One of the biggest debates over environmental stewardship is whether a degraded ecosystem is best left completely alone to recover or whether it should instead be restored by increasing human intervention and management.
A perfect example of this is the conifer forests of California, extending over nearly 30,000 square miles. For millennia, lightning strikes ignited fires that routinely thinned the underbrush and most of the smaller trees, a process that was essential to maintaining a healthy ecosystem. But California’s forests have been transformed. Forest fires have been suppressed, which has caused these forests to develop tree densities 5–10 times greater than historic levels. More recently, environmental regulations have suppressed human activities—logging, grazing, prescribed burns, and mechanical thinning—that mimic the role that natural fires used to play.
As a result, California’s forests are tinderboxes, and the wildfires that aren’t immediately suppressed become catastrophic rather than quickly contained. Hence, the debate grows: do we permit activities that manage California’s forests or adopt a completely hands-off approach and trust ecosystems to eventually rebound?
Corrupting this debate is the perpetual claim that climate change is driving most of the observed ecosystem dysfunction. But if climate change is indeed a significant problem, it ought to strengthen the argument for more aggressive ecosystem management. Manage the density of the forests. Bring back logging and grazing. Allow landowners to harvest timber, and allow them to cut and burn off underbrush.
Another permanently altered ecosystem is California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Over a century ago this massive, 1,100 square mile floodplain was channelized, with levees surrounding dry land that subsided as the peat bogs dried up. With much of this land now at or below sea level, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta cannot possibly be restored.
But here again, environmentalist regulations have stopped activities that were helping maintain this altered ecosystem. For decades after the levees were built, farmers regularly dredged the channels adjacent to their land. This not only helped prevent flooding, but the deeper channels created habitat friendly to the native salmon, helping them successfully migrate while avoiding the introduced species of bass predators that prefer warmer and shallower water.
Today, apart from a few ship channels, dredging has come to a complete halt in the delta. It’s not the cost of doing the actual work of dredging. That expense is insignificant compared to navigating the gauntlet of local, regional, state, and federal agencies, all staffed with environmentalist bureaucrats who demand far more analysis, reports, and permit fees than any private landowner can hope to afford.
Everywhere on earth, permanently altered ecosystems are typical in the 21st century. In some cases, setting aside areas for complete nonintervention can be an effective choice. But there are glaring examples where doing nothing is a terrible choice. Two examples hold immediate relevance: the Aral Sea and Lake Chad.
In both cases, these bodies of water are disappearing, and in both cases, the primary cause is diversions for agriculture, although, of course, the conventional environmentalist wisdom is that the shrinkage is primarily due to climate change. Again, however, even if climate change is the primary cause, that only strengthens the case for intervention over a hands-off approach. And the most decisive intervention—interbasin water transfers—is likely to make an environmentalist’s head explode. That does not mean it isn’t the most practical solution, if not the only practical one.
Big new infrastructure in the form of interbasin transfers of water could rescue from oblivion two of the world’s biggest manmade environmental disasters. In Central Asia, diversions from the Syr Darya and Amu Darya rivers to irrigate cotton fields caused the Aral Sea to dry up. At 26,000 square miles, it was the third-largest inland lake in the world, eclipsed only by the Caspian Sea and by Lake Superior. Today, it is almost gone, reduced to barely 1,200 square miles. Its estimated volume has shrunk from nearly 900 million acre-feet to less than 20 million acre-feet.
If destroying the agricultural economies of Central Asia is not an option, there are other possibilities. Water from the massive Ob-Irtysh watershed drains 330 million acre feet into the Arctic Ocean in an average year. A system of pump stations and canals moving 10–20 million acre-feet per year could be diverted from an upstream tributary south through Kazakhstan to refill the Aral Sea.
There are other possibilities, equally ambitious but equally possible. Water from the Volga watershed flows into the Caspian Sea at an average rate of over 200 million acre-feet per year. A percentage of this flow could also be tapped to refill the Aral Sea. If necessary to compensate for the loss, a series of tunnels and canals could transport water from the Black Sea eastward into the below sea level Caspian Sea.
Another disappearing lake, also affecting temperature, rainfall, fisheries, soil, and air quality on a near-continental scale, is Lake Chad in the heart of the African Sahel. Again, irrigation diversions have shrunk this lake from nearly 10,000 square miles to less than 200 square miles. Its estimated volume has dropped from not quite 150 million acre-feet to less than one million acre-feet. But there is a remedy: the mighty Congo River.
Flowing less than 1,000 miles from Lake Chad is the Ubangi River, a northern tributary of the Congo. Well upstream from its confluence with the Congo, the Ubangi sustains a flow of over 100 million acre feet in an average year. Diverting less than 10 percent of this flow northward would be more than enough to refill Lake Chad.
Projects this big are not beyond serious consideration. In 2004, a team of Russian scientists proposed to revive the plan to divert a portion of the Ob-Irtysh to refill the Aral Sea. In Africa, a coalition of nations in the region has been deliberating over various diversion designs to transfer water from the Ubangi to Lake Chad. In both cases, the economic development along the canal corridors would be tremendous, as would the prospects economically and ecologically if these lakes were restored.
In California, where projects of comparable scope already exist in the form of the State Water Project and the Central Valley Project, government is so paralyzed by bureaucracy, corruption, litigation, and environmentalist fanaticism that the very idea of building even more infrastructure to remedy environmental challenges is anathema. That’s unfortunate, because California has its own shrinking sea.
