Ironies of the Information Age

During the time  that I have been an ecological scientist and involved with environmental issues, I have found several ironies of our modern technological and scientific information age. The first irony is that often we do not measure what we need to know. I have been involved in a lot of major environmental issues, from the conservation of bowhead and sperm whales to the possible effects of global warming on forests. In each case I find that there are key pieces of information missing that nobody has bothered to find out.

The second irony of the information age thing is that, if we do measure something useful, we usually don’t bother to use it. This is true among scientists as well as among public agencies and non-profit interest groups. We just archive information and forget it.

The third irony that, although we have the ability to gather many kinds of scientific information, we tend to solve environmental problems from ancient myths, plausibilities, false inferences, and ideologies. This means we often start with an answer that we wish were true and squeeze whatever scientific information we use into a mold that conforms to this wish. And we get very upset if people do not believe us.
Thoreau as a Seeker of Quantitative Information

Here Thoreau is a wonderful example to us. Thoreau buffs are familiar with his search for quantitative measurements, his careful analysis of information, and how his imagination was stimulated by what he learned. His experience that strikes me the strongest is his measurement of the depth of Walden Pond.

“There have been many stories about the bottom, or rather no bottom, of this pond, which certainly had no foundation for themselves,” Thoreau punned in Walden. “It is remarkable how long men will believe in the bottomlessness of a pond without taking the trouble to sound it.”‘ He went on to write that “Many have believed that Walden reached quite through to the other side of the globe” (285). And so he became interested in the depth of the pond and set out to learn this physical, quantitative characteristic of one of his favorite places in nature.

As a person with an intrinsic naturalist’s and observer’s inclination, Thoreau took a simple and direct approach to determining the depth of the pond: he measured it. He had the skill to do this, because he often worked as a surveyor. “As I was desirous to recover the long lost bottom of Walden Pond,” he wrote, “I surveyed it carefully, before the ice broke up early in ‘46 with compass and chain and sounding line. I fathomed it easily with a cod-line and a stone weighing about a pound and a half, and could tell accurately when the stone left the bottom, by having to pull so much harder before the water got underneath to help me” (285-287). Thoreau made an important step from informal natural history to quantitative measurement. This is a key step in using science to obtain a new kind of understanding of nature.

Once he had made one measurement. his curiosity was aroused and he began to investigate the general shape of the pond’s basin. He made more than one hundred measurements of the pond’s depth. From these he made a map, using his skills as a surveyor, and located the deepest point in the pond: “The greatest depth was exactly one hundred and two feet; to which may be added the five feet which it has risen since [with the spring runoff into the pond], making one hundred and seven” (237).

His curiosity further aroused, Thoreau began to consider generalizations arising from his quantitative measurements. “As I sounded through the ice I could determine the shape of the bottom with greater accuracy than is possible in surveying harbors which do not freeze over, ” he wrote (288).

Measurements led to surprises. “I was surprised at its general regularity,” he wrote. “In the deepest part there are several acres more level than almost any field which is exposed to the sun, wind and plough. In one instance, on a line arbitrarily chosen, the depth did not vary more than one foot in thirty rods; and generally, near the middle, I could calculate the variation for each one hundred feet in any direction beforehand within three or four inches. Some are accustomed to speak of deep and dangerous holes even in quiet sandy ponds like this, but the effect of water under these circumstances is to level all inequalities” (288-289).

Thoreau’s investigation then went through a progression to ever more general theoretical constructs, leading to the development of a set of hypotheses about ponds and lakes in general. To do this, he had to find a means to aggregate his data so that Thoreau could see the result as a whole and think about that whole. For him, with his experience as a surveyor. this was the straightforward step of making a map. This required that his depth soundings be located geographically.

