Curt Meine & Bryan Norton: The Pragmatist's View→

Center for Humans & Nature:

“As large systems change slowly, they become sort of the background for what we do. Smaller systems—like our yard, for example—change much more rapidly. I noticed that Leopold had this very sophisticated conception of time and space, even though he introduced it metaphorically. And then I read “Thinking Like a Mountain,” in which Leopold described how he had destroyed the wolf populations [in the American Southwest] and how he later came to regret that after the deer population he was trying to increase started to actually decrease from overpopulation and over-browsing of the mountainside. Leopold wrote about the famous incident where, having killed an old wolf, he watched the green fire die in her eyes. What he learned there, I think, was that wolves function in a larger and slower system than humans do.

Consequently, we can come to hate something like the wolf, even though, once you start to see the wolf’s role in longer-term developments, the wolf becomes almost like a savior, right? Having destroyed the wolves and changed the ecological system, he then regretted it. He fell back on that hierarchical framework to say, “I was thinking only like a human. I was only thinking in terms of increasing the deer herd for hunters. But then I realized that my activities on that level spilled over to affect the usually slower-scale changes.” In fact, he saw the impacts on the ecological scale, the scale at which deer and wolves interact. The deer populations growing out of control were a result of his removing the wolves. So his human thinking destroyed a very complex system.

So what’s interesting about that is that Leopold starts to see the world on three different levels: the human, the ecological, and the evolutionary. And he felt that we can see positive values on each of those three levels. The positive level for humans is generally economic and developmental. The level of interactions among species (wolves and deer, in particular) would be the ecological scale. And what he realized was that, however important our economics are, if we destroy the ecological system, it’s going to come back and bite us even at the human level. So his explanation of why he went wrong was very much based in a scientific model, which he showed through the metaphor of “thinking like a mountain.””

Interesting perspective that we need to broaden our timelines to create pragmatic environmental solutions.

William Laurance: Improving Environment Impact Assessments→

ENSIA:

Illustration by Kelsey King

“The EIA is the frontline of environmental protection in most countries. It’s a legal requirement placed on a developer to measure the impact on nature of their proposed development. If that impact includes anything the government has pledged to protect, such as a threatened species, then the development may be halted or redesigned to avoid the impact.

Or that’s the idea, anyway. The only problem is that the EIAs are rarely stopping bad projects. All around the world we see a growing catalog of cases where EIAs are giving green lights to developments that should never see the light of day — projects that are destroying irreplaceable habitat or threatening the last representatives of endangered species.

Here are eight things we can do to help:... ”

Bigger than Keystone XL: Enbridge Sandpiper→

 Ron Meador, writing for MinnPost:

“Enbridge will proceed to carry, on average, 880,000 barrels of heavy crude oil per day — and potentially higher volumes of lighter grades — from the tar-sands mines of Alberta to the docks and pipeline interconnections at Superior, Wisconsin.

That’s actually a bit more than the design capacity of 830,000 barrels per day for Keystone XL, which would carry oil from the Alberta tar sands and the Bakken oil patch in North Dakota to refineries mostly in the Gulf Coast region.”

Dave Shaffer, Star Tribune, Enbridge Files to Replace Problem Pipeline in Minnesota:

“Enbridge decided to replace Line 3 rather than repair the 34-inch-diameter pipe because that would require digging in about 900 places where tests revealed problems. The pipeline suffers from corrosion because the protective tape on the steel has not held up, Little said.

The project is expected to face opposition from environmental groups, including climate activists who are fighting pipelines like TransCanada’s proposed Keystone XL in western states as a way to slow development of Alberta’s tar sands.

“It traverses some of the most important lake country, aquifers and water resources in Minnesota,” said Richard Smith, president of the Friends of the Headwaters, an environmental group based in Park Rapids that wants the Sandpiper and Line 3 to avoid the headwaters of the Mississippi River. “That is why we have advocated a different route.””

Adding capacity. Walking away from the existing Line 3. Matters are worse.

Leading Canadian ecologist calls on scientists to recover policy influence→

Ron Meador, reporting for MinnPost: 

“David Schindler made plain in a talk Tuesday evening entitled “Letting the Light In: Providing Environmental Science to Direct Public Policy,” on the University of Minnesota’s St. Paul campus.

Schindler is a Minnesota-born engineer turned freshwater ecologist, a longtime leader in Canada’s environmental academy in part because his résumé includes deep involvement as a scientist in the battles over acid rain, eutrophication, dioxins and, more recently, the impacts of oil production from the Alberta tar sands.”