Confession from a Co-Founder of Greenpeace

It has been nice having some rain this week, even if it did slow down work. Next week looks pretty good. We will try to finish planting trees before the next storms hit.

   Of course, we have 150% normal rainfall. The state and the Feds have announced 0% water allocation for the year. I know the reservoirs are still low. They would fill faster if they didn't flush all this rainfall down to the ocean. Just saying.

Some of you think I am a little hard on the enviros. I thought you night be interested in hearing from a reformed environmentalist. Patrick Moore is a co-founder of Greenpeace. He stepped away a few years ago and he has been vilified by his former colleagues. I have met Moore. He seems to be a pretty good guy.

Environmentalism for the 21st Century

By Patrick Moore

As we begin the 21st century, environmental thinkers are divided along a sharp fault line. There are the doomsayers who predict the collapse of the global ecosystem. There are the technological optimists who believe that we can feed 12 billion people and solve all our problems with science and technology. I do not believe that either of these extremes makes sense. There is a middle road based on science and logic, the combination of which is sometimes referred to as common sense. There are real problems and there is much we can do to improve the state of the environment...

For me it was time to make a change. I had been against at least three or four things every day of my life for 15 years; I decided I'd like to be in favor of something for a change. I made the transition from the politics of confrontation to the politics of building consensus. After all, when a majority of people decide they agree with you it is probably time to stop hitting them over the head with a stick and sit down and talk to them about finding solutions to our environmental problems...

All social movements evolve from an earlier period of polarization and confrontation during which a minority struggles to convince society that its cause it is true and just, eventually followed by a time of reconciliation if a majority of the population accepts the values of the new movement. For the environmental movement this transition began to occur in the mid-1980s. The term sustainable development was adopted to describe the challenge of taking the new environmental values we had popularized, and incorporating them into the traditional social and economic values that have always governed public policy and our daily behavior. We cannot simply switch to basing all our actions on purely environmental values. Every day 6 billion people wake up with real needs for food, energy and materials. The challenge for sustainability is to provide for those needs in ways that reduce negative impact on the environment. But any changes made must also be socially acceptable and technically and economically feasible. It is not always easy to balance environmental, social, and economic priorities. Compromise and co-operation with the involvement of government, industry, academia and the environmental movement is required to achieve sustainability...

As an ecologist and environmentalist, not a political scientist or political activist, I have always shied away from strong opinions on poverty and class. But it seems unacceptable to me that so many hundreds of millions of people live at a material standard that we in the industrialized countries would not consider acceptable for a dignified life. I believe there is a great deal to be learned by exploring the relationships between ecology and politics. In some ways politics is the ecology of the human species. The two subjects have developed such completely different disciplines and terminologies that it is hard to think of them together. But I believe we must if we are to gain a truly holistic understanding of the relationship between ourselves and our society, and the Earth on which we ultimately depend...

MAY THE FOREST BE WITH YOU

If you would like to read Moore's complete statement you can find it at-
http://www.maninnature.com/Management/Conservation/WConservation1f.html

Wasting Rainfall

Both the San Francisco Chronicle and the Associated Press have been reporting this week that we are NOT refilling our reservoirs with the recent rains. Federal regulators are concerned about----wait for it---the Delta Smelt. So let me get this straight, AFTER TWO YEARS OF DROUGHT RESTRICTIONS we are finally getting some needed rainfall and THE FEDS ARE LETTING THE WATER RUN OUT INTO THE OCEAN!!!

This just proves what I have been saying, they want all the water.
We cannot pump to fill the reservoirs in the summer because the fish need the water.
We cannot pump to fill the reservoirs in the Spring because the fish need the water.
Now we cannot pump to fill the reservoirs in the winter because the fish need the water.
Does it make sense yet when people say we have a man made drought?

One of the main points in my book, "Ten Reasons: Finding Balance on Environmental Issues", is that we need a healthy economy and a healthy environment. Now we have neither. Instead of finding solutions to our problems, they just clamp down.

Here is a portion from "Ten Reasons"

Ten Reasons-Reason 7-Solutions

#7-I’ll start believing environmentalists when they start offering solutions. What I usually see is a presentation of a problem and then they jump up and down and tell us to stop it. For example, they will tell us how bad over population is. Then tell us to stop it. What kind of solution is that? It would be nice if the solutions made sense. One suggestion they had about dust on dirt roads was to water the dirt roads every day. Do you know how many miles of dirt roads there are in Fresno County? Do you know how much water that would take? Do you know how many of those roads have no traffic at all during the day? That wasn’t much of solution. Watering the roads we use makes a lot more sense. But, the farmers had to suggest that, the enviros didn’t figure that one out.

            My experience working with the environmental community is they are not

interested in problem solving.

            As I have shared elsewhere, my introduction to the environmental community was

a Sierra Club meeting in San Diego when I was sixteen. [remember this was years before

I started farming.] The sum of the meeting was as follows, “Well, we beat the nuclear

guys on that issue, who do we go after next?” It is not that I am getting old and I can’t

remember, I never found out what issue they beat the nuclear guys on. The whole point of

the meeting was, “where is our next victim?” Even as a starry-eyed idealist ready to enlist

in the cause I was repulsed by this approach, and I was out of there. I will gladly work for

a cause I believe in, but I don’t go around picking fights to throw my weight around.

