HinesSight

Getting the facts straight on saving the Metolius

I'm thrilled that the state legislature has passed HB 3298, which will stop destination resorts from ruining the mostly unspoiled Metolius River basin in central Oregon -- which my wife and I visit regularly.

But it's disturbing that misinformation about the basin being designated an Area of Critical State Concern keeps being thrown out by the Portland Oregonian, Bend Bulletin, and other news sources (both in editorials and supposedly unbiased stories).

So I want to get some facts straight.

(1) HB 3298 isn't a end run around the state's land use system. Instead, it makes use of the Area of Critical State Concern designation process that has been part of Oregon law since 1973, when the legislation that enacted statewide land use planning (SB 100) was enacted.

The Oregon legislature first authorized the designation of an Area of Critical State Concern (ACSC) as part of the legislation creating the statewide land use program (Senate Bill 100) in 1973.
 
At that time, several areas were identified as possibly warranting state protection in the face of uncontrolled development, including the Columbia River Gorge, areas of the Oregon Coast, and portions of the Metolius basin. Several of these areas were later protected through federal action, or through special state land use goals.
 
While the Metolius area was not immediately protected, Jefferson County did plan most of the basin as forest lands – limiting further development to forest-related uses.

(2) The "Jefferson County approvals" that are being overturned are the work of only three people. A recent editorial in the Oregonian makes it sound as if the citizens of Jefferson County were behind the push to rezone forest lands so destination resorts could grow there instead of trees.

Actually, the rezoning was initiated by three county commissioners. Repeat, three.

That's all it takes to change long-standing land use policies on private land in the Metolius basin: three people (actually, just two, since they constitute a majority on the board of commissioners).

Yes, public hearings were held on the proposed rezoning. But the commissioners don't have to follow what the public wants, only hear what citizens have to say.

So even though residents of the Metolius basin spoke overwhelmingly against the destination resorts when a hearing was held in Camp Sherman, that didn't matter to the three commissioners. They approved the rezoning anyway, against the wishes of locals.

(3) Those seeking to build the destination resorts haven't gotten final land use approvals. Reporting and editorials on this issue often make it sound like the resort developers were all ready to start construction before the nasty legislature put a road block in their way with HB 3298.

Not true.

No rezoning has occurred, because an appeal of the Jefferson County action is still before the state Supreme Court (see Carla Axtman's excellent summary of the destination resort timeline here).

Now, there's a close connection between the legal notion of "vesting" and the attempt to paint Metolian developers Shane Lundgren and Jim Kean as unfairly treated by HB 3298. (Vesting refers to when construction is far enough along to be "grandfathered in" when a land use law is passed that would prohibit the development.)

This year the Oregon Court of Appeals issued a ruling in the Cyrus case. Here's an excerpt from a concurring opinion in the ruling by Judge Sercombe.

I am not aware of any Oregon cases in which a property owner has acquired "vested rights" where construction was undertaken and partially completed while the right to begin construction was itself at issue in pending litigation. 

Meaning, if a property owner moves ahead while appeals of the decision that approved the development are being considered, that's "bad faith" -- because it reflects a disregard of our legal system. More from Judge Sercombe:

The general common-law rule is that "[a] landowner lacks the requisite good faith when he proceeds with construction before an appeal period has expired."

In the case of the destination resorts, no on-the-ground construction has occurred. However, editorials have said that Kean spent big money (millions, if I recall correctly) on his plans, believing that he had a go-ahead for development.

If this is true, he's a poor businessman, because Kean and Lundgren don't have any final land use approval yet. And it is bad form (plus bad faith, legally) to press ahead with development when appeals haven't been exhausted.

Well, this doesn't get me to the bottom of the barrel of inaccuracies that have been spewed about the Metolius-saving legislation. But at least I've corrected some of the most egregious untruths that have been spread about.

I'll end with a You Tube video that I took today as I walked with my wife (Laurel) and dog (Serena) on a hike along the Metolius River -- downstream from the Camp Sherman store.

As I stroll along I talk about how great it is that the Metolius has been protected from the destination resorts, and mention reasons why HB 3298 needed to pass.

The best part of the video, of course, is the Metolius -- one of the nation's most beautiful rivers.

House passes Metolius Basin protection bill -- great news!

This is a great day for Oregon.

The state House of Representatives just changed course and voted 31-28 to approve HB 3298, which prevents destination resorts from being built in the Metolius River Basin.

Thanks to the courageous legislators who had the guts to vote "yes" rather than "no" after hearing from so many concerned constituents -- like me.

Here's the full Oregonian story:

Reversal: House passes Metolius protections bill
by Michelle Cole, The Oregonian
Monday June 22, 2009, 10:21 AM

SALEM -- In a stunning reversal from last week, the Oregon House on Monday passed a bill declaring the Metolius River basin a Critical Area of Statewide Concern.

The 31-28 vote sends House Bill 3298 on to Gov. Ted Kulongoski, who has fought to get it passed.

In brief and a fairly unemotional 10-minute debate, Rep. Larry Galizio, D-Tigard, said he had changed his mind and supported the bill. Galizio said he was convinced following a "convincing" phone call from the governor and "an outpouring" of letters and other contacts from the public.

Kulongoski had moved to create the new protections after developers launched plans for two new destination resorts near the river.

 --Michelle Cole; michellecole@news.oregonian.com

From the grave, Tom McCall says "Save the Metolius"

I don't cry easily. But this morning I teared up while reading a moving piece by the son of Tom McCall, who was a Republican governor of Oregon from 1967 to 1975.

Tom W. L. McCall Jr. writes about his father's love for the Metolius River basin, which currently is threatened by destination resorts that would be allowed in this wild and scenic area by a Jefferson County rezoning.

If you aren't familiar with this astoundingly beautiful area of central Oregon, which my wife and I visit frequently, here's some photos that I took recently. Look, and you'll fall in love with the Metolius from afar.

Unfortunately, a bill that would stop the destination resorts -- which could markedly reduce the flow of springs and creeks that are the sole source of the Metolius River -- has been derailed by a single vote in the Oregon House of Representatives (the bill passed the Senate).

I'm deeply irritated by the legislators who failed to understand that this is our only chance to preserve the Metolius Basin from developments desired by county politicians because they wrongly believe this would increase property tax revenues.

But all will be forgiven if one of the five Dem "No's" on the bill changes his mind and HB 3298 comes back to life.

I hope they'll read Tom McCall Jr's marvelously written essay (see below). The next to last paragraph is the one that caused tears to flow in me.

If you're moved to help save the Metolius -- doesn't matter where in the world you live -- click here, scroll to the June 18 entry, and email the state representatives who are listed. Tell them you feel just like Tom McCall: preserving the Metolius Basin is worth whatever sacrifice it takes.

Read and (maybe) weep:

Reflections on this day flow over me in words and images as clear and pristine as the waters of the Metolius.   The Metolius flows through the ages of time strong and pure, carving its valley, and nurturing all around it. The Metolius lives today with civilization, in a mutually supportive, accommodating, and sustaining relationship.  We must not deceive ourselves by thinking—for one moment—that a massive injection of suburbia into the quiet woodlands and meadows nurtured by the river will not plunder and massively disfigure this natural treasure.

 This is a moment in time when Oregonians have the chance to protect a wonder of nature that my father cherished.  My father considered the Metolius River Basin to be in the same extraordinary natural Endowment that includes the Oregon Beaches, the Columbia River Gorge, and Crater Lake -- all legacy public resources that deserved special and everlasting protection.  Sadly, my father's life was cut short before he could ensure the permanent protection of the Metolius.  This left a gaping hole in his conservation hopes for Oregon.

 Nevertheless, Tom McCall did set up a process that lives beyond his life to afford Oregonians a method by which to ensure protection of a landmark treasure like the Metolius.  This process is the designation of the LCDC and Area of Critical Concern, all contained within SB100, which is the original land use law.  It is a fitting and profound continuation of Tom McCall's legacy to see Oregonians today invoke the protection of the LCDC and the designation of an Area of Critical Concern for the clear purpose he envisioned.

 I wish to recount a story from my father's final days, which Oregonians who enjoy the fruits of my father's passionate commitment to Nature and conservation will appreciate:  During his campaign against Measure 6, Tom McCall said, "You all know I have terminal cancer—and I have a lot of it.  But what you may not know is that stress induces its spread and induces its activity.  Stress may even bring it on.  Yet stress is the fuel of the activist.  This activist loves Oregon more than he loves life.  I know I can't have both very long.  The trade-offs are all right with me.  But if the legacy we helped give Oregon and which made it twinkle from afar—if it goes, then I guess I wouldn't want to live in Oregon anyhow."

 There is only one choice—only one issue—facing us at this moment:  preserve the Metolius, or destroy it.  Take your choice.  And may that choice be to preserve this pristine river as I and millions of others have for decades. You, the public, can be part of the legacy my father helped give Oregon by being one of those who rises in passion to Save the Metolius.  My father's spirit is “twinkling from afar,” relishing in Oregon's passion for conservation.

(A recent Salem Statesman Journal editorial calling for the passage of HB 3298 provides another perspective on saving the Metolius.)

This isn't a cooling decade, global warming deniers

I will confess to criticizing a Portland right-wing talk show host, Victoria Taft, without listening to much of what she said.

All I needed to hear via my car radio channel surfing were words along the lines of, "The Earth is cooling this decade; so much for global warming."

No, Victoria, you're wrong. I realize that facts don't mean much to conservative talk radio, but it's still irresponsible to spout such erroneous B.S.

Check out: "Very warm 2008 makes this the hottest decade in recorded history so far."

I recall Victoria Taft blabbing on about how 2008 was the coolest year in ages, so in her science-challenged brain this fit right in with the delusional belief that global warming is a fantasy cooked up by Al Gore and other liberals who are trying to use a fictional environmental crisis as an excuse to embrace the Green Savior of socialist big government.

Actually, this graph from the "Very warm" article speaks the truth.

"Climate is about long-term trends. Perhaps the most interesting fact is that 2008 is on track to be almost 0.1°C warmer than the decade of the 1990s as a whole – and warmer than any year of last century beside (the El-Niño-enhanced) 1998.

The decade of the 2000s — 2000 to 2009 — will almost certainly be the hottest decade in at least 2000 years (see “Sorry deniers, hockey stick gets longer, stronger: Earth hotter now than in past 2,000 years“).

So once again, right-wing talk radio gets it wrong ("it" encompassing just about every subject).

I love to blog about these blunders. I'd put up more posts on this subject, but the blunder-picking is so easy, I could devote my full blogging-time to exposing the inanities of Victoria Taft and her comrades in lies.

Democrats lose me on their Metolius vote

I registered as a Democrat to be able to vote for Obama in the 2008 presidential primary. Now it looks like I'll be joining the non-affiliated ranks again.

Because I'm super-ticked off at the Oregon Democratic Party after five Dems, including the House Speaker (Dave Hunt) voted against saving the Metolius Basin from destination resorts.

Hence, as Blue Oregon reported via a live blog, HB 3298 failed by one vote.

What's the point of working hard to get Democrats elected, plus donating a bunch of money to the party, when they cave on one of the most important bills of the 2009 legislative session?

This is the first time since last November that I've seriously -- way seriously -- regretting signing on as a Democrat. I've always been cynical about political parties, figuring that it was better to remain unaffiliated to keep the Democrat/Republican B.S. from sticking to me.

Suddenly I feel very sticky.

I felt a little better after dashing off the following email to Rep. Hunt. If Oregon Democrats won't stand up for one of the most special places in Oregon, I'll make my Metolius statement by walking away from the Democratic party

Rep. Hunt, I note that you voted against the bill to protect the Metolius Basin. Shameful. This was the most important bill this session for my wife and me, who are frequent visitors to the Metolius and are familiar with the property-tax desiring machinations of the Jefferson County commissioners. We've also been big contributors to the Democratic Party.

Last year I changed my voter registration from a long-standing "unaffiliated" to become a member of the Democratic Party. I'll be changing back to an Independent again after seeing that gaining a Democratic majority doesn't make any difference on crucial environmental issues. If you're out to bring Democrats down to earth after successes in 2006 and 2008, you're off to a great start with this vote.

Oregon land use news: Metolius and Measure 49

A thumbs-up and a thumbs-down on the land use front this blogging day...

On the positive side, we just got the Spring 2009 "View from the Summit" Crag Law Center newsletter.

Our neighborhood has gotten terrific legal support from Ralph Bloemers and other Crag staff in our fight against a Measure 37 subdivision that threatened to dry up wells and a community lake in this groundwater limited area.

Ralph and fellow attorney Courtney Johnson wrote an excellent piece, "Learning Lessons from Oregon's Experiment with Measure 37." It focuses on how Measure 49, which restored much-needed fairness and balance to the state's land use system, is being implemented.
Download Crag Measure 37 article

Note the photograph in the top right. I took it.

Now, the thumbs down.

Usually I agree with Steve Duin. He's a columnist for the Portland Oregonian who frequently writes about environmental issues and rips on DEQ when it deserves ripping.

But his "Once More Into the Metolius" didn't accurately describe the effort to save central Oregon's fragile Metolius River Basin from two large destination resorts.

Duin makes it sound like this is a personal crusade by two Democratic state senators, Betsy Johnson and Ginny Burdick -- who own property along the Metolius.

That isn't true.

Central Oregon Landwatch, Friends of the Metolius, 1000 Friends of Oregon, and many others -- including the vast majority of those who live full-time in Camp Sherman and the surrounding area -- are supporting legislation that would designate the Metolius Basin an "area of critical state concern."

As permitted under state law, as I explained in this post, which gave another thumbs-down to an Oregonian editorial about the Metolius that also got its facts wrong.

So the effort to save the Metolius from destination resorts isn't an end-run around Oregon's land use laws. It is making use of them to preserve one of the state's natural treasures. Which is what countless Oregonians want, not just a few legislators.

Metolius editorial in Oregonian wrong again

Oregon's largest newspaper, the Oregonian, is dead-set on defending large destination resorts that threaten the fragile -- and drop-dead beautiful -- Metolius River basin.

Today's editorial outrage is "A Process of Critical Concern." It repeats a previous erroneous contention by the editorial board that current governmental and legislative efforts to protect the basin are end-runs around the state's land use planning system.

But for those who believe the state has an effective and respected system for sifting environmental, recreational, economic, agricultural, housing and other needs, the process that was engineered to protect the Metolius was far less beautiful than the river. The developers and Jefferson County officials who invested money and time into legally navigating the difficult approval process are entitled to the frustration they feel, after being knocked off their horses in midstream.

Fact 1: The process that's led to the Metolius River Basin being recommended for approval as an Area of Critical State Concern (ACSC) has been a state law since 1973, as the Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development points out.

The Oregon legislature first authorized the designation of an Area of Critical State Concern (ACSC) as part of the legislation creating the statewide land use program (Senate Bill 100) in 1973.
 
At that time, several areas were identified as possibly warranting state protection in the face of uncontrolled development, including the Columbia River Gorge, areas of the Oregon Coast, and portions of the Metolius basin. Several of these areas were later protected through federal action, or through special state land use goals.
 
While the Metolius area was not immediately protected, Jefferson County did plan most of the basin as forest lands – limiting further development to forest-related uses.

So the process that is of such "critical concern" to the Oregonian editorial board is well-established.

It just hasn't been used until now, because never before has there been such an ill-considered attempt by a county to trash an irreplaceable natural treasure for some cash: property tax revenues.

Fact 2: Which gets us to one of the words in the Oregonian editorial: "midstream." Yes, the developers and Jefferson County officials are midstream in their efforts to add 3,000 homes and 10,000 people (at peak times) to an area that now has only a few hundred full-time residents.

So where is the unfairness? Just as the developers had the right to ask Jefferson County to rezone their forest land to permit destination resorts, so do the people of Oregon have the right to say "No way!" before the permitting process has been completed.

Which, it hasn't been. Over at BlueOregon, Carla Axtman has documented this in an excellent series of informative posts. Here and here she talks about the unfinished nature of the land use approval request.

In 2006, the Jefferson County Commission changed the zoning map to allow the resorts. However the process that allowed those changes is now in part in front of the Oregon Supreme Court. Thus the 2006 zoning map is still on hold and has not gone into effect.

With the two destination resorts still sitting on land zoned just for forest management/timber harvesting, the landowners can't file the land use applications to build the proposed resorts. In other words, neither of these landowners has the established right to build these resorts.

Nor should they.

Hopefully the legislature will agree with the Land Conservation and Development Commission, which held several public hearings on this issue, that the Metolius Basin needs to be designated an Area of Critical State Concern. (HB 3100 is the vehicle for doing this.)

The Oregonian editorial made it sound like the big bad state is trying to overturn a popular local decision. Wrong.

As I told a legislative committee that was holding a hearing on another bill to limit destination resorts, almost everybody in the Camp Sherman area (the main community in the Metolius basin) is opposed to the destination resorts.

The rezoning process was initiated by a few would-be developers, and pushed along by a few county commissioners. Money was, and is, the overriding factor for both parties.

Yet a study has shown that destination resorts actually cost local governments more taxes than they bring in. And the state is willing to allow the developers to use land in a less environmentally sensitive area for their destination resorts.

So saving the Metolius Basin from unneeded harmful development is entirely lawful, appropriate, and fair. Oregonian editorial board, you got it wrong.

Destination resorts cost Oregon taxpayers a lot

Last Thursday I fired up our Prius and trundled down to the Capitol to testify in favor of a bill that would prevent additional destination resorts from trashing Oregon's beauty and livability.

Having gotten to the hearing room early, a rarity for me, I was one of the first people to sit at the HB 2227 witness table.

Early on in my testimony I plugged a 2007 blog post, "Save the Metolius from destination resorts," quoting an outrageous remark by Bill Bellamy, a Jefferson County commissioner.

"Whether or not you like what destination resorts have done, it's phenomenally significant what they do to property tax revenues."

Against the wishes of local residents in the Camp Sherman area, Jefferson County pushed through zoning changes that would allow two large destination resorts in and near the Metolius River basin.

Currently the full-time population of the basin is only several hundred. The resorts would add up to 10,000 more people at peak times.

Terrible idea.

I told the Oregon House Land Use Committee that we were drawn to become part owners of a forest service cabin on the Metolius because the area was so unspoiled.

Black Butte Ranch, a nearby destination resort, didn't appeal to us because we wanted to vacation in natural surroundings rather than golf courses, swimming pools, and paved bike paths.

This, I said, is what draws visitors to the Metolius and other world-class environmental attractions in Oregon. It sure isn't destination resorts. How many people go to the Grand  Canyon or Yellowstone National Park because they've heard of a great resort there?

Not many, for sure.

I was pleased to hear Rep. Mitch Greenlick ask another witness a question along that very line, after this Chamber of Commerce type had testified that destination resorts are just the most wonderful thing, because they attract so many visitors to Oregon.

Greenlick wanted her to comment on the idea that what draws people to areas like the Metolius River Basin is their naturalness -- a lack of subdivison-like destination resorts and other quasi-urban amenities.

She dodged the question, being one of the few witnesses at the hearing in favor of more destination resorts, and so not wanting to admit that plunking hundreds or thousands of homes down in the middle of a forest isn't the best way to attract more visitors to "unspoiled Oregon."

