that he succeeds, even if his extended metaphor - he is writing "after the manner of" Canterbury Tales - often gets in the way of the information.

The cartoon, which appears in this week’s New Yorker, neatly illustrates one of the bugaboos that confounds both creationists and many evolutionists. One of the things even evolutionists get wrong is that there is no bright line dividing species as you go through the generations, but a continuum. It’s just that from our backward-looking point of view, we see the beginning and the end, but miss the gradually changing middle stages that now may be extinct. He points out a couple of modern exceptions that illustrate the point.

One is the Herring Gull and the Black Backed Gull, which live around the polar region. In Europe they are distinct, but if you follow the Earth either East or West, they gradually fade into each other until, when you get to Siberia, there is no
difference between them. A spatial reconstruction of what evolution normally does in time.

I have to admit I never knew most of the things he writes about, so I guess I shouldn’t complain, but that’s what bloggers are supposed to do, isn’t it?

The politics of science

I almost missed this since it hit over the holidays. Maybe you did, too. The subject is the backlash against Jared Diamond’s books Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse. The original story A Question of Blame When Societies Fall ran in the NY Times on Christmas. (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/25/science/25diam.html?_r=1&oref=slogin).
Here’s an excerpt:

The backlash had been brewing since a symposium last year, “Exploring Scholarly and Best-Selling Accounts of Social Collapse and Colonial Encounters,” at a meeting of the American Anthropological Association in San Jose, Calif. Although “Guns, Germs and Steel” has been celebrated as an antidote to racism — Western civilization prevails not because of inherent superiority, but geographical luck — some anthropologists saw it as excusing the excesses of the conquerors. If it wasn’t their genes that made them do it, it was their geography.

“Diamond in effect argues that no one is to blame,” said Deborah B. Gewertz, an anthropologist at Amherst College. “The haves are not to be blamed for the condition of the have-nots.”

Now Steven Pinker has weighed in, via a letter to The Times: (//topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/p/steven_pinker/index.html?inline=nyt-per:)

Re “A Question of Blame When Societies Fail” (Dec. 25): The conference designed to discredit Jared Diamond highlights the worst of what goes on in contemporary academia. The organizers’ failure to invite Mr. Diamond might be attributed to elementary rudeness were it not for a more damning explanation: they were afraid he would give the lie to their glib accusation that because his work is widely read, it must be oversimplified. These anthropologists’ beef with Mr. Diamond clearly has less to do with the content of his thesis than with the fact that he tries to understand why things happen rather than writing a morality play conforming to their lefter-than-thou politics. Steven Pinker,
Cambridge, Mass.

It is worth noting that Pinker, E.O. Wilson and now Jared Diamond have all come under attack for basically the same thing: saying in print that something other than human culture – usually genes, but in Diamond’s case geography – is at least partly responsible for the way things are in the world. This is an extension of the argument that all human behavior is socially determined and all we have to do to create a utopia is change the system. Pinker, Diamond and Wilson have all been attacked from both the left and the right for research that refutes that premise. If everyone hates them, might they be onto something?