The Nature That We Make

[Geee]

American Spectator:

 

Earth Day is getting interesting. Discussions on conservation and environmentalism have gone cosmic. Some argue that much of the contentiousness of environmental politics, especially the divide between economics and environmentalism, represents the New Holy Wars.

Since the days of Gifford Pinchot and John Muir, debate has raged on the relationship between human beings and nature. Should public lands be preserved untouched or made available for "wise and multiple use"? Is nature better left alone to achieve some perceived state of equilibrium or balance? Or is the very idea of a balance, stasis or equipoise, a steady state if you will, really a misperception of a world characterized by flux, upheaval, dynamism and change? Moreover, is mankind a "natural" part of the landscape or an alien invader, a destroyer of worlds? And which version of nature do we want to exploit, protect or restore?

Daniel B. Botkin, a leading ecological scientist, wrote a path-breaking book, a genuine intellectual stimulant, Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the Twentieth-First Century (1990), which demonstrated how human misperceptions of a natural balance in nature actually obstruct solid, scientific efforts at protection or restoration. A revised and updated version of this book will be issued by Oxford University Press in August.

Botkin noted that even a very wild place like the Boundary Waters Canoe Area in northern Minnesota, which "could persist with the least direct human intervention," has, from the end of the last ice age until the time of European colonization, "passed from the ice and tundra to spruce and jack pine forest."

The shift from tundra to spruce to jack and red pine, then to paper birch and alder, and then back to spruce, jack pine and white pine was driven by variable climate. "Which of these forests represented the natural state?" asked Botkin.

"If natural means simply before human intervention, then all these habitats could be claimed as natural, contrary to what people really mean and really want," wrote Botkin. "What people want in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area is the wilderness as seen by the voyageurs and a landscape that gives the feeling of being untouched by people."

[Valin]

Geee

 

Take an example from the Great Lakes. There would be no commercial or recreational fishing to speak of in the Great Lakes absent the exertions of the U.S.-Canadian Great Lakes Fishery Commission (GLFC) to cope with a parasitic invasive, the sea lamprey.

 

The sea lamprey infiltrated the basin, from the Atlantic, via the Welland Canal, which was opened in the early 19th century. Niagara Falls did serve as a kind of barrier until the Canal was modified in 1919.

 

A single sea lamprey can destroy 40 pounds of fish in its lifetime by attaching its mouth to its prey by means of suction. One metric used in the program is the wounding rate found on targeted fish species.

 

I was raised in Duluth Mn. every year around this time the Smelt would make their spawning run, we net them by the 1,000's in a matter of 20-30 minutes. Reason being the sea lamprey eating the lake trout, starting in the 80's the lamprey were destroyed, and Lake Superior was restocked with Salmon and Trout....today no huge runs of smelt.

[Geee]

I used to make them many moons ago. Haven't thought about them in years. Such a shame.