1000 Friends of Oregon lists other problems with destination resorts here. But in these tough economic times some are willing to ignore those drawbacks because they believe resorts are a financial gold mine for cash-strapped counties.

Rep. Gene Whisnant made this claim in his testimony. He lives in Sunriver, a central Oregon destination resort. Not surprisingly, he thought the resorts are wonderful and waxed on about the benefits they bring to a local economy.

Unfortunately, Whisnant left the hearing before Eric Kancler from Central Oregon Landwatch demolished that argument. With facts, in the form of a recently released analysis of the costs and benefits of destination resorts in Oregon. 

It turns out that these resorts end up costing taxpayers a whole bunch of money for roads, schools, and other infrastucture, over and above what they bring in via property taxes and such. Here's a summary of the findings.

A proposed Deschutes County resort was used as an example.

In conclusion, local governments and local taxpayers would be left with a cost burden of $46 million if the Thornburgh Resort is fully completed as proposed. This is a net cost after the resort has been credited for all known payments and tax revenues it will generate. The cost will ultimately be borne by other taxpayers (not the resort) through some combination of higher taxes, reduced public services, and lower facility service standards. 

Sure, there's a place for destination resorts. But what they've largely become in Oregon are rural subdivisons for full and part-time homeowners, rather than dedicated tourist facilities.

A Crook County rancher testified that he can't even get into a nearby destination resort. It's a gated community. A costly one, according to the Central Oregon Landwatch study.

The most fundamental question that this report seeks to answer is, "How will the approval of a destination affect local taxpayers and the general public?"

The answer it turns out, is that the standard model for a golf-course subdivision-oriented destination resort presents local governments and taxpayers with a substantial net burden that will result either in higher overall taxes or a decrease in the quality of basic services.

George Will lies about global warming

George, how could you do it? You've been one of the few conservative columnists I could read without wondering, "What bag of untruth was that statement dragged out of?"

Yet now Will has joined the Reality Is What We Say It Is crowd, having spouted blatant lies about global warming in today's column, "Dark Green Doomsayers."

Now, lies is a strong word. It fits in this case, though -- better than mistaken, misleading, or such.

One reason: George Will is a national columnist with considerable fact-checking resources. And his piece is just ten paragraphs long. There's no excuse not to get important facts right in such a brief bit of writing.

Countering the claim that global warming is leading to a decrease in sea ice, Will said:

According to the University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.

Response of the Arctic Climate Research Center: Huh?

We do not know where George Will is getting his information, but our data shows that on February 15, 1979, global sea ice area was 16.79 million sq. km and on February 15, 2009, global sea ice area was 15.45 million sq. km. Therefore, global sea ice levels are 1.34 million sq. km less in February 2009 than in February 1979. This decrease in sea ice area is roughly equal to the area of Texas, California, and Oklahoma combined.

It is disturbing that the Washington Post would publish such information without first checking the facts.

Yes, it is. And that George Will would write a column founded on lies. Here's another one: the assertion that in the 1970s scientists were confidently predicting global cooling rather than warming.

It took me less than 30 seconds of Googling to debunk this myth. But I guess Will couldn't spend that much time on the truth.

Wikipedia:
"Global cooling was a conjecture during the 1970s of imminent cooling of the Earth's surface and atmosphere along with a posited commencement of glaciation. This hypothesis never had significant scientific support, but gained temporary popular attention due to a combination of press reports that did not accurately reflect the scientific understanding of ice age cycles, and a slight downward trend of temperatures from the 1940s to the early 1970s."

USA Today:
"The supposed 'global cooling' consensus among scientists in the 1970s — frequently offered by global-warming skeptics as proof that climatologists can't make up their minds — is a myth, according to a survey of the scientific literature of the era."

New Scientist:
"A survey of the scientific literature has found that between 1965 and 1979, 44 scientific papers predicted warming, 20 were neutral and just 7 predicted cooling. So while predictions of cooling got more media attention, the majority of scientists were predicting warming even then."

Here's some additional nails that have been pounded into George Will's credibility coffin. From now on I'll be looking at his column with a lot more skepticism.

"George F. Will Takes on Science, Loses Credibility"
"Will Omitted Key Context in Ice Age Quote"
"Where There's a (George) Will There's A Way ... To Deny Global Warming"

Keep resorts out of the Metolius River Basin

This should be a no-brainer: preserving a uniquely special place in Oregon -- the Metolius River Basin recreation area -- that is threatened by two large destination resorts.

But brains are in short supply among some who approve of this potential travesty.

As noted in my 2007 "Save the Metolius from destination resorts," Jefferson County commissioner Bill Bellamy came up with this astoundingly poor reason for allowing about 3,000 homes and a couple of golf courses to be built near the Metolius:

"Whether or not you like what destination resorts have done, it's phenomenally significant what they do to property tax revenues."

This shows the mentality that led Jefferson County to change its zoning of the area to allow the resorts, even though the vast majority of people who live in the Camp Sherman area were opposed.

In the 2007 legislative session a Metolius-saving bill, Senate Bill 30, died after Gov. Kulongoski said that he wanted to let the land use planning process go ahead before intervening.

I noted that even horses were for SB 30, yet opponents of the resorts didn't get a fair shake at the hearing that I attended on the bill.

Now its 2009 and the Governor is doing the right thing, even though an Oregonian editorial failed to realize this. Kulongoski isn't playing "red light, green light" with the would-be developers, because he said back in 2007 that if state agencies told him that current laws can't protect the Metolius Basin, something needed to be done.

Bob Stacey, 1000 Friends of Oregon executive director, cleared up the editorial board's confusion in his own follow-up opinion piece, "Protecting the Metolius."

It is true that during the 2007 session Gov. Ted Kulongoski signaled that he would not -- at that time -- support proposed legislation that offered special protection for the Metolius.

But The Oregonian suggests that "the developers naturally took the governor's stand as a sign he would allow them to pursue their resorts under existing land-use law."

That reasoning ignores the fact that on June 22, 2007, the governor instructed state agencies to report back to him on whether existing state law would be sufficient to protect the Metolius Basin. What the governor heard back was that existing laws would not fully protect the critical natural resources of the Metolius Basin from harmful effects of resort development.

As a result of these reviews, the governor concluded that additional protection for the Metolius is warranted. We agree. We find it odd to suggest that the governor should not consider every tool in the toolkit to protect this unique treasure for all Oregonians. We applaud his leadership.

So now Kulongoski has asked the Department of Land Conservation and Development to consider whether the Metolius River Basin should be designated an "Area of Critical State Concern."

Public hearings have been scheduled next week in Sisters and Madras. Comments on the proposal also can be emailed. If you're a lover of the Metolius, as my wife and I are, let DLCD know that you don't want this beautiful area to be ruined by giant destination resorts.

If the Area of Critical State Concern process doesn't work out, the Governor has a backup plan: legislation that would stop the resorts. Central Oregon Landwatch and others also have succeeded in getting the Oregon Supreme Court to accept an appeal of the Jefferson County rezoning.

So one way or another, I'm hopeful that the Metolius will be protected.

It'd be a shame to allow the greed of a few county commissioners for more property tax revenues to trash an area that has been officially designated "wild and scenic."

Adding 3,000 homes in and near the Metolius Basin, where only a few hundred people live now, doesn't sound like a good way to preserve a wild and scenic river.

(Click below for an email message I got from Central Oregon Landwatch, describing the upcoming hearings and the need for people to comment on the Area of Critical State Concern plan.)

Big Look legislation gets trashed at hearing

Yesterday I was pleased to be one of about three dozen people who roundly said, "No way!" to the Big Look task force's attempt to weaken Oregon's highly successful land use planning system.

As noted previously by someone I highly respect (namely, me), the task force spent a lot of time, money, and energy coming up with astoundingly wrong-headed proposed legislation for the 2009 session.

Somehow the Big Look managed to simultaneously conclude that: (1) Oregon's current land use laws are doing a great job protecting farm and forest land, and (2) the laws need to be changed so less farm and forest land is protected.

Huh?

This was the entirely justified reaction of virtually every person who took the opportunity to testify (for two minutes, more or less) before the House Land Use Committee public hearing on HB 2229.

[Update: The committee has scheduled two additional public hearings on HB 2229, both on Tuesday, February 10. More info. about the hearings is here.]

I was at the hearing for 80 minutes. During that time I can recall only two people speaking in favor of the bill. More than thirty trashed it in various degrees.

Some parts of the proposed legislation were viewed as acceptable, or even desirable. But sections 5-8 received an almost unanimous thumbs-down from a wide range of groups and individuals.

Including me. Here's the testimony that I submitted on behalf of our neighborhood's Keep Our Water Safe committee.
Download HB 2229 testimony PDF

I focused, as did quite a few others, on how it'd be a really bad idea to allow counties the option of redefining farm and forest land so subdivisions could sprout instead of crops and trees.

Politicians (county commissioners) would be lobbied by aspiring real estate developers to rezone their farm or forest properties. The last thing Oregon needs is increased politicization of our land use system. Yet the Big Look task force has called for just that.

There were quite a few moving moments at the hearing.

Some people spoke of how their relatives had come on wagon trains over the Oregon trail to settle here. They are still farming the ancestral land, and are deeply concerned about dismantling Oregon agriculture so urban sprawl can Californiaize our beautiful landscape.

Along that line, another person said that he'd escaped the Santa Clara valley many years ago (as did I, having gone to college at San Jose State before moving to Portland for graduate work). He didn't want to see Oregon become what he'd fled from.

I enjoyed the remarks of a man from southern Oregon, which were along the lines of:

"Coos and Curry counties are some of the last holdouts of the pioneer spirit. People there don't like to be told what to do. County commissioners don't appreciate directives coming from Washington, D.C. Nor from Salem. That's why HB 2229 shouldn't be passed -- the legislature can't allow these guys to screw up the south coast."

Today the Salem Statesman Journal ran a story about the hearing. I left a comment on the SJ web site critiquing reporter Peter Wong's coverage. He fell prey to the "fair and balanced" B.S., where one quote from an opponent has to be balanced by one quote from a supporter, even though over 90% of the testimony at the hearing was against HB 2229.

[Update: got an email today with info. about Henry Pir, the guy quoted in the SJ story who claims that he isn't able to replace a house that burned down. I was told:

He states that he "just wants to rebuild a house that burned". What B.S.
What he forgets to mention is that:
1) It burned sometime around 1990.
2) That was two owners ago.
The county turned him down twice and then, wouldn't you know it, the commissioners gave him the OK. This was appealed to LUBA by neighbors and Pir threw in the towel early apparently knowing of certain failure.

Such is largely confirmed by minutes of a Marion County Board of Commissioners meeting.
Download 050708BoardSessionMinutes 

So this actually shows that the land use system is operating fairly, but that local elected officials often try to grant certain favored people a dispensation from rules that should apply to everybody -- which is precisely why HB 2229 is such a bad idea.]

Here's an excerpt from my testimony, most of which I read to the committee before getting the "your two minutes are up" signal.

Fox News still denies reality of global warming

It never fails to amaze me that a cable news channel -- Fox -- is so dead-set against reporting reality.

I watch Fox News occasionally as part of my exercise regimen, since it usually only takes a few minutes of viewing to get my pulse racing into the "Outrageous!" zone. Yesterday, what got my heart rate up was more global warming B.S. inspired by Al Gore's testimony at a Senate hearing.

Fox commentators made a big deal out of the fact that it was snowing in Washington, D.C. when Gore spoke.

Which, of course, shows their abysmal ignorance regarding the difference between weather and climate. Changes in the weather happen daily; changes in climate happen over long periods of time.

There's no doubt that the Earth is warming.

The only debate is over the causes, and what should be done about it. Whether it snows in a city on a particular day has zero relevance to global warming science, but you'd never know that from listening to Fox News.

A Christian Science Monitor story asked, "It's cold. Does that debunk global warming?" Obvious answer: No.

The National Atmospheric and Oceanographic Administration defines climate as the average of weather over at least a 30-year period. Climate, says NOAA, is what we expect; weather is what we get.

In other words, you can’t tell much about the climate or where it’s headed by focusing on a particularly frigid day, or season, or year, even.

Yet Fox News also misled viewers by saying that 2008 was the coldest year in the United States since 2000. Here's what Fox left out: 2008 still was the ninth warmest year ever measured.

According to NASA:

Calendar year 2008 was the coolest year since 2000, according to the Goddard Institute for Space Studies analysis of surface air temperature measurements. In our analysis, 2008 is the ninth warmest year in the period of instrumental measurements, which extends back to 1880 (left panel of Fig. 1). The ten warmest years all occur within the 12-year period 1997-2008. The two-standard-deviation (95% confidence) uncertainty in comparing recent years is estimated as 0.05°C [ref. 2], so we can only conclude with confidence that 2008 was somewhere within the range from 7th to 10th warmest year in the record.

Another blood-boiling bit of Fox News non-sensicality was their focus on a poll that found a high percentage of Americans (over 40%, I recall) don't believe that global warming is a big problem.

Over on a Fox blog, a global warming head-in-the-sander cited a similar, or maybe the same, poll: "A recent Rasmussen poll says 59 percent of those surveyed don’t believe mankind is warming up the planet."

Well, I can imagine a medieval version of Fox News (assuming there would be a difference from the 21st century version) intoning, "Ninety-nine percent agree with the Pope: Galileo is wrong -- the sun does go around the Earth."

Scientific research, and reality in general, doesn't depend on public opinion. Truth is independent of how many people believe in something. Evolution remains a settled fact even though creationism is accepted by a disturbingly high percentage of Americans.

Fox News is looking increasingly desperate to me.

Reporters and commentors seem frantic to show that even though the Republican agenda was heartily rejected by voters the past two elections, there's still some warmth left in the conservative oven.

Not from what I see on Fox News --the same old science-denying, rich people-affirming, government-hating crap that got our country into its current problems, and deserves to be channel-flipped onto CNN or MSNBC.

Big Look task force on wrong track

Oregon's 2009 state legislature has many pressing problems to deal with, notably our steadily sinking economy. Proposals to reform the land use system should take a back seat, especially if they don't make sense -- which describes what the Big Look task force has come up with.

Today I went to a Salem City Club meeting where three Oregon land use experts shared their take on the Big Look legislative recommendations.

Mike Thorne, who chaired the task force, tried to present a rationale for "tweaking the system," as the Portland Oregonian called it in a story published today. But he failed.

He admitted that Oregon is way ahead of other states when it comes to protecting farm and forest land, preventing urban sprawl, and fostering economically vibrant city centers.

So the statewide land use system is working well.

However, Thorne said there's a perception that it needs to be more flexible. He didn't say what led the task force to conclude this. Facts weren't high on the Big Look task force's agenda, as I pointed out earlier in "Legislature should ignore Big Look Task Force."

After Richard Whitman (head of the Department of Land Conservation and Development) provided more detail on the Big Look recommendations, 1000 Friends of Oregon's Bob Stacey explained why the proposed legislation is a solution in search of a problem.

The task force wants to make it easier for counties to rezone farm and forest land so subdivisions can sprout instead of crops and trees. Yet the protection of resource lands is a clear success of Oregon's current land use system.

So why weaken it?

Stacey said it's a shame that rezoning farm and forest land to allow for more development is the top priority of the Big Look task force, especially since Oregonians voted overwhelmingly (62%) for more protection of these lands in approving Measure 49 in 2007.

Indeed, it's crazy to propose weakening Measure 49 when it hasn't even been fully implemented yet. Measure 49 allows property owners to have three home sites on farm or forest land, so it already compromises protections for resource land.

Plus, court cases involving Measure 49 are wending their way through the state and federal legal system. This is no time to further muddy the land use waters with the unnecessary Big Look proposals.

A reader's comment on the Oregonian story told it like it is.

As a rural Eastern Oregon property owner let me tell you this regional system will destroy meaningful land-use planning in this state- this is a state- not a bunch of artificial regions and we need statewide planning.

Most county commissioners in this state would vote for anything if you stuck a dollar bill in front of their face- As a whole they are the most parochial backward looking dinosaurs anywhere.

Yet the Big Look task force wants to allow politicians from two or more counties to band together and agree to pave over irreplaceable farm and forest land. Crazy.

We need to preserve what makes Oregon special, not trash it so a few people can make some extra bucks at the expense of the many. Our land use system is doing a good job enhancing livability and economic prosperity.

Yes, it can be improved.

Unfortunately, the main recommendation of the Big Look task force -- weakening of farm and forest land protections -- is a big step in the wrong direction.

1000 Friends of Oregon gets it right:

The Big Look Task Force was created in 2005 to evaluate Oregon’s land use planning program and to recommend improvements to meet future challenges.  The Task Force’s work is drawing to an end; its legislative recommendations and a final report will be submitted to the 2009 Legislature.

Oregon will experience many changes over the next 30 years, providing both opportunities and challenges: almost 2 million more people will call Oregon home; global warming will continue to pose an environmental and economic threat; oil prices will rise; and Oregon’s economy will be operating in an increasingly global context.  Our statewide planning program, while imperfect, has been remarkably effective in achieving its goals over the last 30 years.  We have protected farm and forestland, contained sprawl, and managed growth far better than most other states.  To turn future population growth and the challenges of climate change and globalization into opportunities, we must strengthen our land use planning program, not weaken it.

The Task Force’s legislative recommendations include several proposals that 1000 Friends supports.  However, we oppose the most significant – and controversial – proposal, which would greatly erode protection for Oregon’s agricultural land.

Global warming is global, not local

Memo from Reality to Global Climate Change Deniers: Even though somewhere it's really cold and there's a lot of snow on the ground, this doesn't mean global warming isn't happening.

You'd think this would be obvious to anyone with half a brain.

But anti-scientific right-wingers don't seem to be operating with a full cranium when it comes to global warming.

I liked Cheryl Smith's letter to the editor in today's Portland Oregonian.

I know it must be highly amusing for you, but will the day ever come that you don't print letters from global warming deniers that equate our local weather condition with the larger phenomena of climate change? I'm sure they think they are being very clever but it's getting kind of stale.

That's for sure.

This was Portland's snowiest December ever -- which means zilch when it comes to understanding the Earth's overall temperature trend.

But try telling that to all of those who crowed, "Ooh, ooh, the roads are covered with ice! Where's Al Gore's global warming now?!"

Well, right where it's always been: on the pedestal of virtually certain facts.

The Bush administration isn't a big promoter of climate change literacy (to put it mildly), but even the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says that global warming is happening:

What's Known

Scientists know with virtual certainty that:

• Human activities are changing the composition of Earth's atmosphere. Increasing levels of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere since pre-industrial times are well-documented and understood.
• The atmospheric buildup of CO2 and other greenhouse gases is largely the result of human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels.
• An “unequivocal” warming trend of about 1.0 to 1.7°F occurred from 1906-2005. Warming occurred in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, and over the oceans (IPCC, 2007).
• The major greenhouse gases emitted by human activities remain in the atmosphere for periods ranging from decades to centuries. It is therefore virtually certain that atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will continue to rise over the next few decades.
• Increasing greenhouse gas concentrations tend to warm the planet.

However, on Lars Larson's conservative talk show today (Rob Kremer stood in for Lars) I gritted my teeth as I listened to science writer David Appell grapple with two global warming deniers: Kremer and local meteorologist Chuck Weise.

Fortunately for my dental health I got to Lancaster Mall and shut off the car radio after hearing only about ten minutes of the hour-long program.

