Collide-a-scape

Remember the old saw, “I have some prime swampland to sell you in Florida…”

As this law blog notes, the saying

is based on events of the 1960s and 1970s where local scammers would attempt to induce out of state purchasers to acquire “lucrative” land which, in reality, turned out to be worthless, undevelopable plots.

Well, it sure looks as if a variation of that scam has played out in the late 2000s.  But this time it was Florida Governor Charlie Crist who got fleeced, after he purchased a swath of farmland in the Everglades from Big Sugar. The cane fields are supposed to be reverted back to wetland, a key piece to the famed river of grass. At least that’s how the plan, to much fanfare, was unveiled two years ago.

Monday’s devastating New York Times investigation reveals that this vaunted deal to save the Florida Everglades (which had already been considerably scaled back in terms of obtained acreage),

is instead on track to rescue the fortunes of United States Sugar.

Longtime Everglades watchers (and I’m one of them) will not be surprised by this turn of events. In fact, I can hardly wait for Carl Hiaasen’s next Miami Herald column, which is sure to feast on the sorry particulars uncovered by the Times, such as this:

United States Sugar dictated many of the terms of the deal as state officials repeatedly made decisions against the immediate needs of the Everglades and the interests of taxpayers, an examination of thousands of state e-mail messages and records and more than 60 interviews showed.

Of course, Hiaasen, who, more than anyone, has colorfully and memorably chronicled Florida’s sleazy politics, will be shocked…shocked, at these revelations.

But here’s the important part of the story that people–especially greens– seem to be overlooking. As the Times reports:

Efforts to restore the Everglades have picked up urgency in the last decade: the sprawling subtropical wetland, the only ecosystem of its kind, is dying for lack of clean water. Many environmentalists remain convinced that Mr. Crist’s deal with United States Sugar, even in its downsized form, offers the Everglades its best hope.

Got that? Many environmentalists are going along with the deal. Here’s the next graph in the Times piece:

But documents and interviews suggest that the price tag and terms of the deal could set back Everglades restoration for years, or even decades.

In addition to the cost (which is money that could have been used to speed up existing restoration projections), how might the deal set back the larger effort? Here’s the knife in the heart to Everglades ecologists:

When it came time to decide which land to buy, state officials acknowledged that United States Sugar was, as one official put it during an interview, “pretty much in the driver’s seat.” The water district overseeing the restoration will end up with six large disconnected parcels under the current deal, including all of United States Sugar’s citrus groves.

State officials acknowledged that some of that land, which has been ravaged by canker, a plant disease, is useless for restoration.

Useless for restoration. If that’s really true, then this is indeed a scam deal that should outrage anyone who cares about the Everglades. Now the politics of the Everglades have long been as murky as its waters.  I have some familiarity with this history because in the early 2000s, I wrote a bunch of stories on the Everglades for Audubon Magazine when I was an editor there, and helped put together an Everglades special issue. I also covered some of the more controversial elements for Science Magazine.

This was at a time when the $7.8 billion Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan was being finalized. That’s a whole other can of worms, which Michael Grunwald has covered in its entirety better than anyone.

Anyway, I was curious to see if establishment greens, such as Audubon and the Sierra Club, who are enthusiastic supporters of the Governor’s deal, have been given pause by the recent Times investigation. So far, National Audubon has been mute, and so has the magazine’s blog. Audubon of Florida, its politically influential state office, emulates Pravda in this post from yesterday on the deal, not even mentioning the Times story.

The Sierra Club is also keeping quiet, its boosterish position apparently unchanged from this press release last month.

Meanwhile, some environmental commentators, perhaps unaware of this entanglement, are viewing the Times’ disclosures through a narrow lens. But even if you read through the Times’ long piece, you’d see plenty of evidence of mainstream greens still rationalizing the deal.

Yet, here’s Tom Laskawy’s take in Grist:

I’m not sure what conclusions can be drawn from this report other than U.S. corporations continue to extract billions from taxpayers as easily as taking candy from a baby.

How simplistic. This deal doesn’t happen without the assent of establishment greens, such as Audubon’s national and (very well connected) state officials. They’ve provided the green cover for the Governor. For the sake of the Everglades, I hope they made the right, politically calculated bet. So far, though, it’s not looking that way.

There is much that is astonishing about today NYT story on Somalia, above all this:

One American official recently conceded that Somalia’s “best hope” was the government’s new military chief, a 60-year-old former artillery officer who, until a few months ago, was assistant manager at a McDonald’s in Germany.

Meanwhile, in the Guardian, you can read how the tide may be turning in Somalia, thanks to Sheikh Sharif Ahmed, the current president, whose government controls a few blocks in Mogadishu, the country’s capital. This snippet from the Guardian story is…well, interesting:

Sharif has won praise from western governments and the African Union for his attempts to create viable institutions and financial accountability.