            Another experience was working with a Bay Area environmental group. In a side

bar conversation I tried to engage David Behar of the Bay Institute about how to solve

water supply problems to benefit both the environment and the farmers. Behar’s

comment was, “This is a Zero-Sum game.” He felt that if one side wins the other side

must lose. Can you see how this perspective automatically limits our ability to solve

problems?  Right off the bat he has eliminated one of the most powerful tools for solving

problems; The Win-Win. Or, as Fisher, Ury and Patton put it in their classic, Getting to

Yes!, “Seek Options for Mutual Gain” (Fisher, Ury and Patton 56). This experience

confirmed once again that the enviros not only do not want to “Seek options for mutual

gain”, they are not interested in problem solving at all.

            In Reason Three I talk about my experience on a Technical Advisory Committee

for the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board. Each of the technical

experts on the committee was locked in to his or her specialty. The salt guys didn’t want

to consider any solutions until the salt issue was solved. The fertilizer guys didn’t want to

consider any solutions until all the fertilizer issues were solved. I think you get the idea.

THE ENVIROS HAVE NO RESPONSIBILITY TO PRODUCE ANYTHING-

            Another reason I think we see a lack of solutions from the enviros is they don’t

have any responsibility to produce anything. When your prime directive is to protect the

environment at all costs everything else can fall to the way side.

            You and I have to produce something or provide a service to support our families

All the things we have in our lives do not magically appear. For example, the coffee you

drank this morning came from beans grown overseas. They had to be nurtured, harvested,

roasted, ground and shipped thousands of miles to get to your home. All of this does not

happen by magic or by accident. It takes a lot of work, a lot of planning, a lot of effort

and that is just for one cup of coffee. How about the rest of the food you ate today?  Or,

the clothes you wear. [I, for one, would love to visit half the places my clothes have been

to.]     

            Our environmental friends and neighbors feel zero responsibility in the production

of the necessities of life. Their over-riding primary goal is protection of the environment.

It is a noble goal, but it has no balance.

[If you want to read more, you can find copies of Ten Reasons on Amazon.com or at the Book Barn in Clovis, CA.]

Two Nobel Ideas for California Water

Two Nobel Ideas for California Water

By Paul H. Betancourt

Copyright January 2016

            When President Obama came to the Valley in 2014 to see the effects of the drought he shrugged his shoulders, blame climate change, hopped back on Air Force One, flew to Palm Springs to play gold with King Abdullah of Jordan and give him a billion dollar check. That was the best our government could do. Maybe there is an alternative.

Amartya Sen

The 1999 Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to Amartya Sen for proving that government policies turn droughts into famines. Sen wrote extensively about the 1943 famine in Bengal, the 1972-74 famine in Ethiopia and the the 1972 famine in the Sahel. Dr. Sen writes, “Droughts may not be avoidable, but their effects can be.” If government policy can starve people to death, which is the slowest way to kill somebody, then maybe we want to make sure we get policy right. There is a lot at stake here.

           

Elinor Ostrum

            One of the things that drove me crazy in 2014 was the passage of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act. As soon as they cut off surface water from our reservoirs they jumped up and down and said, “You have a groundwater problem.” Of course we do, that is why we put in the surface water systems! Over 70 years ago we knew we had a ground water problem. We put is the reservoirs and canals so we would have reliable water to grow our population and our economy- and it worked!

            OK, enough ranting. Elinor Ostrum was co-winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics. Ostrum’s work focuses on Common Pool Resources (CPR’s), and the government institutions to manage these resources.

            Ostrum’s work is not limited to the Western world or merely to our time. In her 1990 book Governing the Commons she also studies institutions that manage Common Pool Resources in Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Turkey and Japan. She also studies groundwater management in Southern California in the 1960’s as well as historic irrigation management in Spain and historic timber management in Switzerland. Ostrum’s conclusion is there are significant structures and policies that can be entered in to voluntarily by resource entrepreneurs. These agreements can be monitored internally and/or by governments.

            Ostrum’s “Design Principles and Institutional Performances” for successful use of Common Pool Resources include-

Clear boundaries and memberships-individuals or households who have rights to withdraw resource units from the CPR must be clearly defined, as must the boundaries of the CPR itself.

Congruent roles-Congruence between appropriation and provision rules and local conditions Appropriation rules restricting time, place, technology and/or quantity of resource units are related to local conditions and to provision rules requiring labor, material and. Or money.

Collective choice arrangements- Most individuals affected by the operational rules can participate in modifying the operational rules.

Monitoring- Monitors who actively audit CPR conditions and appropriator behaviors, are accountable to the appropriators or are the appropriators.

Graduated Sanctions- Appropriators who violate operational rules are likely to be assessed graduated sanctions (depending on the seriousness and context of the offense) by other appropriators, by officials accountable to these appropriators, or by both.

Conflict Resolution Mechanisms- Appropriators and their officials have rapid access to low cost local arenas to resolve conflicts among appropriators or between appropriators and officials.

Regional rights to organize-The rights of appropriators to devise their own institutions are not challenged by external government authorities.

Nested assets- Appropriation, provision, monitoring, enforcement, conflict resolution and government activities are organized in multiple layers of nested enterprises.

 (Ostrum p. 90-102)

Please remember these principles are not academic theory, they are time tested principles. The point of Ostrum’s work is that we have a Nobel proven alternative to Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons scenario. Since publication in 1968 the image of the ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ has driven people to conclude that resource entrepreneurs cannot be trusted to use resources in a responsible and sustainable manner.

In Conclusion

            Whether you agree or disagree with Dr. Sen or Dr. Ostrum we have to agree they have world class ideas that we can apply here at home. Before we run off with more central command and control ideas from Sacramento and DC we should consider their Nobel Prize winning ideas. Historically, governments make droughts worse. Properly done, local control of common pool natural resources works better than centralized command and control.

Ostrum, Elinor, Governing the Commons,    1990.

Sen, Amartya, The Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze Omnibus, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1999.