Appell made good sense. Kremer and Weise were just blathering.

But they could blather at a high volume, and confidently, even when facts were left far behind. So I fear that some listeners took them seriously rather than laughing at their ignorance.

Global warming is global.

The evidence for it is derived from many years of Earth-wide temperature observations. What happens one year in one part of the world has no scientific significance.

That's why "It's getting warm out there!" properly mocks those who had a lot to say about how global warming is a crock when a cold spell hit parts of the United States, but lost their tongues when unusual warmth recently embraced the country's eastern third.

And, no, the Earth didn't get cooler in the last decade, as I keep hearing on know-nothing conservative talk radio. It kept on warming. More facts:

More robustly, the most recent 5-year averages are all significantly higher than any in the last century. The last decade is by far the warmest decade globally in the record. These big picture conclusions are the same if you look at any of the data sets, though the actual numbers are slightly different (relating principally to the data extrapolation - particularly in the Arctic).

So let it snow here in western Oregon. Or, not (which I'd prefer after dealing with tire chains for as much as I want to this winter).

Doesn't affect global warming reality.

Scientists agree: global climate change is real

It's been an unusually warm and dry November here in Oregon -- and the Pacific Northwest. Naturally this doesn't prove global warming is happening, but it's one more experiential piece of evidence.

Yet just as there still are people around who deny the Holocaust, global climate change skeptics continue to spout their anti-reality rhetoric.

Periodically I get comments from them on one of my climate change posts, such as "Global warming doubters deserve to be scorned."

Now, I appreciate the time and effort put in by the most recent commenter. And I dutifully took a look at the links he shared. However, I'm not impressed by what a few scientists say when their opinions go against the grain of the general scientific consensus.

This quotation from an article by Michael Shermer in Skeptic magazine is germane to my point:

Within all these fallacies of thinking about both evolution and the Holocaust, there is an assumption by the creationists and the revisionists that if they can just find one tiny crack in the structure the entire edifice will come tumbling down.

This is the fundamental flaw in their reasoning. The Holocaust was not a single event. The Holocaust was 10,000 events in 10,000 places, and is proved by 10,000 bits of data that converge to one conclusion.

Ditto with anthropogenic (human caused) global climate change.

On conservative talk radio I regularly hear blather from scientifically illiterate hosts about how it's been the coldest winter in some place since whenever, or how this or that glacier is growing rather than receding.

Big deal. This doesn't change the fact that the overwhelming majority of climate change scientists agree that the Earth is warming, and humans have a lot to do with it.

Check out "The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change" in the highly-respected journal, Science.

Many details about climate interactions are not well understood, and there are ample grounds for continued research to provide a better basis for understanding climate dynamics. The question of what to do about climate change is also still open. But there is a scientific consensus on the reality of anthropogenic climate change. Climate scientists have repeatedly tried to make this clear. It is time for the rest of us to listen.

The above-mentioned commenter sent along a link to a ridiculous petition project. It claims that 31,072 American scientists have signed the climate-change denying petition, including 9,021 with Ph.Ds.

Whoopee.

So a bunch of people who aren't experts in climatology disagree with the real experts. I'm sure it'd be possible to find an equal number of Ph.Ds who don't believe in evolution. Further, the qualifications for signing the petition are pretty darn loose.

Signatories are approved for inclusion in the Petition Project list if they have obtained formal educational degrees at the level of Bachelor of Science or higher in appropriate scientific fields. The petition has been circulated only in the United States.

So a B.S. in chemistry earns you the right to spread your B.S. about a subject you know next to nothing about. Most appropriate.

If you've got doubts about whether anthropogenic global climate change is happening, get the facts from genuine experts. Like those who run the RealClimate web site, whose tag line is "climate science from climate scientists."

Look over some of the posts, such as "Mind the gap." You'll learn about the complexities of climate change science, which get glossed over by the simplistic global warming deniers.

I was amused by the lead paragraph in one of the It isn't happening! web sites.

In early September, I began noticing a string of news stories about scientists rejecting the orthodoxy on global warming. Actually, it was more like a string of guest columns and long letters to the editor since it is hard for skeptical scientists to get published in the cabal of climate journals now controlled by the Great Sanhedrin of the environmental movement.

Oh, poor things. They can't get their pseudo-science through the peer-review standards that guard against garbage being published in reputable scientific journals.

This makes my point for me. Real climate change scientists agree that global warming is happening. Fake ones have a different opinion.

Hmmmmm. Should I go with real or fake? I choose real, because reality is preferable to illusion.

Legislature should ignore Big Look Task Force

It's apparent that Oregon's Big Look Task Force shouldn't have much attention paid to its recommendations in the 2009 legislative session.

This group was supposed to step back and take, well, a big look at Oregon's land use system.

The notion was that Oregonians in Action and 1000 Friends of Oregon, the yin and yang of land use advocacy groups, would find common ground in reasonable changes that balanced individual property rights and communal environmental protection.

Didn't happen. Today's Salem Statesman Journal had a front page story on the Big Look recommendations, "Plan boosts local input on land use." 1000 Friends of Oregon doesn't like that notion. Neither do I.

You can read 1000 Friends' reasons here. They make good sense.

First and most important, where's the problem local control is supposed to solve? The Task Force has come up with a solution in search of a problem.

As the Oregon League of Conservation Voters says:

A widely-spread misconception repeated in today's Oregonian is that somehow our statewide land use system, which has state standards that guide local plans, is "one size fits all."

Our laws have different requirements for different types of farmland and forestland, different requirements for lands in the Willamette Valley and outside of it, different requirements for different size cities, and so forth. Five our 19 land use goals only apply to certain areas of the state.

The Oregonian article says that 1000 Friends of Oregon called the local control proposal "a very bad idea." So much for bringing opposing groups together. The Big Look Task Force has been casting its gaze mainly in one direction: more development on irreplaceable farm and forest lands.

Which its very own survey found is opposed by a clear majority of Oregonians. When asked, "Would you support using public money to permanently protect farm and forest lands from urban development?" almost twice as many (48%) said Yes rather than No (27%).

Those who attended Big Look Task Force meetings or filled out an online survey were even more enthusiastic about protecting resource lands: 60% to 29%.

Yet somehow the Task Force concluded that what Oregon needs now is more paving over of farm and forest land. Crazy.

As the 1000 Friends critique points out, remapping these resource lands is the wrong thing to do:

This proposal destabilizes Oregon’s outstanding agriculture economy at exactly the wrong time.  Agriculture is an ever-increasing economic engine, topping almost $5 billion in gross farm income in 2007.  Agriculture is responsible for over 10% of Oregon’s jobs and is the second largest traded-sector part of the economy.  And it has been amazingly stable and strong – growing almost every year for the past three decades, and in a variety of crops located in every part of the state:  wheat, nurseries products, livestock production, fruits & vegetables, orchard fruits and nuts, and more.

Oregon agriculture, unlike other sectors of the economy, is strong and will not abandon the state by moving operations overseas.  We should be thanking Oregon’s farmers, not putting their family businesses at risk by sweeping the deck clean of past experience with the planning tools the Task Force earlier determined work well.  Remapping is expensive, controversial, and will create years of unneeded turmoil and uncertainty in our rural communities.  We urge you to drop this concept.

Oregon agriculture has been changing with the times. Our neighborhood is fighting a proposed 217 acre Measure 37 subdivision that wants to "plant" 43 homes on high-value farmland.

Grass seed and Christmas trees used to be grown on properties like this one in the south Salem hills. Now vineyards dot the countryside along Liberty Road between our house and the Salem city limits. This shows that farmland needs to be protected, not remapped, because new and better uses for Oregon's agricultural lands keep being found.

The Big Look Task Force is bent on loosening Oregon's pioneering, and hugely successful, land use policies. My wife found that out when she tried to testify at a Big Look meeting and was disrespected.

If the Task Force truly was interested in reflecting the views of Oregonians, it would listen to them. Instead, it has produced proposed legislation that makes me wonder, "Who the heck ordered that up?"

The 2009 Legislature will have lots of serious problems to deal with. Land use isn't one of them. The Institute of Natural Resources at Oregon State University prepared a report for the Big Look Task Force that concluded, "Oregon's land use system is sound."

Every governmental task force likes to say, "Our report won't sit on a shelf and gather dust." Well, in this case that's just what should happen.

I'll end with a piece by Mitch Rohse, an experienced and respected land use planner. He explains more cogently than I have why the Big Look Task Force is on the wrong track.

Big Look chairman disrespects 1000 Friends of Oregon

Oregon's Big Look Task Force, as chaired by Pendleton rancher Mike Thorne, is coming to seem increasingly small-minded. Not a good sign for a group that's supposed to take a broad, inclusive view of our state's pioneering land use system.

Yesterday Laurel, my wife, went to a task force meeting here in Salem. She hoped to be able to speak during the public comment period, since even though The Big Look held ten town hall meetings around Oregon, none were in the mid-Willamette Valley.

She wasn't able to drive to Portland or Eugene to say her piece, so when a 1000 Friends of Oregon staffer (we're members) told Laurel that the agenda for the October 8 meeting included a fifteen minute public comment period, she headed down to a Department of Land Conservation and Development meeting room.

Laurel got there well before the 4:45 to 5:00 pm time for that agenda item. But she found that the meeting already had been adjourned, with no opportunity for public comment.

Someone suggested that she talk with the chair of the task force, who was still in the room. Mike Thorne turned out to be an irritable guy who wasn't much interested in hearing what someone highly knowledgeable about land use issues had to say.

Seemingly, because Laurel was involved with 1000 Friends of Oregon. Thorne said, "I'll be straight with you if you'll be straight with me. I suspect 1000 Friends of Oregon put you up to this [coming to testify]."

Well, they did let Laurel know about the meeting.

But Laurel explained to Thorne that she'd wanted to speak at one of the town hall meetings and had been disappointed that none were held in the Salem area. So this was a chance to tell the task force about her experience with Measures 37 and 49, declining groundwater, and why clueless local government officials shouldn't be able to undermine statewide land use goals.

Her impression, which also is mine, is that Thorne and some of the other task force members already have made their minds up and don't want to let inconvenient reality-based facts intrude upon their desire to give Oregonians in Action and other pave Oregon over types what they want.

It's too bad that the credibility of The Big Look already is down the tubes even before its recommendations are released, because some tweaking of our state's land use laws is in order.

However, it's becoming evident that The Big Look intends to view Oregon through a teeny-tiny keyhole shaped by an extreme property rights perspective – ignoring the rights of those who already live in an area where additional development would trash valuable farmland, forestland, and limited groundwater.

An October 8 editorial in the state's largest newspaper, the Oregonian, cautioned that the Big Look Task Force not run rough-shod over citizens who want to speak their minds about keeping this state green, clean, and livable.

One real concern is whether the task force is hurrying people or truly allowing them enough time to speak. The task force is working at a feverish pace (it is supposed to report to the Oregon Legislature in January). But if any attendees are walking away from these meetings, feeling ignored or slighted, that's inexcusable.

The editorial also points out that an in-depth Oregon State University study of our land use system concluded that its working well.

In dry, bureaucratic language, the study even cautions that the task force shouldn't be too eager to overhaul the system. "While recommended changes deserve full consideration,'' the study concludes, "they need to be made with careful deliberation regarding how changes might affect the state's ability to maintain a system that, based on intensive, objective analysis, generally meets its goals."

That's the truth. But those who want to see laws tilted in favor of over-development, urban sprawl, and destruction of irreplaceable resource land aren't much interested in facts. Dollar signs make excellent blinders.

I suspect one reason Mike Thorne brushed off my wife with such little courtesy is that he was ticked off at another opinion piece in that day's Oregonian: "A success story that's well worth protecting." More truth:

A recent study done for the Big Look Task Force by Oregon State University's Institute for Natural Resources found "an overall consensus that Oregon's land-use program has been effective in preserving the agricultural land base."

The task force is asking the wrong questions. Instead of offering proposals to open up more rural land for development, it should be initiating proposals to increase economic stability in rural communities, including infrastructure improvements for the agricultural economy.

Oregon agriculture is doing well. Our land-use planning system has played a key role in helping Oregon farmers prosper. This is no time to weaken land-use planning and put Oregon agriculture -- and Oregon's economy -- in jeopardy.

Yes, one of the authors was Eric Stachon, a 1000 Friends staff member. But the other author was Gary Rhinhart, a fourth-generation dry land wheat farmer in Umatilla County.

Listen up, Mr. Thorne. Oregonians don't want your task force messing with what makes Oregon such a great place to live and work: a well-crafted balance between environmental protections and economic development.

I’m hot. Global warming is to blame.

It was 90 degrees today in Oregon's generally temperate northern Willamette Valley. Last month we reached 100 degrees, breaking records for this time of year.

I had to do some field mowing today. It was hotter than I wanted it to be. Who do I blame?

Global warming! And the climate change deniers who love to say, "Sure, we're getting more hurricanes (or tornados, floods, heat waves, melting sea ice, etc.) but there's always been natural variations in the weather."

Newsweek's Sharon Begley demolishes that argument in her persuasive piece, "Global Warming is a Cause of This Year's Extreme Weather."

It's heartwarming (bad choice of words, given the sweat on my brow) to have Begley tell it like it is.

It's almost a point of pride with climatologists. Whenever someplace is hit with a heat wave, drought, killer storm or other extreme weather, scientists trip over themselves to absolve global warming. No particular weather event, goes the mantra, can be blamed on something so general.

Extreme weather occurred before humans began loading up the atmosphere with heat-trapping greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. So this storm or that heat wave could be the result of the same natural forces that prevailed 100 years ago—random movements of air masses, unlucky confluences of high- and low-pressure systems—rather than global warming.

This pretense has worn thin. The frequency of downpours and heat waves, as well as the power of hurricanes, has increased so dramatically that "100-year storms" are striking some areas once every 15 years, and other once rare events keep returning like a bad penny.

And here's something that speaks to my overheated psyche:

Global warming has left its clearest fingerprint on heat waves. Since the record scorcher of 1998, the average annual temperatures in the United States in six of the past 10 years have been among the hottest 10 percent on record. Climatologists predict that days so hot they now arrive only once every 20 years will, by midcentury, hit the continental United States once every three years.

Fortunately, both Obama and McCain have the smarts to recognize that global climate change is for real. Unfortunately, we and the planet have had to put up with almost eight years of Bush, the anti-reality president, who's had his head in the scientific sand on this and many other issues.

Hornets sting me. Bees are disappearing. Got to be Bush’s fault.

I've been stung twice by hornets recently. A longstanding hive of wild bees on our property also has disappeared. Naturally I'm blaming George Bush. He's responsible for so many disasters, might as well pin these on him too.

But seriously … this youa culpa isn't all that far-fetched. The climate, in Oregon and elsewhere, is changing due to global warming. That's having effects on plants and the insects that pollinate them.

In Europe global warming is being blamed for the spread of the Asian Hornet into France and potentially Great Britain. These are giant hornets renowned for their vicious stings.

I don't know what kind of hornet stung me. Both times it was on the top of my head while I was walking around our neighborhood lake. I'd been watching out for yellow jacket nests in the ground. They usually appear this time of year.

Laurel and I are expert at spotting and killing yellow jackets. Hornet nests, though, were uncharted territory. In the seventeen years we've lived in rural south Salem, I don't think we've ever been stung by a hornet. This summer, thrice (Laurel got stung once). Something has changed.

A neighbor with a bee suit took care of the first nest, which was hanging from an oak tree branch. We handled the second ourselves. It was in a fir tree close to the trail I was on when attacked.

Laurel bravely sprayed it, aiming at the nest's opening, while I not-so-bravely stood farther away, providing flashlight assistance (it's advisable to kill yellow jackets and hornets at night, when it's cooler and they're not very active).

Is it a coincidence that the wild bee hive disappeared just as the hornets thrived? Maybe. But it's also possible that climate change is messing with the balance of insect nature in ways that aren't well understood yet.

Last night I read a fascinating article in The New Yorker by Elizabeth Kolbert, "Stung. Where have all the bees gone?" She describes the worrying phenomenon of colony collapse disorder (C.C. D.), a serious but poorly understood problem in both Oregon and the rest of the world. (See "Bees Vanish and Scientists Race for Reasons")

Kolbert mentions a 2006 report titled The Status of Pollinators in North America.

Among the many possible contributing factors that the report cited are habitat loss, pesticide use, climate change, and introduced pathogens. May Berenbaum, a professor of entomology at the University of Illinois, chaired the National Research Council panel.; she recently characterized C.C.D. as "a crisis on top of a crisis."

"We can't count on wild pollinators because we've so altered the landscape that many are no longer viable," she said.

Well, I can testify that wild hornets still are viable. And that buying stock in whoever makes Benadryl could be a savvy investment ploy, because if hornets are increasing because of global warming lots more people are going to be chugging this antihistamine after getting stung, just like I did.

In my heart of hearts I know that blaming George Bush for my stings is a bit irrational. Yes, he's irritatingly clueless about the reality of global warming, just as he is about many other things. However, the decline of bees and the rise of hornets in our neighborhood surely is the result of numerous causes, climate change being only one possibility.

At the same time, there was something fitting about the way I slapped my head when I felt the hornets sting me. It's what I feel like doing much of the time when I hear about clueless George denying some evident scientific, political, or military fact.

So until the American voters get rid of his hornet's nest of incompetency by electing our next president in November 2008, I think I'll keep on viewing my stings as George Bush's fault.

My lip swelled up after the first attack. It felt and looked strange. The next day it was back to normal. That's the way I'm looking forward to feeling when a new Democratic president takes the oath of office.

Normal again, after eight years of getting stung by neoconservative blunders.

Salem's Pringle Creek Community--an innovative green oasis

I cruised into Salem's oh-so-Green Pringle Creek Community yesterday. In our new Prius, naturally. I wanted to see the super energy efficient cottage home that'd just been built there—one of only six in the country to qualify for Platinum LEED status, I believe.

It was getting a lot of attention from Tour of Home gawkers. As it should have been. It's a sustainable architecture tour de force, packed with energy saving devices and technology described in this newspaper story.

I talked quite a while with Don Myers, one of the head honchos of this first development to sprout on the Fairview Training Center property. My wife and I were investors in Sustainable Fairview Associates, which bought the entire property and sold 32 acres to the Pringle Creek Development folks.

We weren't very happy with Sustainable Fairview when we cashed out last year, after the remainder of the property had been sold to Phil Morford. He's now in default on a bunch of obligations, which makes our decision to get out of Sustainable Fairview look pretty wise.

Fortunately, Pringle Creek Community is a whole different shade of green – financially, managerially, and philosophically. I really like what Don and his team are doing. They're creating a wonderful vibe on their sorely needed oasis of creativity and innovation in generally fuddy-duddy Salem.

I was thrilled to hear that an organic restaurant is planned for their Village Center. I'd be a frequent diner there, for sure.

I also enjoyed the contrast between how Pringle Creek Community is handling a large oak that needed to come down, versus conventional developer George Suniga's trash-the-Earth approach at his utterly un-green Waln Creek Estates.

Suniga cut some marvelous old oaks for no good reason, then disposed of them quickly to hide the evidence of his misdeed. At Pringle Creek Community, though, this fallen oak is displayed with reverence in front of the sales building.