For full whiplash effect, read both the NYT and Guardian pieces back to back.

I’m a little surprised this NYT story by Jeffrey Gettleman hasn’t been noted at Natural Security. It’s about an innovative aid project in Sauri, Kenya that seems to be a big success.  Because the Sauri initiative is among the first of 80 “showcase” projects dreamed up by Jeffrey Sachs, the implications of its success are huge. Gettleman wastes little time in examining the bigger picture:

But the question for Mr. Sachs and his team remains: Is this progress, in development-speak, scalable? In other words, is there a way to take a place like this one and magnify the results by 1,000 times or 10,000 times and wipe out poverty across the developing world?

What follows after that is an interesting capsule debate on the relative merits and pitfalls of foreign aid in developing countries.

And if none of that is enough to pique the interest of environmental security bloggers, the story’s kicker should, which pivots to Sachs discussing the links between poverty and terrorism:

A few years ago, Mr. Sachs said, he came back from Yemen, which has recently become a haven for Al Qaeda, and spoke to American officials about how the country was “broken by hunger, water-stress, disease and poverty” and “sliding closer to the cliff.”

“I told our government all about this,” he said. “But all I got back was a blank stare.”

The social/ecological relationship is one that fascinates me. It seems to have been the theme of this year’s annual Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) symposium, which Piper Corp reports on at the Ecological Society of America (ESA) blog. For those unfamiliar with LTER’s, this gem of a program is in its third decade and is overseen by the National Science Foundation. In 1999, I wrote in Science magazine about some surprising findings from the Phoenix LTER–one of two urban study sites.

The ESA post interested me because of a thorny dilemma highlighted by new research from the Phoenix LTER, which Corp lays out here:

Ecologists frequently consider how to preserve the resilience of ecosystems—how to make sure that they will continue to produce important services as they face stresses like climate change and water shortages. But we can’t have it all. At some point, said Kelli Larson (Central Arizona– Phoenix LTER), we’ll have to make some tough tradeoffs, depending on which services we value the most. Larson’s work looks at residential landscaping in the Southwest, where traditional lawns use more water but homes with pebble-covered yards use more energy to keep cool and more chemicals to control pests artificially. Sustainable living, it seems, begins not with a to-do list but rather with a question: what do we most want to sustain? (And, importantly, what do we need to sustain?)

As recent controversial developments involving renewable energy suggest, the path to sustainability will require us to make all kinds of uncomfortable tradeoffs. Inevitably, those last two questions–what do we most want to sustain and what do we need to sustain will be decided by human values.

Several days ago, Andy Revkin wrote a Dot Earth post about what I would characterize as an ecotopia for conservationists:

After three years of meetings and study, a broad array of conservation groups, government scientists and other experts on North American wildlife policy have produced a road map for restoring some large free-roaming populations of bison in the North American plains.

As Revkin goes on to detail, the plan would have to overcome significant political and cultural hurdles. Tellingly, at the end of his post, Revkin asks a question that hints at his take on the idea:

Can we, or should we, get comfortable with what amounts to an engineered “Eden”?

Ah, what I would give to be able to discuss this more often than the latest skirmish over climate science. Because there is much here that signifies how environmentalists still view nature and humans as separate entities.

One gruff commenter, obviously perturbed at the rewilding concept, nonetheless channels my thoughts when he asks:

what is the reason for this lamentable sentimentalism when it comes to certain animals and physical landscapes? things change.

Another commenter, noting all the positive reaction on the thread to the notion of reintroduced bison, is similarly sarcastic:

It’s fascinating how many of the comments mention the glorious sight of buffalo on the plains…
Are ya just hoping for something better to look at when you drive through?

Did you consider that actual midwesterners would have to be consulted before you went through with your theme-park plan for the Great Plains?

Are *you* going to subsidize the industrial-strength fencing that will keep the behemoths off the highway?

How much to indulge this toxic sentimentality about a mythical before-time when all was bright and clean and morally correct?

As I was reading though the post and comments, I was reminded of a review I wrote four years ago, of a book called Twilight of the Mammoths: Ice Age Extinctions and the Rewilding of America, by Paul Martin. I summarized the book’s concept as thus:

Martin argues for returning the ancient beasts—sloths, saber-toothed tigers, mastodons, and other extinct megafauna—to their old stomping grounds in North America. Okay, what he really wants is to restore their evolutionary lineage by rewilding parts of the American desert and prairie with their latter-day relatives, such as the elephant and the cheetah, whose current prospects in Africa are otherwise considered dim because of poaching and habitat loss.

Now that would be something to see as we drive through.

So climate skeptics of all stripes have an opportunity to demonstrate just how highly they value sound science. As the NY Times reports today, religious conservatives are hitching their anti-evolution agenda to the anti-AGW bandwagon.

