Cool. Someone, Edward "Red Ted", is reading this stuff and was inspired to respond!

I want to move beyond his post and look at some of the barriers to better decision making. Jones focuses his ire in the forest article on environmentalists who respond with knee-jerk vitriol any time a forest products company gets near a forest. He argues that this vitriol makes it impossible to build a sustainable plan. He does not look at where the vitriol comes from.

For many years we have been told, correctly to the best of my knowledge, that American forest management has been a federally subsidized boondoggle for the firms with national connections who pull wood from the forests for below cost, break up ecosystems, and clear-cut every chance they get. From the environmentalist perspective, forest service companies have shown that they can not be trusted.

This is contrary to U.S. history. The U.S. Forest Service was founded with the mission to expedite the exploitation of western resources on federal lands and assure a steady supply of the materials needed by a growing nation. The economic and political health of the nation depended on those resources. Every citizen in the nation benefited from this, a classic case of the exploitation of a small segment for the benefit of the community as a whole, the opposite of a commons problem.

Forest Service personnel pursued their mission with near religious fervor, certain that they were doing good works in association with admirable private sector entities - the forest products companies. Fire suppression was part of their work to preserve those resources from needless destruction so that they could be used to build homes for a growing nation dedicated to individual prosperity, the first nation of home owners, the Jeffersonian ideal of independence and individual sufficiency. Forests were renewable resources, like crops, and were harvested in the most efficient and effective ways that could be devised by a public/private partnership. In addition to fire suppression the Forest Service built roads to facilitate access to the forests. It was a patriotic duty gladly performed.

They were not, are not, bad people. They are not "untrustworthy". They are salt-of-the-earth heroes joyously doing difficult and dangerous work with the inner peace and satisfaction that comes from self-sacrifice in the interests of the community as a whole. They helped make America great. But, they didn't quite understand the ecology of western forests or anticipate the long term results of growth.

No one did that was in a position to influence policy. Long term residents that had made progress toward becoming native to their environments and the indigenous people who were native to these places knew better, but they were not influential. Those who knew how to live well didn't know how to operate the machinery of society. They had neither wealth nor power and lacked the social graces to be taken seriously by policy makers. They had little formal education and spoke in ways that could not be understood by those who had power. Their tacit knowledge and situational wisdom was not respected or valued by those who felt that knowledge wasn't valuable until it was codified, written up in papers that could be consumed by monks who never had dirt on their hands or calluses anywhere but on the tips of the fingers of their writing hand.

Formulating useful and effective environmental policy requires long term thinking, anticipating the future consequences of present behavior, but it also benefits from understanding the events that created present conditions. As a historian I suspect that Edward understands this well; past history and future history can be approached in similar ways. At any given point on the arrow of time events have a trajectory, the momentum imparted by past events, which imparts inertial resistance to present and future efforts to alter that trajectory. It is puerile to rage against that inertia, what's done is done. Better we should calmly note these initial conditions and work with them to achieve desired future objectives.

The source of the vitriol of naive pseudo-environmentalists is a politics based in ignorance. It is willful ignorance, a cultivated ignorance, an ignorance so useful they don't want to get rid of it. It's what Aquinas called ignorantia affectata. Ignorance can sometimes be cured though not easily or quickly. Progress is often made funeral by funeral as old bigotries die along with their hosts. Our need for enlightened and effective environmental policy is more important than the cherished hatreds of political activists. Though they are suffused with fervor, true believers in their creed, they are wrong and we need to move beyond them. If they can remake themselves and rejoin humanity in its efforts to live mindfully then fine, but our progress should not depend on their approval. The environment should not be hostage to political objectives that are indifferent to the environment, that only use it as a wedge to gain power.