I believe it's the one that Don told me would be cut up for lumber and used for building, thereby completing a tree circle of life that began and ended within a few hundred feet.

Beautiful. Pringle Creek Community is doing more than using We're Green! to sell lots. They're walking the sustainable walk, along with talking the sustainable talk.

Don also pointed out some Yew trees that had been carefully saved from bulldozing (yes, it can be done, George Suniga). A sign by them says they're a metaphor, having survived for over a thousand years—even through the Fairview Training Center era.

Now they're in good hands, thanks to Pringle Creek Community's commitment to long-range sustainability rather than short-term profit.

Yes, residences here are going to cost more per square foot. But plenty of people are willing to pay a bit more upfront to gain energy savings down the road. Plus, the satisfaction of putting their pocketbook where their environmental philosophy is.

I told Don that my main gripe with Sustainable Fairview was the reluctance to push for a truly world-class, knock-your-socks-off green development that would draw in people from all over the country – and even other countries – who wanted to live there. Build it and they will come.

Pringle Creek Community has.

I ran into a friend in the model cottage home who'd reserved a condo at a traditional sort of development being built near downtown Salem. She and her husband are having second thoughts now that Pringle Creek Community is looking so attractive.

If we weren't so attached to our ten acres where we've done so much work planting trees and restoring blackberry and poison oak infested acreage —our own little "sustainable development" – I'd be thinking those sorts of thoughts myself.

Maui overdevelopment makes for sad sights

We love to visit Maui. Just as we love Oregon, our home. So it's sad to see overdevelopment trashing the livability of both beautiful places.

Measure 37, which seriously watered down Oregon's land use laws, is causing subdivisions to sprout on irreplaceable farm and forest land. I don't know what Maui's problem is--basic greed and complacency, I suppose.

Maybe when you live here, it's like the old "boiling a frog alive" metaphor. Development occurs so slowly and steadily, you get used to it, not noticing how hot the overdevelopment water is becoming.

My wife and I notice, since we only come here for a short time once a year. And at least some locals do. I read a letter to the editor in the Maui News a few days ago. The guy had counted the number of large construction cranes between Lahaina and Kapalua.

It was about a dozen, I recall. Here's a couple of them, towering over the few palm trees that remain at Kapalua Bay.

We're staying at the nearby Napili Kai Beach Resort. Sitting on Napili Beach you can hear the incessant noise of construction equipment back-up beeps coming from Kapalua.

This couple was getting married on the Kapalua Bay beach when I walked by. The minister's conch shell and singing was beautifully Hawaiian. The back-up beeps that marred the ceremony weren't.

That's how Maui is becoming: an increasingly uncomfortable blend of natural beauty and manmade ugliness.

A parking lot at the Kapalua shopping area used to be shaded by these magnificent trees, whose name I don't know. This tree is near where we park at Napili Kai. The front desk person didn't know the name of the tree either.

Whatever kind of tree it is, the developers at Kapalua chopped the tops of them off. Sad sight. Maybe they'll survive. But not as they were. Which pretty much sums up Maui.

In three lines this web page did its own summing up of the island:

Pros: "There's something for everyone on Beautiful Maui"
Cons: "Growing too fast."
In A Nutshell: "Get there before the developers do any more damage."

What's most striking is the growing gap between the wealthy folks who buy the oceanfront developments, and the regular folk who already live here.

Again, a lot like Oregon, where rich out-of-staters drive up the price of properties in desirable places like Bend and Ashland, making it tough for locals to afford a home.

The Kapalua construction is discreetly walled off from the view of drivers-by. This poster shows who will be living here, now that the trees have been cut down and much of the oceanfront condo'ed over. She doesn't look like a native Hawaiian, does she?

I feel entitled today to criticize the crushing of Maui's once pristine environment. A plastic bag blew off the beach this morning while we were ensconced on our mats.

It dropped into the ocean. Laurel said, "Somebody needs to get it." I said, "It looks like that man is." But he wasn't. He made a few desultory strokes toward it, but it already was being blown by the wind out to sea.

"A sea turtle could eat it!" Laurel exclaimed. "I don't have my fins, or I'd retrieve it." "I'll do it," I told her confidently. I was about ready to go for my daily 20-30 minute swim back and forth across Napili Bay anyway.

What I didn't realize, though, was that swimming straight out past the reef (finless) against some fairly large waves was a lot tougher than swimming sideways across the bay. Plus, the bag kept being blown further out.

I began to have my doubts that I'd ever reach it. But my admiration for the Wonder Pets helped keep me going. I kept hearing their voices in my head: "There's an animal in distress…We've got to help it!...This is serious."

I reached the plastic bag. Stuck it in my swimming trunks. Used some large waves to propel me back toward shore. A minor environmental crisis averted.

Hopefully there are lots of people who live on Maui who're willing to similarly expend some energy saving the livability of their island. Don't take it for granted, my friends.

We're seeing Oregon become a different (and worse) place because of overdevelopment. Learn from our bad example. Don't let it happen here anymore than it already has.

Oregon needs a new Tom McCall. Lots of them.

Oregon is on the verge of losing its way. And that's being charitable. We may already have sunk into mediocrity among the 50 states, having lost our once well-deserved reputation for environmental trail-blazing.

Yesterday I was bemoaning with some friends the sprouting of subdivisions in south Salem. That's just a taste of the California-izing that is to come if Measure 37 isn't fixed, pronto.

You can kiss much of Oregon's charm and rural character goodbye if the asphalt and concrete-lovers are able to convince the legislature that the trashing of our land use laws should continue unabated.

We reminisced about the good old days of Gov. Tom McCall, famous for his "Visit, but don't stay" sentiment. Tom, you're missed. Now we've got a Ted (Kulongoski) who says he admires you, but unfortunately doesn't act much like you.

Ted is standing up for the environment in some ways. Yet Measure 37 is causing Oregon to move backward. That calls for a McCall who will do more than stand up—we need a battler who will fight his way forward.

Even better, millions of them. I sense that our citizens are fed up with organizations like Oregonians in Action who don't give a damn about the livability of this state, being mostly interested in lining the pockets of developers by turning farmland and forestland into tract homes.

It's sad that someone can say, with an absolutely straight face, "Don't Oregonize California." How far we've sunk.

This week I came home to a beautiful moon and Venus rising over a just-set sun. It was a classic Oregon scene, minus the clouds and rain, that had me racing for my camera and tripod. Our lighted dogwood provided a nice contrast to the darkening night sky.

Imagine that scene with Measure 37-approved twin billboards smack in the middle of it. That's the Oregon "property rights" zealots lust for. Artificiality replacing nature from the coast to the deserts.

Here's my simple response: you don't have the right to do that. This land is our land, not your land. You didn't make it. It comes from another hand—call it God, Tao, Buddha nature, Allah, Big Bang, whatever you like.

I don't know what Tom McCall's philosophy of life was, but I strongly suspect he'd agree. Clearly, though, he'd be aghast at what Measure 37 has wrought. Here's what McCall said in 1973:

But there is a shameless threat in our environment and to the whole quality of our life and that is the unfettered despoiling of our land. Coastal condomania, sagebrush subdivisions and the ravenous rampage of suburbia, here in the Willamette Valley, all threaten to mock Oregon's status as the environmental model of this nation.

Sadly, those words could just as well have been spoken in 2007. McCall's legacy deserves better.

So-called “climatologist” George Taylor has to go

George Taylor is a embarrassment to Oregon. He passes himself off as the official state climatologist even though Oregon doesn’t have such a position. Today an article in the Oregonian (“Experts square off over climate change”) quoted Governor Kulongoski:

"He's not the state climatologist," the governor said. "I never appointed him. I think I would know.”

Apparently Oregon State University’s College of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences gave Taylor this title, because the Oregonian story says that the position of state climatologist was dissolved by the legislature in 1989.

Regardless, Taylor loves to spout off about how humans really aren’t a big factor in causing global warming, an unscientific position that makes him a darling of big oil and conservative organizations like the Heartland Institute, which recently trotted Taylor out as among the serious scientists who are debunking scaremongering about climate change.

Yeah, right. You’d be hard pressed to find a truly serious scientist who doesn’t accept that human caused climate change is happening. Heck, Taylor’s own college admits this on its web site:

Climate change is happening globally and in the Pacific Northwest. Humans are contributing to global warming and climate change in a measurable way.

Willamette Week ran an expose on Taylor in August 2005. I’d been ranting about the absurdity of Oregon’s climatologist being a global warming denier for several months previous. It’s even more absurd now that we know he isn’t the climatologist.

But Taylor is still up to his old tricks. Just a few days ago (January 26) right-wing talk show host Lars Larson had Taylor as a guest. He introduced Taylor as the “official state climatologist.”

Taylor then proceeded to mangle facts and science. He said that the 1930s was the warmest decade in Oregon, which isn’t true: the 1990s was. He also claimed that 1917-42 saw the most melting of Oregon glaciers. Also not true, according to this Oregonian story.

"It's almost universal that all glaciers are retreating," said Peter Clark, a professor at Oregon State University and an international authority on glaciers. "The signs of retreat are dramatic and accelerating."

If Taylor simply went around speaking as an uninformed individual with views about global warming that aren’t shared by reputable scientists, that wouldn’t be so bad.

However, when he writes a letter to the editor as the state climatologist, passing along the untruth that the 1930s was the warmest decade on record in Oregon, that’s unconscionable.

Email the dean of George Taylor’s college at OSU, Mark Abbott. Tell him that Taylor needs to stop being called the state climatologist. And that Oregon deserves to have someone competent heading up the Oregon Climate Service.

Lars Larson asked Taylor whether, if we change our human activities enough, we can have an effect on human caused global warming. Taylor’s answer: “I don’t believe that’s true.”

Willamette Week said that Taylor’s critics call him one of the most dangerous men in Oregon. Could be an overstatement. But human caused global warming is real and deadly serious.

To have someone saying otherwise, who is passing himself off as Oregon’s climatologist, that is dangerous.

[Update: Advance reports of what will be in the soon to be released report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change feature headlines such as "World's scientists say climate change is much worse than they thought." But George Taylor feels that he knows more than the world's experts on climate change, because he continues to claim that humans are having a minimal effect on global warming.

The report supposedly will say: "It is virtually certain that human activity has played the dominant role in causing the increase of greenhouse gases over the past 250 years." But don't worry. George Taylor says it isn't so. And so long as Oregon State University continues to bestow upon him the title of "state climatologist," unfortunately some people are going to believe him.]

How Sisters, Oregon became a charming prosperous town

It wasn’t through allowing property owners to do whatever they wanted, an instructive lesson for those who seek to dismantle Oregon’s pioneering land use laws. No, Sisters changed from a town on the decline into a charming artsy Western-themed community because of central planning.

My wife and I love Sisters. We share ownership of a cabin in Camp Sherman, about fifteen minutes away. We go to Sisters a lot. It’s a great place to walk, shop, eat, and relax. Plus, they now have spiffy centrally located public bathroom facilities. What else could you want? (especially after a triple latte at one of the fine coffee houses)

Last weekend Laurel read a history of the Sisters area that was sitting on a cabin bookshelf. She learned that the developer of nearby Black Butte Ranch (a beautifully planned residential resort) wanted Sisters to be a classy place for Ranch owners and visitors to enjoy.

So, according to a history of Black Butte Ranch:

"When Brooks Resources began developing the Ranch [in the 1970s], they offered merchants in Sisters $5,000 and free architectural help to create a “theme” look to the town. The Sisters planning commission adopted an 1880’s theme, which improved the town’s attractiveness and returned it to its original roots.

The theme adoption has made Sisters a thriving community creating a unique, quaint town with excellent gift and souvenir shopping."

Currently there isn’t a garish oversized neon sign anywhere in Sisters. Nor any other obnoxious symbol of unfettered commercialism. Even the McDonalds on the edge of town (many residents wish it didn’t exist at all) melds harmoniously with the Sisters western theme.

Thus let’s tip our cowboy hats to foresighted planning. And dedicate the next line dance to Oregonians past, present, and future who recognize that places where anybody can do whatever they want with their property aren’t worth wanting compared to well-planned locales like Sisters.

(For more about why we like Sisters so much, take a look-see at “Belly dancing and fast food in Sisters”).

Bush finally embraces sustainability. For a bad reason.

I’m still trying to get my head around George Bush’s new love for sustainability, a Green word decidedly at odds with this envirophobic president. Yet there he is these days, calling for a sustainable this and that.

The problem is, the “this and that” Bush wants to sustain is the war in Lebanon and its extension to Syria and Iran.

Sure, he speaks about his desire for a sustainable cease fire in the Middle East, but what Bush really means is that he wants Israel to keep pounding Hezbollah (and innocent civilians) until fire from across the border ceases, because anyone who could pull a trigger is dead.

Being a firm believer in sustainability, I see this as dismally sad.

Bush ignores the clear evidence for human-caused global climate change, which threatens the ability of Earth to sustain our lives. Bush ignores massive trade and budget deficits that have mushroomed during his administration, which threaten the sustainability of the U.S. economy. Bush stifles cutting edge medical research on embryonic stem cells, which offers much promise of sustaining lives that now are cut short by death or debilitating diseases.

Yet when he wants to keep a war going that is devastating Lebanon, a country that was on the verge of embracing a genuine democracy, Bush finally finds his voice for “sustainable” — speaking about it for all the wrong reasons.

There are times when it makes sense to look far into the future. I’ve just mentioned three: when the Earth is warming dangerously; when deficits threaten the economy; when meaningless religious dogma is favored over advancing medical science.

But there also are times when action needs to be taken, now. If a street gang is killing passersby, you don’t conduct a sociological analysis of what made them turn to violence before you call 911 and get police on the scene. Likewise, when thirty-seven children are killed in a war that no longer has a discernible purpose, you don’t babble on about finding a “sustainable” way of ending the violence.

You end the violence. Now.

President Bush, I’m all for you getting on the sustainability bandwagon. However, you need to learn what is worth sustaining, and what isn’t. You believe that its fine and dandy to sustain the killing of innocents.

You’re wrong.

Camp Sherman threatened by Jefferson County

If you love Camp Sherman and the Metolius River, you need to help defend this beautiful piece of Oregon. For the Jefferson County Board of Commissioners is determined to cast aside Camp Sherman values in favor of zoning changes that would foster ticky-tacky development.

As the Friends of the Metolius put it in their July newsletter:

For twenty-five years Camp Sherman folks have worked for sensible, sensitive land use planning for the private land in the Metolius Basin. They have sought rules which would produce development that was small scale, low key, conservative, deliberate, that was protective of the natural values. The proposed revision of the Jefferson County zoning ordinance would severely restrict that approach.

Friends of the Metolius has put together a Save the Metolius web site with everything you need to know about the horribly flawed development plans that Jefferson County is trying to foist upon the Camp Sherman area.

Print out, sign, and mail in their petition to the County to stop the rezoning process until genuine local citizen participation takes place. Read a sample letter to the county commissioners, then write and send in your own plea for them to reconsider their ill-considered plans for the Metolius Basin.

What’s at stake here? Gregory McClarren, president of the Friends of the Metolius, spells it out:

By the end of spring 2006, I believe “war was declared on the Metolius,” one of Oregon’s crown jewels, by the county commission. The proposed revision of the Jefferson County Comprehensive Plan would undo nearly 25 years of protections for the Metolius Basin’s unique charms, open space, and pristine water quality.

Camp Sherman would end up with a greater density of homes and tourist rental accommodations, stream protections would be scaled back, and the unincorporated rural character would be allowed to become more urbanized to help fulfill urban housing needs.

To add insult to injury five parcels in the Basin ranging in size from about 20 acres to over 640 acres would be designated as “eligible and available for destination resort siting,” further increasing loss of wildlife habitat, threatening water quality, and diminishing the Camp Sherman character.

Five large destination resorts. Just what Camp Sherman and the Metolius Basin doesn’t need. Laurel and I are one-fourth owners of a cabin on the Metolius that sits on leased Forest Service land. We love the river. We love Camp Sherman. We love the wonderful rural friendliness and eccentricity of the area.

Especially the Camp Sherman store, where even if everybody there doesn’t know your name, they act as if they did.

It seriously galls me that the Jefferson County commissioners are ready and willing to sacrifice what makes Camp Sherman unique. The Bend Bulletin editorial board says that the commissioners could use a nanny, given how childishly they’ve been handling the Measure 37 claims process.

I’d add, ditto for how they’ve been handling planning for the Metolius Basin. So tell the commissioners how you feel about the prospect of changing the Camp Sherman area much for the worse. That’s what I’ll be doing myself, first thing tomorrow morning.

Oregon Cougar Plan starts needless killing

The Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission is hard at work spending taxpayer money on a nonexistent problem. Contract employees using hounds will be used to kill 66 cougars in three areas.

These 66 cougars aren’t problem cougars. They’re just plain cougars. They haven’t been caught killing livestock or otherwise causing a nuisance to humans.

In its idiocy, the Fish and Wildlife Commission came up with a cougar management plan that doesn’t seek to control problem cougars, but rather kills the animals en masse in areas where cougar complaints and purported cougar predation exceed 1994 levels.

Gosh, what a great concept. Let’s apply it to traffic in Salem, where I live. I often complain that there are a lot more cars on the road now compared to when I moved here in 1977. So let’s thin the herd of automobiles so I can drive around as freely as I used to.

I recommend starting with any car that either has an out-of-state plate or a “Bush-Cheney” bumper sticker. They may not be causing any problem when the tow truck comes to take them away, but I feel like they might. And besides, I’ve got a right to keep Salem traffic jams at 1977 levels.

Another obvious problem with the cougar plan is that many reported sightings of “cougars” are mistaken. But if you call in a sighting to the Fish and Wildlife Commission, it counts as a complaint. Even if the animal was really a kitty cat. I wouldn’t be surprised if some ranchers already have the complaint number on their speed dial and are phoning in phony sightings while they watch Fox News.

Cougar phobic Oregonians in the red counties, don’t you feel a bit funny calling on big government to save you from a problem? Especially when the solution you’re getting isn’t much of a solution. And the problem isn’t much of a problem.

If you’re losing livestock regularly to a problem cougar, that’s a problem. However, killing cougars indiscriminately likely isn’t going to help much. Men commit most of the crimes in this country. But if government starts randomly killing men the crime rate won’t go down much.

You see, it’s certain types of men who commit crimes. Most men are law abiding, just as most cougars don’t kill livestock, and most pit bulls don’t bite people. Profiling entire groups that are considered dangerous just to deal with a few problem individuals doesn’t work.

Malcolm Gladwell talks about this in his The New Yorker article, “Troublemakers: what pit bulls can teach us about profiling.” The Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission must not have read it. Or if they did, ignored it.

Gladwell points out that, as a breed, pit bulls aren’t a problem. Particular pit bulls do become problems, however, just as particular German Shepherds, Dobermans, and dogs of any other breed do. He says that it possible to figure out what combination of dog, owner, and environmental (like being chained up) factors leads to a dog attack.

“But,” Gladwell says, “it’s always easier just to ban the breed.” Or, the species.

I think it’s time for a voter initiative that would ban the indiscriminate hunting of cougars with hounds by government bounty hunters. Oregonians have already made their wishes clear (see “Oregon cougar plan a slap in the face to voters”). Unnecessary cougar thinning wasn’t one of those wishes.