Less than 200 miles from downtown Los Angeles is the sprawling Salton Sea, a 350-square-mile artificial lake that was created by accident just over a century ago when the Colorado River was diverted for nearly two years into what had been a dry, below-sea-level basin. Farmers in the Imperial Valley used to drain their irrigation runoff into the Salton Sea, a process that both prevented it from drying up and also gradually contaminated the water with pesticide and fertilizer residue. Now that Imperial Valley farmers are selling more water to San Diego for municipal use and converting to drip irrigation, the Salton Sea is drying up. But there is a solution. Build a tunnel from the Pacific Ocean just north of San Diego to transport water into the Salton Sea. Since the Salton Sea is 230 feet below sea level, the descending water could generate electricity, which could be used to desalinate it.
For a California bureaucrat today, the very idea of such a project is laughable. For a public servant back in the 1950s, however, such a project might have already been built, had the need arisen back then.
Manmade environmental challenges, whether they concern forests, deltas, or shrinking inland lakes, can be successfully addressed with approaches that embrace intervention rather than avoid it as much as possible. Big infrastructure can be part of an interventionist package. If it weren’t for big infrastructure, the megapolis called Los Angeles would not exist. Nor, for that matter, would most of the territory of the Netherlands, where hundreds of miles of dikes protect farms, cities, and millions of people from the North Sea.
In a world profoundly altered by human civilization, choosing to actively manage ecosystems can often be the best option. In many cases, dogmatically ruling out intervention including massive investments in new infrastructure can do more harm than good.
Homo Sapiens has populated the planet earth for a very, very long time. As a species we are looked upon as either risen apes or fallen angels. Most of our species was marginally sentient to their environment and until the advent of gunpowder and technology were, from a historical perspective, never considered detrimental or even influential when it came to rivers, lakes, oceans, estuaries, marshes, swamps, forests, prairies and the associated flora and fauna. Mankind is not responsible for the disappearance of Mammoths, Mastodons. Megalodons or countless other species which existed not even 65 million years ago but perhaps a mere 20,000 years ago. It is speculated that about 25 species of plant and animals experience extinction every day. Humans are not responsible for killing all of them.
However humans are responsible for terminating the Passenger Pigeon, the Ivory Billed Woodpecker, the Carolina Parakeet, the Tasmanian Wolf and countless other species of animals and plants as well as transformational topographical changes that have eliminated lakes, marshes and rivers while in some locations doing the complete opposite.
Having watched with considerable dismay, and ire, the clearcutting of coastal forests in British Columbia leaving stumps almost ten stories high that stretched for miles I was once tempted to go into forestry management as a profession. Replacing those several thousand year old forests with Ponderosa Pine is like replacing your grandparents with your sperm count. It simply isn’t the same. Those forests, like the huge Redwoods and Sequoias indigenous to Coastal California, are never affected by lightning strikes to thin their populations. Such trees are many thousands of years old. Having traversed, camped, hiked and fished in forests in Michigan, NY, Washington, Oregon and Canada I have frequently seen the stumps of trees that were alive before Columbus arrived and had I walked in the forests that James Fenimore Cooper wrote about when it was said that a squirrel could jump from NYC to the Great Lakes without touching the ground I’m sure I would have been humbled by such sheer majesty. There are still some places where Nature remains the original author. Forests surrounding the Northern Orinoco River that W.H. Hudson wrote about still remain intact today. However much of the world has been affected by the efforts of what I still consider a risen ape and, as such, has become a species crafted by an creator which now, like a prodigal son, affects both the parent what he has bequeathed.
Considering the above I might be considered and environmentalist and to a great extent I am. We should all be concerned. However current environmental policies are a sham and often completely out of touch with sound practices because they are completely about politics and very little about original intensions in an environment sense. Obviously the California fires associated with ignoring the need for thinning trees, clearing underbrush, establishing fire zones and providing access to water for warding off potential conflagrations should be obvious. But first the Democratic political class would have to become educated and then have to agree with Republicans and that is not the way they want to fast tract votes for themselves. They were hoping no one noticed and bet that a fire would not happen prior to the election.
An example of damage caused by humans and the management based on recognizing the need for intervention would be Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge. The area provides habitat for hundreds of thousands of migratory waterfowl. It used to do so for millennia but around seven hundred years ago, and until the 1930’s, humans have in so many ways encroached and decimated the region. It was not until the 1930s that the Army Corps of Engineers working with Civilian Corps did something right among the many things that they have done wrong. Today water is properly saved and diverted to create a flood plain that is perhaps better than it originally was. There are many such regions which are similarly managed in a positive way and their management started way before radical environmentalists decided that environmental issues were dear to the hearts of voters and deserved political attention. And they are right. Unfortunately like so many other things the progressive liberal authoritarians champion they mismanage and ultimately destroy.
It is estimated that around sixty-five million years years ago a critical event upended 225 million years of sophisticated evolved life on planet earth. Without that happening a creature far smaller than a Virginia Opossum with less than half the intelligence may not have had the opportunity to become the creature, Homo Sapiens, now considered to be responsible for everything which is not right with our environment. That is obviously no where near true but what is true is that mankind has to be involved in environmental management and that nothing will be effectively done until the radical environmentalists are returned to a primordial irrelevance so we can all get on to doing what is right that is long overdo.