We're on the Way Up!

It's bleak at the bottom, but my annual watch of daily minimum temperatures is over. After a few depressing days at 21 degrees, the temperature chart on the Boston Globe weather page ticked up to 22 degrees yesterday. These are just average temperatures, of course, but I now have a reason to hope, at least, that tomorrow will be a little warmer than yesterday. Spring is on the way!

One That Got Away

Around the time of the fortieth anniversary of Woodstock, an op-ed piece appeared in the Boston Globe extolling progress America has made in civil rights and social freedoms as a result of the spirit of love and peace that arose from the sixties as epitomized by Woodstock.

Not surprisingly, I'm prone to looking at the world around me and wondering: "Where did all those hippies go?". I look at the miles of strip malls, the big-box stores, the ubiquitous Chinese crap, the suburban subdivisions grinding up forest and farmland, the religious right, wall street greed. Human nature being what it is, I'm not really surprised. People want to take the easy way out and do what feels good now without considering long-term impacts or affects on others. So what if shopping at Walmart puts Americans out of work and despoils China? I can save ten dollars on that plastic Santa to put on my brown lawn this year! So what if they pour tons of fungicide on the soil and pump fossil water from hundreds of feet underground? I want to supersize my fries at the drive-through!

I wrote this letter, but it didn't make the paper. I'm not surprised. Online comments show there were many responses to the article. When I told my wife that I wrote yet another letter to the paper, her basic response was: "Get a life. Nobody cares what you think." How can I argue with that?



August 29, 2009

Rene’e Loth goes a little too easy on the Woodstock Generation (“Woodstock pays dividends,” Op-Ed, Aug. 28). If body piercings, flip-flops in the White House and corporate branding of things like Woodstock itself represent progress, then those great leaps forward must be balanced against the accomplishments of the culture that also brought us SUVs, McMansions, lawn care service, high fructose corn syrup, an obesity epidemic, reality TV, NASCAR, cage fighting, liar loans, credit default swaps and the Iraq war. For every boomer that paddles a kayak or pedals a bike to work, there are thousands who drive alone in a car. For every hipster who lives in an integrated urban neighborhood or on a commune, there are scores who lust after gated communities.

We boomers like to pat ourselves on the back, but we had our chance and blew it. We talked about peace, love and harmony, but what we really wanted was just the sex, drugs and rock n’ roll. Let’s hope a new generation rises up to foment true revolution.

Photo: "One Minute to Midnight" San Francisco, February 2010

Burning Our Future Forests

A recent article in the Boston Globe about plans to build wood-fired power plants in Massachusetts made me worry that the voracious appetite these plants have for wood, and the scale of the machinery used to harvest the trees will make wise forest management that has traditionally been focused on high-quality hardwood logs impossible. Back in the 70's I observed one of these operations in New Hampshire. They gave lip service to setting aside quality logs for lumber or veneer, but we watched as one beautiful birch after the other went right into the chipper.

Proponents of these plants often make the claim that forests are renewable and that trees can be re-planted. Well, native New England mixed hardwood forests are never planted. They regenerate naturally after harvest, and to ensure that this regeneration happens properly, a trained forester should be involved to make sure harvesting operations are planned and conducted in a way that allows for good quantity and quality of regeneration. The kind of people that worry about delivering tons of chips to a power plant today are not the kind of people who dream about what a woodlot will look like 50 years from now.

My letter in response to the article appeared in the August 2, 2009 paper:

Beth Daley’s piece on proposed wood-burning power plants in Massachusetts ( “On wood, burning questions,” Boston Sunday Globe, July 26, 2009) prompts concern about the future of our forests. To feed the beast of a biomass-burning power plant, trees will likely be harvested by big, expensive machines on very tight production schedules. The pressure to constantly supply huge quantities of chips will prohibit much discrimination in selecting trees for harvest.

The most valuable trees in Bay State forests are high-quality hardwood sawlogs, typically red oak. Deciduous forests in New England are not planted, they arise from natural regeneration. High densities of quality sawlogs don’t just happen, they are nurtured by careful control of regeneration, species composition and stem quality by professionally-trained college-educated foresters known as silviculturists. This careful woodland culture requires thoughtful care over periods that span decades.

While the increased demand for timber that these power plants create may enhance opportunities for timber stand improvement, professional supervision of forest operations with equipment and techniques that harvest the right trees is essential. Biomass might help supply our future energy needs, but the harvest of that biomass must be done in a way that protects the character and value of our forests for generations to come.

Two Ways To End the War

Here's another letter I sent to the Globe. It was prompted by columns by two of their regular columnists:

In his response to Alex’s mom in MoveOn.org (“Answering Alex’s Mom”, June 25), Jeff Jacoby’s “John McCain” answered as only a politician running for national office could. He said how the war is actually going quite well and he didn’t mean that Americans would by actually fighting and dying there for a hundred years, but only babysitting the fledgling democracy.

What he couldn’t tell Alex’s mom is the truth. The truth is that if we were drafting the kids of white, affluent, upwardly-mobile, educated parents like Alex’s mom, this war would be over in about a week. Most of us go through the day without giving the war a thought. Why? Because the burden is inequitably borne by the children of those with little voice and few options. The rest of us get to worry about getting our kids into the very best schools and whether or not high fuel prices will affect our summer vacation plans.

Speaking of fuel prices, Derrick Jackson (“Big Oil and the War in Iraq,” June 24) tells us that, thanks to the sacrifice of those brave American kids, Iraq is finally safe enough for big oil companies to line up to get their hands on Iraqi oil. We whine about four dollar gasoline, but if the price at the pump included that portion of our military budget that is aimed at securing current and future oil supplies for all those crude oil cronies, the uproar to end this war would be deafening.

Malthus Was Only Postponed

Here's a letter I sent to the Boston Globe in response to an opinion piece stating that a global decline in birth rates will lead to woe for future generations. I think we're in for a world of trouble, but too few people is not at the top of my list of concerns. It was published in the June 21, 2008 Boston Globe.

Jeff Jacoby refers to a Malthusian fallacy (The coming population bust, Boston Globe, June 18) and suggests that the world is not overpopulated by humans. The crises of starvation, disease and a destroyed environment that Malthus predicted have not been canceled but merely postponed by the unforeseen discovery of fossil fuel. By using oil and natural gas to power machines, pump water and manufacture fertilizer, we have expanded food production way beyond what we could produce by organic, muscle-powered agriculture alone. When the oil runs out - as it inevitably must - we may well discover that there are, indeed, too many people on this small globe.