As several commenters to a Salem Statesman-Journal story about the cougar killing plan observed, it’s crazy that the government is now paying contract employees to kill cougars in a manner that was banned by the voters in 1994. What is it about “don’t use hounds to hunt cougars” that the Fish and Wildlife Commission doesn’t understand?

For another perspective on this issue, check out Loaded Orygun’s “Is ‘Cougar Madness’ Leading to Unnecessary Kills?”

Short answer: yes.

Treasury secretary nominee favors Kyoto Treaty

George Bush seems to be warming up to the reality of global warming. Henry Paulson, his nominee for Treasury Secretary, is a supporter of the Kyoto Treaty and an avid environmentalist.

My head is reeling. Could it really be true that Bush has converted to fact-based, rather than faith-based, policy making? If so, the foundations of my Bush-bashing world will be shaken. I’ll be finding good things to say about a President who, up until now, has blundered along from faulty gut instinct to faulty gut instinct.

I worry that this is an aberration though.

Physics tells us that the quantum world is founded on probabilities, not predictable determinism. Just as there is a small but real possibility that a sub-atomic particle will tunnel through a solid barrier and be found on the other side, there must be a small chance that George Bush will do a few things right, if only at random.

Regardless, the conservative blathersphere is starting to bear its fangs against Paulson because of his Green leanings. Back in April a coalition of free market-based policy groups urged Bush not to appoint Paulson. One of his neo-con sins is that he has served as head of the Nature Conservancy which, horror of horrors!, seeks to conserve nature.

Can’t have that. Thus Human Events, a national conservative weekly, warns darkly: “Treasury Nominee is Ideologically, Ethically Challenged.”

Well, President Bush, give me more ideologically and ethically challenged appointees like Henry Paulson, please. You’ve got a long way to go before you begin to govern from the center, like you promised back in 2000. But it’s never too late to start.

Same with governing from a grounding in scientific facts. Try it. Whether or not you like it, the Earth and future generations certainly will.

Paving over paradise

We just got back from ten days on Maui. Paradise. And it’s being paved over. Sound familiar, Oregonians? Be careful about who you vote for in November. That “we’ve got to respect property rights” verbiage may sound fine, but what it really means is: paradise needs paving.

Which it doesn’t. Not now, not ever. We’ve been to Maui almost every year since 1991. The traffic keeps getting crazier. The ocean views keep getting filled with condos. The construction cranes sprout faster than palm trees.

Don’t get me wrong. Maui still is a wonderful place to visit. So is Oregon. However, if you live in either of these paradisiacal places and care about sustaining a livable environment, you’ve got to be concerned. This Maui resident says that he’s thinking of moving.

I’m positive I’m not alone as I watch the island of Maui slowly die at the hands of greed and exploitation.

I wake up almost every morning to Realtors rushing around outside dragging perspective [sic] buyers with them up and down the streets of my neighborhood with small computers chirping and cell phones squawking.

I believe that Maui was meant to be visited. After only five years here, I feel it is time to move. The lack of respect for this amazing place along with the painfully obvious destruction disguised as growth has gotten the better of me.

This visit we experienced a symbolic reminder of how over-development is harming Maui. Well, not so symbolic, really. A jackhammer in room 103 when you’re staying in 204 is pretty darn real. A condo below us was being renovated.

I gently (and not so gently) suggested to the resort manager that guests come to Maui for rest and relaxation, not to listen to loud construction noise for several hours a day. My sacred post-swim/beach afternoon nap was thrown for a noisy loop. As the Wonder Pets say, “this is serious!” (add a lisp for the proper Ming-Ming effect).

Our complaints had no effect. Instead of ocean waves and birds we got to listen to electric saws and drills. That’s modern Maui in a nutshell. All too often making a buck comes first. Harmoniously relating to the environment and fellow human beings takes a back seat.

Yes, it’s more pleasant creeping along in a traffic jam on Maui than it is on an Oregon freeway. You can watch the waves rolling in rather than grass seed growing. And the air passing through the window that your elbow is hanging out of usually is warmer (except for today—Oregon is “enjoying” a record breaking heat wave).

There has to be a limit to growth, though. On Maui. And in Oregon. Special places like these need to be preserved. We’ve already got plenty of LAs in this country. If I want to smell exhaust fumes and gaze upon wall to wall concrete I can always hop on a plane and visit my daughter in Hollywood.

Back in the 80s I spent some time on a Fiji island. There wasn’t much to do at the small resort where we were staying. That was the idea. Not doing much. One afternoon a Tahitian girl showed us how to make a native something or other. I don’t remember what it was. I do remember the girl.

She was gorgeous. A classic Tahitian beauty. Wise too. My fellow vacationers were mostly from Australia and the United States. Someone said, “Have you ever been to America?” “No,” she replied. Then she was asked, “Would you like to go?”

She tossed back her long dark hair and smiled. Her words stuck in my mind.

“Why would I want to? In America you live in big cities, work hard, and then die. Why should I leave here?”

There was an awkward silence. I could sense that we all were thinking, “Good question.” In an instant the proud U.S. citizen belief that ours is the land everyone wants to come to had been buried under the sparkling Fiji sand. I thought to myself, “Why do I want to go home? That’s the real question.”

Polynesians like this girl were the first inhabitants of Hawaii. I wonder what they’d think if they could see it today. Probably just what the Native Americans who settled in Oregon would think if they saw this state now. Pardon the stereotype, but only one word seems to fit their reaction.

Ugh!

We check out of Sustainable Fairview

Today we cashed out of Sustainable Fairview, the 245 acre site in south Salem that, according to the local newspaper, is “envisioned to become a model of mixed-use and environmentally friendly development.”

Hope so. But at 1:30 this afternoon I traded two shares in Sustainable Fairview Associates (SFA) for a check, shook hands with Sam Hall, the managing member of SFA, and brought to an end our sometimes satisfying but mostly frustrating experience as investors in this development.

The property has been sold to a group led by Phil Morford, a Portland-area developer, and Gordon Root. Good luck to them.

And thanks to Phil and Gordon for buying the property from SFA, because a few hours after picking up the check I was standing in front of a clerk at the Marion and Polk Schools Credit Union paying off a home equity loan that we’d used to buy the five acre lot next to our home. (See “We buy some really expensive blackberries”.)

Many SFA investors are keeping their shares in play, staying on board while Morford and company pay off their purchase price over the next few years. We may be passing up an opportunity to make more money than the 30% or so we realized over the four years we were SFA members.

But Laurel and I never hesitated to jump ship when the opportunity was presented to us. We (mostly me) have been two of the gadflies who questioned how well Sustainable Fairview was being managed and whether basic principles of sustainability were being applied by SFA.

I’ll end with a compilation of the Sustainable Fairview-related blog posts I’ve written (and ranted) over several years. Digging them out of the “sustainability” category just now, I remembered how passionate I used to be about this development. Then, I lost interest.

I haven’t been to a SFA meeting in several years. I’ve been reading the minutes and keeping a general wary eye on our investment. However, there never was an opportunity for creative, enthusiastic greenies like Laurel and me to become involved in anything but a passive way with the project.

That’s too bad. Hopefully the new owners will realize, as SFA never did, that sustainability isn’t just about enviro-friendly building codes and other mechanistic means of saving energy, recycling waste, conserving water, and all that. In my “Sustainable Fairview Associates—a cautionary tale” post, I said:

Thoreau puts it so well: “Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. I sat at a table where were rich food and wine in abundance and obsequious attendance, but sincerity and truth were not; and I went away hungry from the inhospitable board.” What truly sustains us? Not water, not air, not food, not shelter. These are all for the body, not the “us” that is our soul, spirit, consciousness, original nature, true self—whatever you want to call it.

A so-called “sustainable development” that doesn’t sustain this part of us, the most important part of us, the part of us that finds meaning in life beyond bare existence, it isn’t sustainable at all. Man (and woman) does not live by solar collectors, living system wastewater treatment, permeable roads, and fuel cells alone. A life absent genuine community—where I can commune both with myself and with my fellow human beings—is a life absent what makes life worth living.

Glancing over my SFA-critical blog post oeuvre, I realize that I sound pie-in-the-skyish at times. Lots of times. Undoubtedly this is how I sounded to SFA management as well, who turned a deaf ear to my “Let’s be truly green!” entreaties.

Well, I tried. Sustainable Fairview has turned out fine. Maybe it will end up more than fine—excellent. We’ll see. Time will tell. There’s no doubt that these 245 acres will end up in much better shape than they would have if a traditional developer such as Chuck Sides had gotten hold of them.

For that, I’m happy.

Here’s my compilation of Sustainable Fairview blog posts. Perhaps someday they will become fodder for a graduate student thesis concerning the history of this development. In a decade my writings will appear either prescient or foolish.

Whatever. I just said what I had to say—the blogger’s creed.

Sustainable Fairview overview
What’s sustainable?
New name for “Fairview”
Renaming Fairview makes the news
Thanks for feeding PollMonkey
On remaining in a room
Relativity and sustainability
Sustainable Fairview Associates—a cautionary tale
Seriously seeking special setting
“You say you want a revolution…”
Power to the weblog, right on!
275 urban ac.; 700,000 sq. ft.; grt. vu.; Salem; $13 mil/offer
“Sustainable” Fairview: is it really?
Sustainable Fairview update
Pringle Creek Community, a Salem sustainable development
Salem City Council knows zilch about sustainability

Global warming is real. Debate over.

If you have any doubts that global warming is real, read the April 3 TIME magazine cover story and “Be Worried, Be Very Worried.” The evidence is in. The debate is over. Global warming is happening. Humans are the major cause of it. And we’re heading for disaster.

Yes, there are still global warming deniers like Oregon climatologist George Taylor. But he’s been outed by Willamette Week and I haven’t heard any “global warming is a myth” craziness from George lately. Maybe he’s turned to arguing that creationism and intelligent design are fact, while evolution is fiction. Or that the Earth is flat.

It’s a free country. People can believe weird things. But they don’t have the right to destroy our planet. This is why there’s a big difference between evolution-denying crazies and global warming-denying crazies: the latter are a lot more dangerous.

TIME speaks the truth: “Polar ice caps are melting faster than ever…More and more land is being devastated by drought…Rising waters are drowning low-lying communities…By any measure, Earth is at the tipping point…The climate is crashing, and global warming is to blame.”

It may be too late to do anything about it. Once past a tipping point, it’s devilishly difficult to turn things around. But the cover story ends with:

Curbing global warming my be an order of magnitude harder than, say, eradicating smallpox or putting a man on the moon. But is it moral not to try? We did not so much march toward the environmental precipice as drunkenly reel there, snapping at the scientific scolds who told us we had a problem.

The scolds, however, knew what they were talking about. In a solar system crowded with sister worlds that either emerged stillborn like Mercury and Venus or died in infancy like Mars, we’re finally coming to appreciate the knife-blade margins within which life can thrive. For more than a century we’ve been monkeying with those margins. It’s long past time we set them right.

James Hansen, a NASA scientist the Bush administration has been trying to shut up, is one of the scolds who's been warning about the dangers of global warming. His Scientific American article, “Defusing the Global Warming Time Bomb” is both solid and scary. “Small forces,” he says, “maintained long enough, can cause large climate change.”

Humans are pumping huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Nonetheless, compared to Nature as a whole humanity’s impact on the climate is puny. The problem is, as Hansen pointed out, that relatively small anthropogenic (human-caused) forces can have big effects.

Arctic ice is melting. That’s a fact. As it melts dark water increases and light ice decreases. Dark water absorbs heat while light ice reflects it. So that causes more melting, which makes more dark water, and so it goes. The system feeds back upon itself.

TIME says that the effects of global warming are upon us much more quickly than was anticipated.

What few people reckoned on was that global climate systems are booby-trapped with tipping points and feedback loops, thresholds past which the slow creep of environmental decay gives rise to sudden and self-perpetuating collapse. Pump enough carbon dioxide in the sky, and that last part per million of greenhouse gas behaves like the 212th degree Fahrenheit that turns a pot of hot water into a plume of billowing steam.

Amazingly, conservative apologists like George Will are still saying that global warming is up for debate. It’s strange. In the old days, conservatives believed in conserving. I know this because I was raised by a woman who was both deeply Republican and deeply conservative in the best sense of the word: frugal, non-wasteful, protective of limited resources both monetary and natural.

George Will writes:

Are we sure there will be proportionate benefits from whatever climate change can be purchased at the cost of slowing economic growth and spending trillions? Are we sure the consequences of climate change -- remember, a thick sheet of ice once covered the Middle West -- must be bad?

Gee, George, what a great question. Let’s ask the people of Nebraska if they’d rather run the risk of having the United States’ economic growth slowed slightly or be buried under a sheet of ice.

Alternatively, if the answer to that question seems obvious we can instead apply ourselves to combating global warming. Hansen says, “The emphasis should be on mitigating the [climate] changes rather than just adapting to them.”

My wife and I own two cars, a Toyota Prius and a Toyota Highlander. Both are hybrids. Automotively, we’re doing our part.

Our hot water heater needs replacing. Today we ordered a new one. The energy efficient model is going to cost us an extra hundred dollars (though we’ll get some of that money back via a tax credit). Water heaterly, we’re doing our part.

Unfortunately, neither of us is the President of the United States, who isn’t doing his part. Recently I heard George Bush say that he is opposed to the Kyoto Treaty because it would harm the American economy.

As if having the mid-West covered by a sheet of ice wouldn’t. What an idiot.
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Next day P.S.: it might seem paradoxical that global warming could lead to either a mini or maxi ice age, but the Scientific American article about "Abrupt Climate Change" explains how this might happen:

As global warming continues to heat up the planet, many scientists fear that large pulses of freshwater melting off the Greenland ice sheet and other frozen northern landscapes could obstruct the so-called North American conveyor, the system of ocean currents that brings warmth to Europe and strongly influences climate elsewhere in the world.

A conveyor shutdown--or even a significant slowdown--could cool the North Atlantic region even as global temperatures continue to rise. Other challenging and abrupt climate changes would almost certainly result...As the conveyor grows quiet winters become harsher in much of Europe and North America, and agriculture suffers.

...Uncertainties abound, and although a new ice age is not thought credible, the resulting changes could be notably larger than they were during the Little Ice Age, when the Thames in London froze and glaciers rumbled down the Alps.

City Council shooting Salem in the foot

Here’s an open secret: Salem, Oregon is an unappealing city. Here’s another: the Salem City Council is determined to keep it that way. Crazy. Salem already is crippled by poor planning, lack of creativity, and a boring downtown. Yet the City Council is busily engaged in shooting the city in its foot to hobble it even more.

As I said in “Salem City Council knows zilch about sustainability,” state planners have rejected Salem’s land use policies as being inconsistent with good mixed-use development. Rather than doing the right thing and fixing the plan, the City Council is appealing to the state Land Use Board of Appeals (LUBA).

That’s a waste of money. Also, a waste of all the time and effort that went into the Salem Futures planning effort. The Statesman-Journal editorial board agrees. Today’s paper says that “Effective land-use planning is key to Salem’s future.” Right on.

This isn’t rocket science, befuddled City Council members. Just think about where you like to go when you’re on vacation or driving through a new town. “Wow, take the next exit, dear! Look at that sprawling subdivision…and the strip mall. And…oh my god, it’s a bunch of big box stores! Wal-Mart. Target. Costco. It’s all so…beautiful.”

No, my friends. This isn’t reality.

What you actually do is stop in Sisters on the way to Bend because the stores are so unique, there’s a strict “Western only look” zoning code, and no garish signs. Or, on the coast, you drive right though butt-ugly unplanned Lincoln City and head for oh-so-charming Cannon Beach, where you can have a pleasant time walking around downtown and not take your life in your hands to cross a four-lane highway.

The Statesman-Journal editorial is fine as far as it goes, but it omitted mention of downtown Salem’s notorious lack of vitality. Finally some of the boarded-up buildings are being renovated, but there’s not much to draw people to the city’s core.

Several times a week I go to a Tai Chi class on Court Street. Mondays Laurel and I now go to a tango class at 7:00 pm. So for the past few weeks I’ve been looking for something to eat when Tai Chi is over at 6:00 pm and I’ve got an hour to kill. The first coffee house I went to said, “We’ve stopped serving food.” The second one told me, “We’ve shut down the stove, but it’s still warm and we’ll make you a hot sandwich if you can wait a while.”

I look at my watch. It’s 6:15 pm, not midnight! But in downtown Salem the sidewalks roll up really early, so it might as well be. Mostly those sidewalks are inhabited by street youth after the sun goes down, and they aren’t big spenders. If people actually lived downtown, things would be different.

But, ooh, that would mean mixed-use planning, and the City Council doesn’t want to have anything to do with evil commie socialistic bureaucratic anti-free market planning. So the City Council fiddles with its LUBA appeal while Salem burns.

And bores.

Salem City Council knows zilch about sustainability

It wasn’t a surprise. In today’s Salem Statesman-Journal this headline hit my eyes: “State rejects city’s review of land-use policies.” A shock it was not: the Salem City Council is notoriously tone deaf when it comes to singing tunes of sustainability and environmentalism.

But even though my expectations of council members are low when it comes to all things Green, the lack of understanding of Council President Jim Randall still was shocking. I read:

The Salem City Council thinks that a voluntary, market-based approach with minimal planning is the only way to promote dense mixed-use development of the sort proposed by the Fairview development in South Salem, Council President Jim Randall said.

My wife and I are investors in this development, Sustainable Fairview. We know a lot about it. And we totally disagree with the notion that a “voluntary, market-based approach with minimal planning” is the way to foster further dense, mixed-use development akin to Fairview.

This definitely wasn’t how Sustainable Fairview came to be. The project flowed out of intense state, city, and community planning. It required a complete rezoning of the 275 acres that used to comprise the Fairview Training Center to assure that development would proceed in line with principles of sustainability (energy use, wastewater management, de-emphasis of auto transportation, and so on).

Here’s how the Sustainable Fairview web site’s “Planning and Development” section describes the history of the project:

The Fairview Master Plan is consistent with Oregon’s most forward-thinking visions and goals for sustainable development. From its inception in 2001, Sustainable Fairview Associates (SFA) used the Governor's Quality Development Objectives, the City of Salem’s long range planning effort, Salem Futures, and the Governors Sustainability Executive Order as guidelines for its development program. Likewise, SFA has relied on local, regional, national and international expertise in planning, engineering and design (see Land Planning Team).

Finally, community charrette and numerous public forums were used to both inspire and refine the elements of the plan to be innovative, yet practical and economically exciting for the city in which we live. The Fairview plan has generated development of new mixed-use zone ordinances and aspires to be a model for facilitating new development patterns that create a strong sense of place and community.

Jim Randall and the rest of the Salem City Council members need a crash course in land use planning and sustainable development. Otherwise Salem is going to continue to have its land use policies rejected by the state, which, entirely appropriately, expects that local jurisdictions demonstrate at least minimal competence in planning.

[Next day update: A few additional thoughts, spurred in part by Max’s comment that Salem planners don’t have a supportive environment. Absolutely. I wasn’t being critical of the professional planning staff, who I’m sure could come up with a great mixed-use vision for Salem if they were working for a City Council and Mayor who valued sustainability.

Salem is a backwater. It’s frustrating for me to have lived here for 29 years and see an area with so much potential remain the ugly duckling to Portland and Eugene’s swan. By and large Salem’s civic leaders have precious little imagination, creativity, and daring. Their motto is, “Even if it’s broken, why fix it?”