From the map he “observed a remarkable coincidence,” he wrote, “the line of greatest length intersected the line of greatest breadth exactly at the point of greatest depth” (289). Now Thoreau had expanded his inquiry beyond the initial question of the depth of the pond. Having done a series of measurements, he began to see the pond differently, as if its bottom were a field, and he became curious about the shape of that field. Measurements had touched his imagination.

In reelecting on possible generalizations about his observations, Thoreau considered a comment made by somebody whose opinion he respected. “A factory owner hearing what depth I had found,” he wrote, “thought that it could not be true, for, judging from his acquaintance with dams, sand would not lie at so steep an angle” (287). In this process Thoreau was not the mythical hermit avoiding human contact, but a person who considered the judgment of others when their experience and knowledge might seem valuable.

At this point he was beginning to move into an interesting thought process. A simple curiosity had led to a simple measurement, then to a series of those measurements, which had then led him to a consideration of whether the measurements could be correct and, if so, what they implied. Here, it implied that ponds could not simply always be shaped along the edges like dams of sand. “But the deepest ponds are not so deep in proportion to their area as most suppose,” Thoreau continued, “and, if drained, would not leave very remarkable valleys. They are not like cups between the hills: for this one, which is so unusually deep for its area, appears in a vertical section through its centre not deeper than a shallow plate. Most ponds, emptied, would leave a meadow no more hollow than we frequently see” (287)

Based on his series of quantitative measurements, Thoreau began to speculate about the shape of ponds in general. He began to develop a hypothesis: perhaps the greatest depth of all ponds would tend to occur at the intersection of the line of greatest width and the line of greatest length. To test this idea, quantitative measurements were necessary. His scientific measurements piqued new curiosity, led to new kinds of questions, while leading to a new understanding. The new understanding brought him, in a different way than before, closer to nature.

Thoreau’s study of the pond brings out another important distinction, that between observations and inferences, which are ideas that are developed based on a set of observations. A casual observation that Walden Pond looks deep is one thing, an inference from a single glance that it must be deep everywhere is another — it is a false inference. Confusing observations with inferences and accepting untested inferences is the kind of sloppy thinking often described by the phrase “thinking makes it so,” and is something that continues to pose problems for dealing with nature and the environment.2

Applying Thoreau’s Approach To Modern Environmental Issues

One would hope that this sound, fundamental scientific approach would be followed today. After all, it’s been well known and well applied for several centuries. And one would hope it was applied to modem issues about nature – the very object to which Thoreau himself applied the method.

But sad to say, I have found over and over again that today’s environmental issues often receive as much scientific analysis as the people who chose to sit by Walden Pond and guess at its depth.

Wherever possible, Thoreau tried to learn directly for himself. In general, he did not accept at face value what other people said. Perhaps the greatest example of this is his experience with his mentor, Emerson. As part of Transcendentalism, Emerson believed that nature was benign and cared about human beings. Thoreau listened to the great man and then went to the Maine woods where he climbed Mount Katahdin to see if this were true for nature at her rawest. He found that it was not true, at least not for himself.

When a subject came up that he could not answer in such a direct manner by himself, Thoreau sought experts, and he used expertise in a specific way. Once again, his approach is useful to us. Our society is confused about experts, especially scientific experts – about who is a scientific expert and about the role of scientists and science within our society. When Thoreau could not answer a question directly, he sought people who had had direct experience with the subject that concerned him. In his travels through the Maine woods, he was impressed by Joe Polis, his last guide there, and sought to understand how Polis could find his way so well in the forests.

But even with experts, Thoreau was cautious. He used the assertions of experts as hypotheses to be tested, as the beginning of exploration, not the end. This happened when he visited Cape Cod. There he learned that the Cape itself – its soils, it shape – was continually changing under the force of winds and water. He learned that first from the Wellfleet Oysterman and from other long-term residents of the Cape. One “told us that a log canoe known to have been buried many years before on the Bay side at East Harbor in Truro, where the Cape is extremely narrow, appeared at length on the Atlantic side, the Cape having rolled over it, and an old woman said – ‘Now, you see, it is true what I told you, that the Cape is moving.’