Now, as the readers of Climate Depot, Planet Gore, Watts Up With That, Reason’s Hit & Run, and Tom Nelson well know, the evidence for evolution is indisputable.  As the Times puts it, “there is no credible challenge” to Darwin’s theory. Yet there persists this movement among Christian conservatives to teach Intelligent Design alongside evolution in public schools. Recent court rulings have blunted those efforts, so creationists are trying a new tack by linking up with climate skeptics.

Since climate skeptics often talk about the need for sound science in the climate debate, I’m looking forward to reading in the aforementioned blogs about their distress at being co-opted by religious, anti-science ideologues.

UPDATE: Randy Olson, in a recent interview with Marc Morano, elicits this:

RO: Are you an anti-evolutionist?

MM: Haha, not at all.  In fact, you know it’s not an issue.  The implication of your question is that somehow the skeptics are aligned with creationists.  In all my years of dealing with Senator Inhofe the subject of creationism and evolution never even came up.  Someone even did an analysis of it in our scientists report, and I think they may have only found one or two creationists out of 700-some names.

Is Marc Morano a Darwinian evolutionist? If so, that would certainly put him at odds with his former employer, Senator Inhofe.

UPDATE: Kate Sheppard at the Blue Marble has a little fun with the emerging union between climate skeptics and anti-evolutionists:

Why stop at joining climate and evolution? Surely gravity and western medicine can’t be far behind in the firing line for the “teach the controversy” crowd.

A story I’ve been writing about and following closely since last summer has taken another odd and tragic turn. Here’s a can of worms that’s bound to be pried open:

Ted Gardiner, who had many off-the-record and deep background conversations with The Salt Lake Tribune during the past eight months, insisted he had come to the federal agents on his own to try to stop what he saw as immoral trafficking.

Gardiner was the sole source in the biggest sting operation against pothunters in the Southwest. He killed himself on Monday. Will those “conversations” see the light of day?

Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger do a deep dive into the Romm/Pielke Jr. affair. Some trenchant observations made by the Breakthrough boys, such as this one:

Romm knows that a debate with a non-skeptical liberal like Pielke would disrupt the Manichean fairy tale that global warming is an epic struggle by scientists and climate realists against global warming deniers and ignorant reporters. That’s because publicly debating Pielke will inevitably require Romm to acknowledge that Pielke is not a global warming skeptic nor an opponent of action to address global warming.

By contrast, Romm relishes debating skeptics like Morano and relishes offering them a platform precisely because doing so reduces the climate debate to an argument between skeptics, who oppose carbon pollution limits of any kind, and advocates like Romm, who demand emissions reductions in the name of climate science.

Here’s something else they write, which I wonder if establishment greens will take note of:

In the end, Romm’s bullying does not serve efforts to effectively address global warming; it serves the political interests of the self-proclaimed progressive wing of the Democratic Party. As the chief spokesman for climate legislation in Washington and the pointman on climate for the Center for American Progress, Romm is no rogue actor. On the contrary. In framing global warming as apocalypse, polarizing the debate, attacking alternatives to cap and trade, and using character assassination against working journalists and academics, the green and liberal establishment in Washington has, in Romm, precisely the spokesperson it deserves.

It’ll be interesting to see if Romm retains that position of authority going forward. He’s been fierce about the Waxman/Markey bill and utterly scornful of alternative proposals on the table. If a new climate bill is introduced in Congress, especially one that eliminates cap and trade as the major policy mechanism, where does Romm go from there?

Unlike Democrats, Republicans are renowned for their ability to stay on message. As I suggested here, Marc Morano has cunningly exploited recent events to help craft a narrative that will have short-term staying power. So unless he’s getting cocky, this foot stomping imagery probably isn’t what he intended. Yet here he is, going in for the kill:

I seriously believe we should kick them while they’re down. They deserve to be publicly flogged.

Marc, very unsportsmanlike of you.

It’s out there, lurking. Here’s something warm and fuzzy for Westerners to wake up to this morning:

Now before I get into the piece that follows I should explain that I don’t hold any particular animus towards the states of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming or Idaho, and so when I start talking about disposing of nuclear weapons in those states by making use of them it should be taken as merely a technical discussion (grin).

Hey, nothing personal guys. If peak oil hits sooner than expected, what’s a hungry, oil-starved world gonna do?   You’ll just have to grin and bear it.

UPDATE: The nuke the shale out hypothesis has largely generated disgust and disdain from Oil Drum readers. But this person cautions that nothing will be off the table if there’s a true energy shortage:

Well, most may think this is a non starter, but if Peak Oil decline is half as bad as some here think, then you should not be surprised by what actually happens to keep gas tanks full.