Concerning market-based approaches to mixed-use development, a phrase from my old Systems Science program days comes to mind: “discounting the future.” Meaning, a bird in hand is worth two or more hiding in the brush that you aren’t aware of yet. So the future is given less value than the present. Making money now is a higher priority than investing in the future.

That’s an incredibly selfish attitude, especially over the long run. The “present” I’m living in is going to run out, almost certainly, before the present of my daughter does. So the world I’m helping to form now is going to be the world she inherits. If that world isn’t capable of sustaining human civilization, then I’ve failed her.

This is what sustainability is about: assuring that future generations have the same opportunity to live a good life—or an even better life—as we have now. That takes planning, because the free market discounts the future. It is present oriented. Make money now. Consume limited resources now.

So Jim Randall’s idea that limited or non-existent planning is going to result in a positive sustainable future for Salem is ridiculous. It likely flows from two sources: (1) ignorance of what sustainability means and how important it is, and (2) a political unwillingness to embrace planning even if he overcame that ignorance.

Sad. I just hope that Salem voters will recognize how poorly they are being served by the current City Council and kick as many members as possible out in coming elections.]

[Further update: Sustainable Fairview Associates (the group developing Fairview) has sent a letter to Mayor Janet Taylor and the Salem City Council that emphasizes the need for planning in support of mixed-use development. Hopefully it will help open some minds.
Download sfa_city_council_letter.pdf

The letter is mentioned in today's Statesman-Journal story, "Board rejects using Salem Futures outline," about the Council's ill-advised decision to throw away hundreds of thousands of dollars and countless volunteer hours that went into the Salem Futures planning effort.]

Property rights and wrongs

Oregon is in the midst of a fierce battle between property rights fanatics and reasonable people, like moi, who recognize that a unfettered right to do whatever you want with your property is actually a wrong.

I hope the “Big Look” task force that will be holding hearings around the state and recommending changes in Oregon’s land use laws will pay as much attention to broad philosophical issues as narrow legalistic points. For disagreements over values are at the root of property rights debates.

What value does land have in itself, absent development? How do we value the needs and desires of surrounding property owners when deciding how a piece of land should be used? Should people be able to undermine someone else’s values in pursuit of their own satisfaction?

In other areas of life, questions like these can be resolved without the shrill “don’t tread on me!” attitude exhibited by property rights extremists. Smoking was banned on airplanes a long time ago. Everyone, including most smokers, came to understand that your right to smoke is subservient to my right to breathe.

But strangely, a person’s ability to use his or her land without restraint is too often viewed as some sort of sacred right. I say “strangely,” because if anything should be used for the common good, rather than private gain, it is land.

Cigarettes are made by people and for people. They are a human invention. So the cigarette you put in your mouth took skill, time, and money to manufacture. I think it’s stupid to smoke. However, you have the right to buy cigarettes and others have the right to sell them, just like other artificial commodities.

Land is different. The “Creator” made it (leaving aside who or what the big “C” is). Just like the oceans. Just like the air. We don’t allow the oceans to be sold, nor the air. People have the right to use these public goods, but no one can own them. Yet land is treated differently, in our modern societies at least.

For reasons I haven’t been able to understand, someone who owns land tends to think, “This is mine, mine, mine! I should be able to do with it whatever I want, regardless of how my doing affects other people.” Given the interrelatedness of natural and social ecosystems, this attitude is as nonsensical as the owner of a fishing fleet saying, “I can catch fish until they go extinct!” or a power plant operator saying “I can pollute as much as I please!”

My wife, Laurel, and I own ten rural acres. We live next to a couple who own five acres adjacent to a commonly owned lake. Last summer they became indignant when willows along the lakeshore grew so high their view of the water was impaired. Laurel oversees maintenance of the common property in our development and arranged to have the willows cut down. The couple was happy. They enjoyed their view of the lake and felt that it was their right to continue to enjoy it.

Then, in the fall they started construction on a detached garage. A large garage. A garage right in front of our own best view of the lake. We used to enjoy looking at the lake as we walked along the edge of our property. Now we don’t enjoy looking at their new building.

A small skirmish in the land use war. Legally, our neighbors had the right to build whatever they wanted, wherever they wanted. Ethically, that’s another question. For it was evident that they weren’t adhering to the Golden Rule: what they didn’t want done to them, view-wise, they did to us.

Hopefully the Big Look task force will help the citizens of our state understand that Measure 37 tilted the land use balance way too far in the direction of individual property owner rights. The rights of neighbors and other people have to be considered also when determining how land can be used. I doubt that even the most zealous property rights proponent would be overjoyed to hear that a motocross course is going to be built right next to his home.

And then there’s the whole question of whether it even makes sense to own land at all. We just leased a car. We will be using it for three years. We won’t own it during that time. Who cares? What we want is the use of a car, not the ownership of a car. Similarly, if land were used for a price, not owned, the feeling of “this land is my land” would be lessened, and an attitude of “this land is our land” fostered.

When I was involved with an effort to form a sustainable development where homes would have been built on leased lots, I considered whether humanity valued land ownership to such a degree that we’d agree to sell the entire Earth. Though some might view this as a reductio ad absurdum argument against unfettered property rights, I think it is the Oregonians in Action types who are reasoning absurdly.

Here’s an excerpt:

Who would agree to selling the Earth? Leaving aside such practicalities as settling on a purchase price, and securing clear title to the 126 billion acres of land and water, is the Earth for sale?

We might imagine a interstellar entrepreneur landing in her spaceship, and making humankind a generous offer for the third planet from the sun. Would we accept it, or would we be outraged at the very idea that anyone would view our terrestrial home as a commodity with a price tag attached, like a toaster?

It is exceedingly difficult to envision Earth being put up for sale, either to a terrestrial or extraterrestrial entity. Yet bits and pieces of Earth are sold all the time, some large and some small. Generally, this raises no alarm. But perhaps it should.

“I wish to buy this 20 square mile island.” “Very good, sir. I will prepare the papers while you write the check.” This interchange seems completely normal to us.

At what scale, though, does a property purchase become unthinkable, a moral outrage not far distant from selling the entire Earth. Could someone buy a substantial nation? A minor continent? The southern hemisphere? When is it right to convert land to private ownership, and when is it wrong?

There is no simple answer to this question. However, whatever the answer may be, clearly global sustainability is intimately connected with a communal land ethic. Every person depends on Earth for his or her survival. So the idea of making a commodity out of the foundation of life is repellant.

Nonetheless, most people have no problem with making a commodity out of acreages that are parts of the foundation of life, with some mightily resisting as “socialist” or “communist” the notion that land ever should belong to all, and not just to a few. These same people, though, almost certainly would reject the interstellar entrepreneur’s offer to buy the entire Earth.

Auto-wise, we can’t get much Greener

Saturday a 2006 Toyota Highlander Hybrid SUV came into our lives, joining its 2004 Prius sibling. We are so green, the Kyoto protocol oozes through our pores.

I’ve been feeling superior to just about every car on the road during the Highlander Hybrid (HiHy) driving experiences I’ve had so far. HiHy is bigger, tougher, and faster—7.3 seconds 0 to 60—than every other hybrid on the road today (it ties with the Lexus hybrid that, basically, is an identical twin).

As a HybridCars.com review of HiHy said:

A Prius looks and feels like a hybrid. When you drive one, you scream, “I’m a geeky enviro-weenie” from a mile away…The speed and normal-ness of the Highlander should take its appeal beyond the most ardent supporters of hybrid technology. If you must have a SUV, you must.

Absolutely. But large non-hybrid SUVs scream “I’m an oil-waster, greenhouse gas producer, and OPEC supporter” from a mile away. So I also feel superior to the obnoxiously over-sized Excursions, Tahoes, Suburbans, Hummers, and such that pull up next to me with a 120 pound woman and two grocery bags inside.

Thus I rule the road both enviro-ethically and enviro-machoey. In my own mind, at least, where it counts.

I’ll share more impressions of HiHy after I’ve lived with it longer. First impression: great car, though not without some annoying quirks. These annoyances bother us more because we’ve got our almost 100% positive Prius experience for comparison. The Prius cost $23,000 and the leased Highlander Hybrid $37,000 and change. (We paid MSRP at Capitol Toyota in Salem both times through easy-to-work-with Kelly, the Internet sales guy).

Consider HiHy’s clock. It looks like Toyota got these at a Nabisco warehouse sale, when the “clock inside every box” Wheaties promotion was discontinued. The fuzzy green numbers aren’t due to my taking a bad photo. That’s the way they really look. Toyota, for $37,000 can’t we have a clock with a display that looks at least as good as a $15 Timex?

And then there’s the atrocious “Multi-function display” that you get in the HiHy if you don’t opt for a navigation system and a touch-screen. It’s that gray box, which reminds me a lot of the screen on an old Kaypro computer that I owned in the technological dark ages, except the Kaypro had a green screen and appeared more modern than this.

Our Prius gives us precise running feedback about the mileage we’re getting at any moment. Like, 45.6. With HiHy you get a tiny bar graph that tells you very roughly what mileage the car is presently getting, and no info at all about how you’re doing since the last fill up. Reach for a calculator and a piece of paper; that’s how you figure your mpg in the base HiHy. Ridiculous. Especially considering that this is an SUV being marketed for its fuel economy.

I do like some of the retro features of HiHy. The premium sound system has a cassette player for when you want to listen to your old Steppenwolf recordings. I’ve gotten used to automatic climate control systems, but turning those old-fashioned knobs to get less or more heat isn’t bothering me at all.

And I much prefer pushing a preset button to get the station I want over the Prius’ touchscreen display—which washes out in sunlight (not a problem for most of the year in Oregon, admittedly).

Also on the plus side, Toyota now has sprung for extra hybrid badging on both sides of the car.

The reviews written soon after HiHy was introduced said that for the extra $5,000 or so that the hybrid costs over the strictly gas Highlander outwardly got you only this tiny mention on the rear.

Thank you, Toyota. Now that automotively I’m Pure Green, I want as many people as possible to know about it. (Owner ego-loss didn’t come as standard equipment, obviously).

Oregon cougar plan based on fictions, not facts

If anybody should be afraid of cougars, you’d think it would be me. It’s pretty certain that a cougar killed two fawns near our house recently, and my dog-walking routine takes me right through this area near dusk (or even after dark).

But I don’t worry about being attacked by a cougar because the risk is infinitesimal. I’m at about thirty times greater risk of being struck by lightning. So what is the problem that the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife’s much-debated plan to proactively kill cougars is trying to solve?

Short answer: there isn’t one. The Oregon Cougar Management Plan is based on fictions, not facts. It’s an emotional reaction to the existence of a natural predator that hasn’t attacked a person in this state during the past thirteen years.

Eugene’s Predator Defense organization has posted a critique of the ODFW cougar plan from Rick Hopkins, Ph.D., senior wildlife ecologist with Live Oak Associates. It’s devastating.

There’s no rational reason to go out and kill cougars just because they exist, and might pose a threat to a person one day. That “might” is an exceedingly flimsy excuse for spending loads of taxpayer dollars in a misguided attempt to reduce an already negligible risk.

Here are the facts of the matter as Hopkins presents them in his October 31, 2005 comments on the Draft 2005 Oregon Cougar Management Plan. I’ve slightly edited excerpted remarks for clarity.
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(1) Cougars clearly represent almost no threat to humans. In all of North America over the last 112 years there are only about 100 documented cases of cougars attacking people, with 17 deaths resulting from the attacks. A disproportionate number of these attacks have occurred in the past 30 years, but this likely is due to the increase in the human population.

Since 1990 Washington state has recorded 8 attacks, California 7, and Oregon 0. [Yes, that’s right: zero.] The risk of an attack is probably on the order of 1 in 100 million or more. It is amazing that the ODFW feels compelled to concern themselves with cougar/human incidents that affect two to three people per year (one or two children at most) in all of North America.

(2) Sport hunting or other means of killing cougars don’t reduce the risk to humans of an attack. The belief that increased killing of cougars will reduce the risk of an attack is simply not based on any scientific analysis and is logically deficient. If you reduced the cougar population in the state by 10% and assumed this meant your risk improved by 10%, you have simply shifted the odds from 1 in 100 million to 1 in 110 million. In other words, it is simply immeasurable: you would have no way to know that you had any effect.

An extensive analysis of attack statistics across North America have caused me to conclude that the intensity of sport-hunting is not at all correlated with a concomitant change in the risk to humans. Simply put, sport-hunting is irrelevant with questions related to human safety threats. California has more people, more cougars, and no sport-hunting season for 33 years and yet ranks near the bottom of risk rate.

The best advice is to not try to micro-manage cougar populations to reduce rare events: there is simply no science to support it.

(3) Most sightings of cougars are false. Dr. Beier studied a population of cougars in Southern California. He determined that 70-90% of reports of cougars along the urban/rural interface were false sightings. [See my “Oregon cougar sighting really a kitty cat” post] Thus, changes in “sighting data” is more a measure of changes in people’s attitudes or anxieties related to the cougar and has almost no relevance for evaluating changes in cougar populations.

In reality, the Plan as proposed would not reduce the risk of being attacked in Oregon, as the current risk is so small as not to be reasonably measured. Those Oregonians (and tourists) who live or recreate in cougar country expose themselves daily to many more risky activities and yet they never consider nor concern themselves with the true risk these activities pose.
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Hopkins also says, “The yearning to get back to nature has inadvertently created an increased anxiety between people and the very nature they want to experience.” Good point. We call them wildlife for a reason. They are wild.

I can’t understand this fear of wildness. Maybe it is a Christian thing—dominance over nature and all that. Too many people have this unnatural idea that nature has to be managed and obsessively controlled rather than left alone.

How about coming up with a Cougar Unmanagement Plan, Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife? That blank piece of paper would save lots of your time and our money. There’s no need to try to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. Leave cougars alone.

You can submit a comment on the ODFW Cougar plan by email: cougar.plan@state.or.us

Wolves and fear of the wild

“I like my Canadian wolf fried.” What kind of person would put that bumper sticker on his or her car? I think, a fearful person. Someone who is afraid of the wild that wolves represent.

Thoreau famously said, “In Wildness is the preservation of the world.” I’m familiar with that quote. But until today I hadn’t bothered to read what came before and after those words in his essay on “Walking.”

The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the world. Every tree sends its fibres forth in search of the Wild. The cities import it at any price. Men plow and sail for it. From the forest and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind.

Our ancestors were savages. The story of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a wolf is not a meaningless fable. The founders of every state which has risen to eminence, have drawn their nourishment and vigor from a similar wild source. It is because the children of the empire were not suckled by the wolf that they were conquered and displaced by the children of the northern forests who were.

Thoreau is right. We need wolfish wildness to remain vital, whether the “we” be a nation of millions or an individual of one. Our heritage demands it. Wildness is embedded in our innermost being.

For we are animals, just like wolves. Even more: the science of evolution tells us that some tens of millions of years ago wolves were us. Or rather, we shared a common ancestor from which sprung the mammalian branch of life that now includes wolves and humans.

Today a HinesSight reader pointed me toward a Los Angeles Times story, “Wolves Thrive but Animosity Keeps Pace.” It’s a disturbing tale of irrational lupine fear. In North America a single person has been killed by wolves in the past 100 years. Wolves account for a miniscule fraction of livestock losses, as noted in my “Ranchers overly afraid of the big bad wolf” post.

So there’s no good reason to fear wolves. Nor any wild animal. Respect, yes. Fear, no.

I grew up in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains where rattlesnakes are common. As a boy who ran wild around those foothills I had a healthy respect for rattlesnakes. I certainly felt a chill up my spine when, crawling through a rocky passage, I heard an unmistakable rattle and made the hastiest exit of my young life.

But I never heard anyone calling for the killing of every rattlesnake in California. Yet quite a few wolf-fearers believe that the only good wolf is a dead wolf, even though domesticated dogs are a much greater danger to both people and livestock. In the LA Times article a Defenders of Wildlife spokeswoman opines that wolves are irrationally feared because of deep-seated myth (such as the tragic tale of Little Red Riding Hood).

That may be. My own theory, though, leans more toward the fear of wildness as the causative factor behind irrational wolf-phobia. Hillary Rosner says in her thoughtful piece, “The Big Bad Wolf and the American Mind”:

American attitudes toward wolves are tied up in the strange relationship we have with the idea of the wild more generally: we want it, but only in places where we designate it, only as decreed and managed by us. So, too, wolves are fine, but only if they stay within certain boundaries and keep their wolfishness to a minimum. Keeping wolves in check is a sign, somehow, that we’ve triumphed as a civilization; let them get out of control, and you never know where else nature might come insidiously creeping back in.

We’ve gotten to a point where anything allowed to retain its stamp of “wild” – whether animal, plant, or landscape – must be rigorously managed down to the last detail. Perhaps there’s no way around it. But it undoubtedly has an impact on the American psyche, perhaps subconsciously altering the way we interpret words like “wild” and “wilderness.”

Yes, absolutely. I don’t think this is necessarily a conservative vs. progressive divide, for my highly conservative mother held the old-fashioned Republican belief that the word meant just that: conservatives conserved, whether it be money or wildlife. Yet nowadays it is the radical right that is the most afraid of wildness, as evidenced by steadily increasing pressures to cut out the “wild” from our remaining wilderness.

Wolves are a strong symbol of wildness. Hence, the irrational hatred of them by those who fear the wild that can’t be controlled. These same people, I strongly suspect, also fear homosexuality, for sexual proclivity falls in the realm of the uncontrollable. Likewise, almost assuredly they distrust non-dogmatic spiritual paths such as Buddhism and Taoism, for these encourage an independence of action and belief that breaks the bounds of conventional religiosity.

In the same sense global warming, I suspect, is looked upon as an accomplishment by most fearers of the wild. “We have tamed nature,” they think—consciously or unconsciously. “Human technology has altered the course of natural climate change. Mankind rules! I like my weather fried.”

Far be it from me to deny anyone their chosen fear. Fear of God, fear of wolves, fear of living in harmony with nature, fear of gays. If you want to live a fearful life, be my guest.

But please, don’t impose your fears on the rest of us. Keep them to yourself. I’d like to hear the sound of a wild wolf howl someday, just as my wife and I have enjoyed listening to nearby coyote song. Those of us who embrace the wild aren’t, well, wild about having it torn away from us.

If you want to try to keep your life’s garden perfectly manicured behind a psychic fence that repels even a hint of wildness, go ahead. Just remember that outside the walls you choose to hide behind lies the world where wild-lovers roam.

Take a peek. Try a howl. You might find an inner wolf yearning to run free.

The right is right on immigration reform

This being the holiday season, a time of brotherhood and good will, I’ve been searching my progressive soul for any political common ground that I have with the right-wing in America.

I’ve been listening more than I usually do to Tony Snow, Sean Hannity, Lars Larson, and Victoria Taft (a local Portland rightie) as I cruise around in my progressively pure Toyota Prius, wishing that I could harness the hot air emanating over the radio waves for even greater mileage.

There’s one issue—only one—that makes me nod in agreement when I hear it discussed on the conservative talk shows: immigration reform. Not Bush’s weenie guest worker version, but the hardass lock up the borders and send illegals home variety.