Then he sought out the keeper of Highland Lighthouse, who he learned had lived there for many decades. The Highland Light was a landmark then as it is today, a classic white pillar rising above a white building on the edge of a picturesque dune, high above the beach and the water, facing to the east, to the open Atlantic ocean. It sits on the edge of an undulating landscape of dune grass, shrubs, small oaks and pitch pines, a mixture of patches of grasslands, shrub lands, and salt-spray-stunted, open woodlands. It is a lonely but picturesque landscape. The lighthouse stands on the edge of huge dunes that afford a grand view of the shore below. From the lighthouse, the dune falls away steeply for a long distance. Far below, at the base of the dune on which the lighthouse sits, people strolling along the strand appear as tiny toy figures.

The Lighthouse was built in 1798 to provide one of the major lights to guide ships away from dangerous shoals along the coast of the Cape, and it performed that function during Thoreau’s time. Today, the lighthouse is automated and no longer has a keeper.  The Lighthouse Keeper that Thoreau met agreed about the movement of the Cape. “According to the light-house keeper, the Cape is wasting here on both sides, though most on the eastern,” Thoreau wrote (118). Thoreau listened, was intrigued by this hypothesis, and then constructed some surveying equipment from materials he borrowed from a carpenter, and made his own measurements. “I borrowed the plane and square, level and dividers, of a carpenter who was shingling a barn near by,” Thoreau wrote, “and using one of those shingles made of a mast, contrived a rude sort of quadrant, with pins for sights and pivots, and got the angle of elevation of the Bank opposite the light-house, and with a couple of cod-lines the length of its slope, and so measured its height on the shingle” He observed that the dune rose 110 feet “above its immediate base” and 123 feet above mean low tide.

Next, he checked his measurements against those of other land surveyors. “Graham, who has carefully surveyed the extremity of the Cape, makes it one hundred and thirty feet,” he wrote (118). Then he looked for signs of erosion — making qualitative observations. He found evidence of erosion about a half mile south of the lighthouse, at the point of highest land in the vicinity. There along the dune he saw streams “trickling down it at intervals of two or three rods” which left erosional shapes like “steep Gothic roofs fifty feet high or more,” which were at one location “curiously eaten out in the form of a large semicircular crater” (118).

Still not content with the opinion of the lighthouse keeper nor the measurements he was able to take himself, he examined data kept by the lighthouse keeper. “We calculated, from his data, how soon the Cape would be quite worn away,” Thoreau wrote (118-119, emphasis Thoreau’s). Thoreau made additional measurements when he returned to the Cape the following summer. “Between this October and June of the next year I found that the bank had lost about forty feet in one place, opposite the light-house,” he wrote (119). From these observations he concluded that the Cape was wearing away about six feet a year. But he was cautious about simple extrapolation and generalization from a few observations. “Any conclusion drawn from the observations of a few years or one generation only are likely to prove false,” he wrote, “and the Cape may balk expectation by its durability.” This skepticism — even about one’s own measurements and observations   is one of the important features of science and of scientists.

The steps are clear: first, learn for yourself if at all possible; second, if not, select your experts carefully – make sure they have had direct experience; third, listen to what they say and treat that as a hypothesis; fourth, test the hypothesis for yourself.

This is the path to knowledge we followed with Jim Welter. We viewed his graphs of salmon and water flow, and then made extensive statistical analyses to see if what looked to be the case held up under analysis. It did.

This way of selecting experts and using their knowledge was useful in our situation and can he useful today. It is not the role of scientists, as experts, to make policy, but to advise us about what is possible based on their knowledge and about how we can achieve the choices of the possible, what we gain and what we give up. Then in a democratic society it is up to us to decide which of the possible choices we wish to pursue.