When I read, “Republicans ready to turn the screw on immigration,” I say “Go for it!” One group of House Republicans wants, among other things, to build a 2,000 mile fence along the Mexico-U.S. border, stop granting citizenship to U.S. born children of illegal immigrants, and require employers to verify that their employees are legal workers.

Sounds good to me. Sometimes the right is actually right. Progressives should support this tough immigration reform legislation, even if most on the left will have different reasons for liking it.

I agree with the folks at the Carrying Capacity Network who say that immigration reduction is key to stabilizing our country’s population, which in turn is the foundation for solving our environmental, energy, and social problems in a sustainable fashion.

The Center for Immigration Studies recently released a study which found that more immigrants came into the United States since 2000 than in any other five-year period in the nation’s history. And almost half, 3.7 million, entered illegally. That’s scary.

SUSPS, a network of Sierra Club activists who disagree with the Club’s blasé attitude toward population growth, say “no to racism, yes to environmentalism.” Their desire to drastically reduce immigration, like mine, stems almost entirely from ecological concerns.

I don’t like Michael Savage’s Borders, Language, and Culture jingoish mantra. I’m not interested in keeping America pure. I want American to be livable. I want America to consume a smaller percentage of the Earth’s non-renewable resources. I want America to embrace a philosophy of sustainability rather than mortgage the future for current economic growth.

None of those wants is going to happen unless this nation’s population growth gets under control. And SUSPS points out that immigration is the largest factor contributing to that growth.

So for once I agree with the most rabid right-wingers in Congress on an issue. Miracles do happen.

Ranchers overly afraid of the big bad wolf

Oregon ranchers, who I’d think would be pretty tough guys, are scared to death of the mere possibility that a few wolves might one day find their way into this state. No wolves yet have crossed the border from Idaho, but the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission has been laboring on a plan to deal with them if they do.

The Oregon Cattlemen’s Association is freaking out about the plan, which is slated to be voted on tomorrow (December 1). They want ranchers to be able to kill wolves that even look cross-eyed at livestock, notwithstanding the fact that so far there are no wolves in Oregon and no livestock being threatened by the non-existent wolves. So it’s difficult to understand what the Cattlemen’s Association is so frightened about.

Yes, I realize that most of us grew up listening to the song, “Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf?” If you’re a pig who lives in a house made of hay or twigs, and there’s a big-lunged wolf at the door, it’s reasonable to start quaking in your porcine boots. However, for the rest of us—which includes Eastern Oregon ranchers—wolves aren’t a threat to be much concerned about.

Check out these wolftrust.org statistics: Minnesota is estimated to have 2500 wolves. In the 22 years from 1979 to 2001, wolves killed 1200 cattle and 879 sheep. So each wolf killed less than one livestock animal per year. Idaho has only several hundred wolves. Oregon, zero.

So even if a few dozen wolves decide to come to Oregon, that’s no big deal for ranchers. Wolftrust.org shows that in states with wolves, predation from all types of animals (coyotes, mostly) accounts for only 1-2% of unplanned cattle and sheep deaths. Disease and severe weather kill hugely more animals.

Ranchers should chill about wolves and spend their energy worrying about other more serious problems. Like, how much longer is the public going to let them get away with welfare ranching?

Many ranchers in Oregon graze their cattle on public lands. According to the “Welfare Ranching” book, federal permittees pay only $1.35 per month to graze a cow-calf pair while the average monthly cost of grazing a cow-calf pair on private lands is $11.10. So us taxpayers should have a lot to say about what happens on public ranchland, since we’re the ones subsidizing the ranchers.

And I say, let the wolves alone. I don’t object to setting up a state-funded program to compensate landowners for wolf-caused livestock losses, but ranchers shouldn’t be able to kill wolves—whether or not a few livestock have been lost. That’s just the cost of doing business in a state that values wildlife and the environment.

I don’t see Oregon vineyards demanding that all birds be shot because they lose some of their grape crop to them. And I don’t see Oregon timber companies demanding that all deer be shot because they lose some young plantings to antler rubbing. So why shouldn’t Oregon ranchers accept that in the future they might lose a few cattle and sheep to some wolves?

Again, they’ve got other things to worry about. Like, as noted here, people are eating less beef for health reasons, the nasty environmental problems caused by cattle on public lands are becoming increasingly obvious, and more beef is being imported from other countries.

The big bad wolf should be one of the least of Oregon ranchers’ concerns. Let him be.

A hybrid that has it all

Are you yearning for balance in your automotive life? Do you, like me, want it all? Abundant power and good mileage, driving fun and environmental righteousness. If so, take a look at the Toyota Highlander Hybrid SUV, which is rated #1 in a “muscle per gallon” index prepared by U.S. News & World Report.

Since my wife and I are on a waiting list to buy the 4-wheel-drive version of this car, I was pleased to see that the Highlander beat out the $65,000 Chevrolet Corvette (#2) and the $453,000 Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren (#3), each of which boasts ferocious horsepower but gets piddling mileage.

This is one of the reasons why we’ve come to look more fondly at the Highlander Hybrid SUV. Back in July I opined, “Toyota Highlander Hybrid not so green.” It bugged me that the 4-wheel-drive version got only 31 city/27 hwy while our much-beloved 2004 Toyota Prius is rated 60/51 and reliably gives us 45 mpg in real world driving.

Toyota could have hybridized the four cylinder gasoline Highlander and come up with a car more akin to the Ford Escape Hybrid, which gets about 10% better mileage according to the EPA. We considered the Escape, but the fit, finish, and, yes, fun of the Highlander caused us to buy Japanese.

Zero to 60 in 7.3 seconds and nearly zero emissions. I like it.

If you’re thinking of getting a hybrid, be sure to check out GreenHybrid.com’s “Real Hybrid Mileage Database.” As is well-known, you can’t trust the EPA mileage estimates for either hybrid or regular cars.

In the mixed driving we do in our Prius we’re getting about 10% below the 51 mpg estimate for highway driving. Similarly, the average actual mileage reported by Highlander Hybrid buyers is 26 mpg, which is in the neighborhood of 10% under the EPA highway estimate (taking into account that the 2-wheel-drive version is supposed to get several miles a gallon more than the 4-wheel-drive version).

Right now it’s tough to make a purely financial case for buying a hybrid SUV, especially if you don’t drive a lot. We only put about 10,000 miles a year on our Volvo XC wagon, the car that the Highlander Hybrid will replace. With gas at $3 a gallon, we may never save enough money via the car’s hybrid technology to pay for the approximately $4,500 Toyota is charging for it.

However, the estimated $2,200 federal tax credit for buying a Highlander 4wd that goes into effect in 2006 will ease the financial pain. (To be sure you’ll get the credit, you need to buy a hybrid as early in the year as possible, as I explained in this post.)

In the end, our decision to buy another hybrid came down to putting the money we’d earmarked for a new car where our collective environmental mouth was. Laurel and I both talk a good Green game, but we don’t always play it like we should. For example, I’m semi-ashamed to admit that we still haven’t signed up with PGE for “green power,” in large part because I’m still so ticked at Enron.

A salesman at Capitol Toyota recognized what sells the Highlander Hybrid. He admitted that buyers aren’t getting the car for purely rational reasons. “They want to make a statement,” he said. “They believe in what the car stands for.”

Indeed, we do. Taking a stand against global warming and for America’s energy independence is worth a few thousand dollars to us. Plus, the fun I’ll have driving around in an 268 horsepower SUV with one engine and three (count ‘em, three) electric motors will help make me forget how much the car cost us.

Oregon cougar sighting really a kitty cat

Fearsome! Here’s a KATU news photo of the “cougar” that was reported to be stalking around Fanno Creek Park near Beaverton on Thursday.

It turned out to be Mittens, a large cat to be sure, but of the domesticated house pet variety. None the less, the man who spotted the animal, Drew Essig, "said he saw in the park wetlands a large cat similar to a cougar." It was described as larger than a pet and having a tail about 3 feet long.

On Friday a KATU news team captured photos of both Mittens, the non-cougar,. and Essig, the non-cougar sighter. Essig was embarrassed but good-natured: Oh, my god, this is embarassing. Yeah...and they're still filming me. Thanks, guys. Oh, my god. Do you know how many people I called and said, "I saw a cougar." Oh, wow.

After the story aired, KATU went back live to the anchor desk where this exchange took place: Weatherman: “Now, when you see a cougar, I’m thinking there’s probably no doubt about it. Anchor: “Well, apparently there was.”

Yes indeed, there was. This would just be an amusing story of mistaken cougar identity if it weren’t for the fact that the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife has proposed a Cougar Management Plan whose goal is to reduce the number of cougar complaints to 1994 levels. In other words, cougars would be slaughtered on the basis of unsubstantiated complaints like Essig’s.

As the Cougar Fund points out about the plan: "Complaints are not a good way to measure anything since few can correctly id a cougar and media hype sends these numbers soaring--additionally, the method for collecting reports is poor and anybody can place a call, saying just about anything, and it is logged as a complaint…Studies show that up to 90% of complaints are not cougars at all."

Sometimes they’re Mittens, the kitty cat.

Tell the Department of Fish and Wildlife that they’ve come up with a ridiculous Cougar Management Plan. Submit a comment before October 31. The Cougar Fund has some excellent talking points for inclusion in comments.

Here’s another instance of an extremely shaky cougar sighting that I wrote about a few months ago.

The Eugene-based Predator Defense Institute has some excellent information about cougars midway down its home page, including this letter from an expert about human-cougar interactions.

Hybrid car buyers beware

When it comes to the environment, George Bush is a scatological King Midas: everything he touches turns to crap. Well, in the case of the revised federal tax incentive program for hybrid cars, let’s give him some credit and call it half-crap.

On the positive side, the new energy bill changes the current tax deduction for buying a hybrid car into a more valuable tax credit. As described on Hybridcars.com, after January 1, 2006 the present $2,000 deduction is going to become a tax credit whose value depends on a complex formula involving fuel economy and lifetime expected fuel savings.

For example, the Toyota Prius that we own now is estimated to qualify for a $3,150 tax credit, while the Toyota Highlander Hybrid that we’re considering buying would come with a $2,200 credit (the Prius gets about 45 mpg in real-world driving and the Highlander about 26 mpg).

On the negative side, the new law sets a limit for the tax credit of 60,000 hybrids per carmaker. Then the credits will phase out over a 15-month period. That’s ridiculous.

The whole idea of giving people a tax credit for buying a hybrid is to encourage hybrids to be bought, isn’t it? So why phase out the credit when an auto manufacturer succeeds in selling 60,000 hybrid cars?

Two reasons come to mind: (1) the Bush administration wants to be able to say that it is encouraging hybrid technology without putting much action behind its words, and (2) the Japanese automakers, Toyota and Honda, are way ahead of the American automakers in hybrid sales.

So it is going to be Toyota and Honda hybrid buyers who will get screwed if they get a 2006 car after 60,000 others have been sold. Toyota is on track to sell about 100,000 Priuses in 2005 plus over 15,000 Highlander Hybrids, as reported here. Almost certainly sales will be up for 2006, given rising gas prices and the increasing popularity of hybrids.

Thus Hybridcars.com advises:

If you’re on a waiting list for a hybrid, and expect to see it roll into the dealership late in the year, you might want to slightly delay your purchase to take advantage of the higher tax breaks. But if you are considering a Toyota or Honda hybrid, don’t delay the purchase for too long [for the reason I’ve just mentioned].

I asked the Toyota salesman that we’ve been working with on our prospective Highlander purchase about all this. He agreed that Japanese auto hybrid buyers who get a car late in the year are going to be ticked off when they learn that their tax credit will be lower than that given to earlier buyers.

This is another example of how the Bush administration pays lip service to environmental concerns such as global warming but really doesn’t give a s___t.

Meanwhile, the Siberian permafrost is melting for the first time since it formed 11,000 years ago. Bad news, but it won’t bother Bush since he doesn’t read the news.

Toyota on wrong side of Oregon auto emissions fight

Toyota, how could you? My wife and I own a 2004 Prius, and we’re on the waiting list for a 2006 Highlander Hybrid.

Now we feel betrayed. For Toyota is a member of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, which is supporting a lawsuit to stop Governor Kulongoski from adopting tougher California-style vehicle emission standards.

We’d believed that Toyota was an auto manufacturer with Green credentials. Yet here Toyota is, a member of the Auto Alliance along with GM, Ford, and six other manufacturers. Honda and Nissan aren’t part of the alliance, nor is Volvo.

So part of me wants to make a statement by hanging onto our 1999 Volvo XC wagon and not replacing it with a Highlander Hybrid until Toyota shows that its commitment to fighting pollution and global warming isn’t just lip service.

It’s strange. In today’s New York Times I read that “Toyota Says It Plans Eventually to Offer an All-Hybrid Fleet.” Thus it seems incongruous that Toyota is fighting tougher auto emissions standards, since hybrids are the cleanest cars on the road.

In the interest of blogging exactitude, I’m assuming that the “automotive industry” mentioned in the Salem Statesman-Journal article as having joined Republican legislators in filing the lawsuit against Kulongoski is the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, a.k.a. Auto Alliance. I couldn’t find a news article that offered more details about who the “automobile industry” really is.

I suspect the Auto Alliance doesn’t want their specific manufacturers named for fear of a Green consumer backlash. Hoping that such will indeed occur, here are the names of those who say “don’t cut auto emissions:” BMW Group, DaimlerChrysler, Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Mazda, Mitsubishi Motors, Porsche, Toyota, Volkswagen.

That the Auto Alliance is behind the lawsuit seems to be a reasonable assumption given this “Automaker Lobbyists Seek to Keep Oregon Autos Polluting” page on the Union of Concerned Scientists website.

On the bright side, the Clean Cars for Oregon coalition is working to get the stronger emissions standards approved. They’ve got some Take Action suggestions.

I’m probably going to cut Toyota some slack and keep our name on the Highlander Hybrid waiting list. I think their hybrid heart basically is in the right place, even if their political lobbying is misdirected.

I urge you to email Toyota and let them know what you think about the Auto Alliance effort to derail stronger auto emission standards in Oregon.

Pringle Creek Community, a Salem sustainable development

Saturday Laurel and I went to an open house for the Pringle Creek Community, a 32 acre sustainable development that is taking shape on the old Fairview Training Center grounds in Salem.

There was a lot of evident enthusiasm from the crowd, estimated at 750 in a follow-up Salem Statesman-Journal article.

We’re investors in Sustainable Fairview Associates (SFA), which sold off the Pringle Creek Community land and still owns the remaining 240 acres of the site, as this map shows.

If you do a search for “Sustainable Fairview” on this weblog (use Google box in left column) you’ll come up with quite a few posts that I’ve written on the subject, most of them critical of how SFA has been going about its business.Those criticisms still stand. But Pringle Creek Community is a fresh opportunity to do sustainability right.

For example, it was great to see various community groups concerned with sustainable living represented at the open house, since SFA has been excessively closed. Laurel and I learned a lot about compost tea from Wilamette Organics and also enjoyed perusing other booths.

So in spite of my frustrations with SFA, it felt good to wander around the as-yet-unbuilt Pringle Creek Community land and realize that all the blood, sweat, tears, and money SFA has put into this challenging project are on the verge of being transformed into sustainable reality.

It’s sort of hard to get a feel for what the development is going to be like from layouts like this, though. I assume the actual housing units are going to be less blocky.

Nathan Good is one of the green architects involved with Pringle Creek Community. Laurel and I trudged across a hot dry mowed field to the booth where he was holding forth. Proving that birds of a sustainable feather flock together, I saw that Larry Gunn (tall guy in the farthest away white hat) and Russ Beaton (dark glasses, sitting on hay bale) had congregated there also.

Larry, Russ, and I were part of an Eco-Enterprises group founded by Russ that did its best to line up funding to buy out SFA and pursue a really sustainable vision for Sustainable Fairview. Visionaries that we were, we didn’t have enough grounding in hard-nosed real estate development savvy to pull it off.

I heard Nathan say that Pringle Creek Community likely won’t match the original sustainable goals that were set out for Sustainable Fairview. But then, the remaining 240 acres of the project almost certainly won’t either. They’re in the process of being sold by SFA to another developer who promises to be Green, just as Pringle Creek Community is.

It’s just that there are many levels and varieties of greenness. Russ, who was in on the ground floor of buying the Fairview property from the state, wanted to push the limits of Sustainable Fairview and make it a world class cutting-edge sustainable development. That probably isn’t going to happen.

But Pringle Creek Community is going to be a great place to live, for sure. As we were waiting to register for the open house I heard a man say that he was living in Portland now and would move to Salem if he’s able to build his dream green house at this development.

Getting back to Nathan, he said that "carbon neutral" is replacing the term "zero net energy." Many of the homes at Pringle Creek Community will be carbon neutral, thereby taking a small but important step toward combating global warming.

Nathan also commented that, in his opinion, global warming is the most important problem facing the planet. That was music to my ears. I only wish that our recently outed global warming-denying state climatologist, George Taylor, could tune in to the same harmony.

Willamette Week outs Oregon’s climatologist

Ah, appropriately enough it warmed my heart to read today’s Willamette Week cover story about Oregon’s global-warming-denying climatologist, George Taylor.

Last March I emailed Willamette Week and suggested that they do a story on Taylor, saying “It bothers me that while it is official Oregon policy that global warming is a threat to the northwest, Oregon’s official climatologist is going around spouting an exactly opposite view.”

This is one of the themes in the Willamette Week article, “Hot or Not: Oregon’s official weatherman has good news about global warming—it doesn’t exist.”

I’ve been blogging on about the absurdity of an environmentally conscious state being represented by someone who has his head in the sand concerning the reality of human-caused global warming.

I started with “Oregon’s climatologist denies global warming,” followed up with “Oregon’s climatologist still a Pollyanna on global warming,” and most recently observed that “Kansas is to evolution as Oregon is to global warming.”

Whenever I wrote about George Taylor, sometimes I’d think to myself, “Maybe I’m being too hard on this guy. If I ever meet him, I’d probably like him.”

Indeed, the WW story starts off with: “George Taylor shouldn't scare anybody. He has been a vegetarian since the 1970s. He commutes to work by bicycle. He's an ex-hippie and an ex-surfer. He recycles. He likes trees and salmon.”

But then the article’s author, Paul Koberstein, says: “He’s also, according to his critics, one of the most dangerous men in Oregon.”

Dangerous, because global warming is no joke. It’s real, it’s here, and it’s going to create a lot of problems for the world. Everyone has the right to his or her own personal opinions. However, science isn’t about personal opinions—it’s about facts.

Taylor is quoted as saying, “A lot of people wish I’d shut up. I have an opinion on this issue. I’d rather go ahead and express that opinion than shut up because I might offend somebody.”

Well, for Taylor as an individual, that’s fine. But when Taylor runs around making speeches and signing petitions as Oregon’s official state climatologist, he should have his facts straight. Which, he doesn’t, as the WW article makes clear.

Now that I’ve read the article, I feel like I’ve been too easy on Taylor, not too hard. When one of his colleagues at the OSU College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences was asked about how Taylor has come to hold his uninformed views, Prof. James Coakley said:

"The best explanation I can come up with is, George is very tied into the conservative bent. He gets all his information from the conservative-type think tanks. George picks it up and regurgitates it. Some of the stuff is half-baked at best, but sometimes it's so bad we have to call him on it and write letters to the editor. It's just not right; it just counters all the evidence."

It’s time Oregon got a new state climatologist. Way past time. I hope the heat continues to be kept on George Taylor and those at Oregon State University who are keeping him in his position.

Here are email addresses for George Taylor (taylor@coas.oregonstate.edu); Mark Abbott, the Dean of his college (mark@coas.oregonstate.edu); and Edward Ray, the President of OSU (ed.ray@oregonstate.edu).

Read the Willamette Week article, then let them know what you think about Taylor remaining as Oregon’s state climatologist.

Toyota Highlander Hybrid not so green

Well, let me qualify that statement: the just-out 2006 Highlander Hybrid SUV is plenty green, for you need an awful lot of the green stuff to buy it. I asked for a price quote from the Internet sales force at our local Toyota dealer and got this reply:

“A 2006 Toyota Gas/Electric Hybrid Highlander V6 4WD Limited with FE (federal emissions), NV (navigation), CF (floor mats/cargo mat set) and all of the great standard features...Your Capitol Auto Group Internet Price $ 44,049! The Limited Hybrid Highlander can also be ordered without Navigation for $2,000 less.”

Stylistically critiquing this message, I would suggest that Capitol Toyota dump the exclamation point after the price. While in a different context it could suggest enthusiasm, here it seems ironic. As in: “You asked for a special Internet price. Well, here it is: we’ll sell you a Highlander Limited without a navigation system for $42,049, a price that includes a couple of thousand dollars of extra dealer profit over the already outrageous MSRP of $39,855!”

Gosh, thanks a lot for the price quote. Laurel and I were early adopters of the revamped Toyota Prius, being sixth in line to buy one from Capitol Toyota in September 2003. We got the Prius for the MSRP, about $23,000. And we’ve been averaging 46 mpg in mixed city/country driving. That’s a no-brainer, to buy the Prius.

But I told the Toyota salesman who gave me a Highlander Hybrid brochure and showed me the silver loaded Limited sitting on their lot, “Buying this car is a real brainer.”

I mean, you’ve got to think a lot to justify paying a premium of $5,000 (according to this review) for the hybrid version of the Highlander compared to a comparably equipped gasoline model. Since the AWD hybrid only has an EPA rating of 31/27 mpg (the higher number being city driving, where hybrids use the electric motor more) it would take forever to save $5,000 in gas.

A New York Times article, “Hybrid cars burning gas in the drive for power,” points out that new hybrid cars are sacrificing mileage for acceleration and power. The electric motor is billed as an add-on to an already large gasoline engine, giving you extra zip with some marginal gas savings—maybe just a few miles per gallon.

Driving back and forth to central Oregon recently we got 24 mpg in our 1999 Volvo XC wagon. Someday we want to replace it with a hybrid SUV. But it doesn’t seem to make sense for us to get a 27 mpg hybrid Highlander that is priced thousands of dollars over what we’d pay for a comparable SUV that gets about the same mileage.

I think Toyota and the other auto manufacturers don’t only have a drive for power in their new hybrids; they also have a drive to line their pockets with the green stuff. That’s not the sort of Green we’re looking for in a car. Our Volvo is looking pretty good to us at the moment.

Oregon’s climatologist still a Pollyanna on global warming

While we were in Camp Sherman last week I picked up the Bend “Bulletin” and saw a front page story about a talk by Oregon’s climatologist, George Taylor. I’ve written before about how Taylor denies that manmade greenhouse gases are causing global warming, thus putting him at odds with the vast majority of scientists studying the earth’s climate.

The story, “Expert says state drought just a blip,” shows that Taylor is still going around spreading disinformation about the reality of global warming. He was quoted as saying, “We don't really understand climate. (The data) doesn't say humans don't have an effect, obviously they do. But we don't know what it means.”

Yes, if meteorologists can’t accurately forecast the weather ten days from now, they obviously can’t predict how human-caused global warming will have changed the Earth ten years from now. But when George Taylor says “We don’t know what it means,” his unstated message is “We shouldn’t do anything about it,” notwithstanding his reported statement that reduction of fossil-fuel use would be a good move.

Taylor probably realizes that if he wants to keep his position as Oregon’s climatologist, he needs to pay lip service to reducing greenhouse gas emissions because this is the official policy of Gov. Kulongoski, who joined Oregon with California and Washington in 2003 to create the West Coast Global Warming Initiative. Recently Kulogoski announced that he wants Oregon to adopt California’s tougher auto pollution standards to fight global warming.

The Kyoto Protocol is the world’s primary commitment to addressing the problems of human-caused global warming. George Taylor worked to keep the Kyoto Protocol from going into effect.

The protocol needed to be approved by countries responsible for at least fifty-five percent of the industrialized world’s carbon dioxide emissions. Since the United States accounts for thirty-four percent and withdrew from Kyoto negotiations in 2001, virtually every other major industrialized nation needed to approve the protocol or it would collapse.

In November 2002 Taylor signed an open letter to the prime minister of Canada urging that Canada delay ratifying the Kyoto Protocol. He and another Oregonian joined twenty-five other people in opposing mandatory efforts to reduce greenhouse gases. The other Oregon signer of the open letter was Art Robinson of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine (OISM), a small research institute in Cave Junction.

OISM’s head-in-the-sand scientific style is evident from the publication published by the Institute, “Nuclear War Survival Skills.” You also can buy Nuclear War Survival Skill DVDs that promise you’ll learn about “shelter construction and ventilation, water purification, food preparation, radiation monitoring and many other life-saving procedures - these essential survival skills are performed just as they would be to save lives in a real nuclear emergency.”

Surviving the effects of global warming must seem like a piece of cake to the folks at OISM since they are so optimistic about living through nuclear war. Global warming skeptics like they and George Taylor like to focus on the uncertainties of the science underlying the Kyoto Protocol rather than what is known for sure. I assume that they don’t think there is any problem with Social Security either, because it isn’t possible to forecast the exact year it won’t be possible to pay out full benefits.

As Elizabeth Kolbert writes in her excellent three-part series in The New Yorker, “The Climate of Man" (parts I and II currently are online), “In legitimate scientific circles, it is virtually impossible to find evidence of disagreement over the fundamentals of global warming.”

Kolbert quotes Robert Socolow, co-director of the Carbon Mitigation Initiative funded by BP and Ford:

“I’ve been involved in a number of fields where there’s a lay opinion and a scientific opinion. And in most of the cases, it’s the lay community that is more exercised, more anxious. If you take an extreme example, it would be nuclear power, where most of the people who work in nuclear science are relatively relaxed about very low levels of radiation. But in the climate case, the experts—the people who work with the climate models every day, the people who do ice cores—they are more concerned. They’re going out of their way to say, ‘Wake up! This is not a good thing to be doing.’”

Yet here in Oregon our state climatologist is going around giving talks where he tries to put people to sleep, assuring them that natural cycles are mostly responsible for global warming and that this state’s current drought is “nothing more than a blip in the long-term history of the area’s climate.” That’s irresponsible. It would be irresponsible if Taylor was speaking just for himself. It is doubly irresponsible when he speaks as Oregon’s climatologist.

Halfway across the world, “Australia's Greenhouse Gas Scientists Declare Climate Emergency.” But Oregon’s climatologist says, “No worries, mate.” A Business Week cover story says, “Consensus is growing among scientists, governments, and business that they must act fast to combat climate change. This has already sparked efforts to limit CO2 emissions. Many companies are now preparing for a carbon-constrained world.” But Oregon’s climatologist says, “Not to worry.”

Optimism is wonderful. Unless it blinds you to reality.

Here’s how Elizabeth Kolbert ends her series in The New Yorker:

“No matter what we do at this point, global temperatures will continue to rise in the coming decades, owing to the gigatons of extra carbon dioxide already circulating in the atmosphere. With more than six billion people on the planet, the risks of this are obvious. A disruption in monsoon patterns, a shift in ocean currents, a major drought—any one of these could easily produce streams of refugees numbering in the millions. As the effects of global warming become more and more apparent, will we react by finally fashioning a global response? Or will we retreat into ever narrower and more destructive forms of self-interest? It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.”

I’m worried. George Taylor should be too.

Oregon’s climatologist denies global warming

Oregon is in a drought. That’s undeniable. The U.S. Drought Monitor says so. Global warming caused by manmade greenhouse gases is for real. That’s also undeniable according to the results of a recent study of ocean temperatures.

As I wrote in an earlier post, "Global warming: the big truth," Oceanographers analyzed more than seven million recordings of ocean temperatures from around the world. They compared the rise in temperatures at different depths to predictions made by two computer simulations of global warming.

Bingo. Right on. No doubt about it. Man-made greenhouse gases are the cause of observed changes in ocean temperatures. One of the researchers, a marine physicist, said: "We've got a serious problem. The debate is no longer: 'Is there a global warming signal?' The debate now is: 'What are we going to do about it?'

Yet Oregon’s climatologist, George Taylor, denies that global warming is occurring. In September 2004 Taylor was part of a group that sent a letter to Sen. John McCain, who was chairing a Commerce Committee hearing examining recent scientific research concerning climate change impacts. The group was quoted as saying that “there is little supporting meteorological evidence” for global warming.

That's ridiculous. Take a look at the New Scientist "Special Report on Climate Change" and the first thing you'll read is, "Climate change is with us. A decade ago, it was conjecture. Now the future is unfolding before our eyes." Scientists at the University of Washington have studied changes in northwest snowpacks and concluded that global warming could shrink already diminished snowpack water content by over 50% in coming decades.

Meanwhile, George Taylor gives speeches where he says that global warming actually isn't an imminent threat.

I hope Taylor will change his mind. Oregon can’t afford to have a state climatologist who doesn’t understand that global warming almost certainly is a major influence on our state’s climate. Its worrisome when the climatologist for a coastal state doesn’t believe that oceans are warming because of greenhouse gases. By contrast, the climatologist for Washington state says that global warming is no myth and the repercussions could be severe in the Pacific Northwest.

They already are. Close to home here in Salem, Detroit Lake, along with other reservoirs, probably won’t fill up with enough water for boating this year, just as in 2001—another drought year. This will hammer the Detroit economy. A recent Salem Statesman-Journal article lists other impending drought problems: “shortages of irrigation water for farms, tight municipal water supplies, inadequate river flows to nurture salmon and other wildlife and extreme wildfire danger.”

Right after this list of impending catastrophes, the article says, “State climatologist George Taylor, calling himself an eternal optimist, said he thinks a wet spring is possible.” Well, we'll see. Longer term, Taylor believes that Oregon will be cooler and wetter than normal for the next 15 years. That's hard to imagine given the trends of the past few years.

During most of the past winter the jet stream took storms to the south, into California and away from Oregon. To my understanding, this is a typical El Nino pattern. In his paper, “Impacts of the El Niño/Southern Oscillation on the Pacific Northwest,” Taylor writes that the warmer ocean temperatures associated with an El Nino results in lower than normal precipitation for the Northwest.

Which is just what is happening. And it has been happening for years. A 1998 NOAA (National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration) report said that global warming might be exacerbating El Nino’s effects on the weather. After this report was issued Al Gore urged Congress to act to reduce greenhouse gases. His advice was ignored. People are more likely to believe in the reality of El Nino than in the reality of global warming. Politically, says this analysis, the two have been disconnected.

Yet almost certainly they are connected. It isn’t difficult to make a persuasive argument that Oregon is going to suffer through a drought because manmade global warming has raised ocean temperatures, which has created El Nino conditions, which divert Pacific storms away from the Northwest.

Oregon’s policy-makers shouldn’t be focused only on dealing with the effects of global warming, as the group Taylor is associated with has argued. This group advised that emergency preparedness should be the focus of efforts to mitigate the effects of Florida hurricanes. Since Taylor doesn’t accept the reality of global warming, I expect that he isn't supportive of the West Coast Governors' Global Warming Initiative that Oregon is a part of.

Doesn't it seem strange that Oregon's climatologist is at odds with not only most of the world (which has adopted the Kyoto Treaty) but also the official policy of our state? The above-linked Oregon Department of Energy page says that "on September 22, 2003, Governors Kulongoski, Davis and Locke announced that they have concluded that Oregon, California and Washington must act individually and regionally to reduce greenhouse gas emissions because global warming will have serious adverse consequences on the economy, health and environment of the west coast states. (Governor Schwarzenegger has continued California's participation.)"

It isn’t too far off the mark to say that a meteorologist who doesn’t believe that global warming is occurring is akin to a zoologist who doesn’t believe in the theory of evolution, or a cosmologist who doesn’t believe in the big bang. Taylor’s writings (such as this, and this) point toward a conclusion that he is out-of-touch with the broader scientific community.

Hopefully he is keeping his mind open. I look forward to learning whether recent research has led George Taylor to change his opinion about global warming.

When even evangelical leaders are getting behind the effort to fight global warming, Oregon’s climatologist should become a convert to doing what’s right for our state and the earth. (See post continuation for a New York Times article on this evangelical movement)

Global warming: the big truth

Our Oregon weather is way too weird. In mid-February I shouldn’t have to water willow cuttings Laurel planted by scooping dribbles of water out of a usually full creek. In mid-February I shouldn’t have to be turning on the sprinkling system to keep our plants from drying out. In mid-February the thermometer outside our front door shouldn’t say 58.6 degrees.

But all this is true. So far this month Salem has gotten .43 inches of rain instead of the normal 3.73 inches. The average high for today is 52, not the actual 59. I’ve lived in Oregon for thirty-four years. I know that I shouldn’t be mowing our lawn in mid-February. Yet I did.

A few years ago I wrote a tongue-in-cheek post called “Global Warming…The Big Lie.” I was joking. Global warming is real. As this article is titled, “Here's the proof, Mr President.” Oceanographers analyzed more than seven million recordings of ocean temperatures from around the world. They compared the rise in temperatures at different depths to predictions made by two computer simulations of global warming.

Bingo. Right on. No doubt about it. Man-made greenhouse gases are the cause of observed changes in ocean temperatures. One of the researchers, a marine physicist, said: "We've got a serious problem. The debate is no longer: 'Is there a global warming signal?' The debate now is: 'What are we going to do about it?'"

Damn right, Mr. President. Good question. One thing you could do is send a federal employee out to do the watering for me. My left shoulder has been giving me some problems, and it wasn’t helped by carrying around lots of buckets of water. And if our well goes dry, you could pay for drilling a new one.

Again, I’m kidding. Actually, I’m not blaming Bush for Oregon’s dry spell. I want to save my Bush-Blames for problems that can be tied more directly to his screw-ups, of which there are many to choose from. What I do blame Bush for is not acknowledging scientific facts. Global warming is just one of many instances where the Bush administration politicizes science, choosing to ignore or downplay scientific studies that aren’t in tune with a neo-conservative world view.

There is room to disagree about the meaning of global warming and what should be done about it. The March 2005 issue of Scientific American has a fascinating article called “How Did Humans First Alter Global Climate?” William Ruddiman, the author, presents compelling evidence that starting about 8,000 years ago our human ancestors began contributing significant quantities of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere by clearing forests and irrigating fields to grow crops.

As a result, the article says, “human beings kept the planet notably warmer than it would have been otherwise—and possibly even averted the start of a new ice age.” For analyses of the changes in the earth’s orbit that produce ice ages predict that one should be at hand. In fact, Ruddiman argues that without human activity the next round of glaciation would already have started.

So on the whole maybe global warming is good for humans. And maybe it isn’t. Some parts of the world likely will benefit from global warming, and some will suffer (like low-lying islands). Instead of rejecting the Kyoto treaty and hiding our scientific head in the sand, Bush should have the United States participating in a worldwide debate about the effects of global warming and what should be done about it.

Instead, this cartoon from “Funny Times” sums up the Bush administration’s attitude toward truth—including the scientific variety. I’d find it more amusing if I wasn’t sore from carrying all that water around today.

Sustainable Fairview update

It’s been a while since I’ve written about Sustainable Fairview, the 275 acre sustainable development that is being planned here in Salem on the site of the old Fairview Training Center. Laurel and I are investors in Sustainable Fairview Associates (SFA), the group that bought the property from the state in 2002 and since has been planning how to make Fairview into a model mixed-use Green community.

Currently, one 30-acre parcel has been sold by SFA to a local company, Sustainable Development LLC. Initially another local developer, Chris Jones, planned to buy this parcel, but that deal fell through.

An article by Randy Gragg in last Sunday’s Oregonian about Opsis Architecture had a mention of plans for what has come to be known in SFA circles as the “North 30.” The article says that Opsis, in the person of James Meyer (an SFA consultant), “is at work designing the first phase: a 30-acre, 200-home subdivision in which 20 of the homes will be ‘zero-energy,’ producing as much power as they consume.”

That sounds great. In the past I’ve been a critic of how SFA has gone about planning Sustainable Fairview (here’s one example, and here’s another). But even with all the missteps and missed opportunities, I’m on the edge of becoming a strong believer in the project.

I have to say “on the edge” because SFA is at a crossroads, and it’s uncertain what direction Sustainable Fairview will be moving toward. Logically, the basic choices SFA has are (1) to keep selling off chunks of the remaining 245 acres to various developers, or (2) to find a “master developer” willing and able to take on the challenge of moving the entire remainder of the project from Master Plan to Green Reality.

Laurel and I strongly favor the second option. I believe most of our fellow SFA investors do also. There are about 150 acres earmarked for residential uses and about 95 acres earmarked for other uses—such as a Village Center and other sorts of commercial development. We’d like to see these mixed-uses not get unduly mixed up by having residential and commercial land sold to different developers.

This approach would seem to be at odds with the integrated ecological planning that is one of the hallmarks of sustainable communities. And practically speaking, we’re afraid that once the prime hillside residential land is sold (the acreage getting the most interest from potential buyers), it will be difficult to find a developer who wants to take on the more difficult task of renovating or removing the many old buildings on the lower condo/commercial part of Fairview.

Still, no matter what happens with Sustainable Fairview the 275 acres are going to be developed in a much Greener fashion than would have occurred if a traditional developer had gotten his/her hands on this unique property. The only question is how Green Fairview will be, since the zoning code and CC&Rs require a baseline commitment to sustainability. How high above that foundation will Fairview be able to rise? This remains to be seen.

I’m hopeful that one day Fairview will be featured in articles such as this “The Best Places to Live” piece from Organic Style. It starts this way: “Meet the latest coast-to-coast phenomenon: communities built around a love of nature, respect for the planet, and old-fashioned neighborliness. Build it and they will come: That’s a perfect description of these 10 environmentally friendly communities—from Portland, Oregon to New York City—described on the following pages.”

The Portland project is The Henry, 123 condominium apartments in the Pearl District. The article says that it was named for Henry Weinhard, owner of the brewery that once stood where The Henry does now. OK. Whatever works is the rule when it comes to naming.

Early on I gave some thought to a new name for “Fairview.” “Sustainable Fairview” doesn’t do much for me. I figured that a community committed to a bold, fresh approach to living and working sustainably needed a fittingly exotic name.

Terramore came to mind: love (amore) of the earth (terra). However “Fairview” ends up being called, by its current or another name, may the project become a emblem of just that: love of the earth. God knows, Earth needs all the love we humans can give it.

The Beatles said: “In the end the love you take is equal to the love you make.” That’s about as poetically succinct a description of sustainability as you could find.