Encompassing all these specific ways that Thoreau’s life and writings can be of direct use to us in solving our environmental problems is his love of nature and his life-long search for ways to combine both a physical scientific and a spiritual contact with nature. These, and his love of learning and of civilization, are guides to us for today and the future as we struggle to find how we can conserve our surroundings and maintain the best that human civilization can offer.

Notes

1 Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. J. Lyndon Shanley. ed.. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971, 285.

2 In this discussion of the scientific method I am indebted to Dorothy Rosenthal, who wrote chapter 2 in Botkin, D. B. and E. A. Keller, Environmental Science: The Earth as a Living Planet . Third Edition. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1999.

3 Thoreau, Henry David. Cape Cod. Joseph J. Moldenhauer, ed. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988, 120-121.

4  The original talk was published as Botkin, D. B., 2001, “The Depth of Walden Pond: Thoreau as a Guide to Solving Twenty-first Century Environmental Problems,” The Concord Saunterer N. S. 9: 5-14.

Scientists play three roles in our society, as I have written about in my book No Man’s Garden: researcher, expert witness, and “priest.” As a researcher, a scientist reports the results of a specific study he has done, objectively. As an expert witness, a scientist tells us about a subject in which he has worked, but generalizes beyond his own work, and gives a considered opinion based on his professional experience and best understanding. As a “priest” a scientist tells us what to think and what to believe.

Most of us scientists want to appear as the researcher, but in reality, most of the time, especially when we are dealing with complex scientific issues with broad policy implications, we function as expert witnesses. There is nothing wrong with this role, as long as we are honest in explaining that this is the role we are playing.

There is also a difference between what an individual scientist says and what a large group of scientists agree to say, when they are brought together by a political body and engaged in an attempt to reach a consensus. Most of the time, the result is “conventional wisdom” with all of its pitfalls, along with compromises that come about as the large group tries to deal with cultural and political differences. A report by such a large group is not scientific truth; it isn’t even expert opinion; it’s just a general negotiated agreement.

Everybody I know who uses a computer in their work has a problem with saving
information.  The technical term is archiving.  And I think I’ve found the perfect solution, which I’ll tell you about here.  But first, how did I come up with this idea anyway?

A few years ago I decided to go to a paperless office.  Why have all those files and piles of paper lying around?  It was time to get modern and go to the ultimate in neat and permanent storage of information.  So I bought an expensive flatbed scanner and some software called OCR, for optical character recognition.  My accountant had suggested it.  Think how much money I could save on the storage units I rented for all my papers.  He said  the scanner and the payment for a company to do additional scanning (and clean up my office too) could be a business write-off.

But I soon discovered that the whole idea wasn’t worth the paper it was written
on.  OCR software couldn’t OCR, at least not accurately.  Then the information got out
that the latest in non-paper storage, CD-ROMs, weren’t permanent either. In fact,
nobody was quite sure how long they lasted  — maybe only a decade.  The worst event
was trying to read some scientific data accumulated in the late 1980s —- the old, old
days, as my scientific colleagues told me.  This was after one of my colleagues at a
recent scientific meeting referred to “that old paper you wrote a long time ago.”  Going
back to my publication list, I discovered it was first published in 2000. 

My 1980s data were stored on the best, most advanced backup system in
existence for personal computers at that time –  Colorado Systems tape backups.  But
each new version of that company’s storage devices was not backward compatible.
While the storage capacities got larger and larger, the new machines could not read
what the old tapes contained.  Thinking that my data were safe on a backup tape, I had
carefully stored it in one of the rented storage units.  Then around 1995, a new
graduate student wanted to use those data.  “Sure,” I said, “We’ve got it backed up
here.”  But nobody could find a tape system of that era.  The data sat on tape that
nothing could read.

I was saved in the end because one of my former employees had bought an old
computer from my company (we would have thrown it out otherwise) and used it for a
few years at home.  I called him, and he said that old machine, ca. 1985, had the
proper tape reader built in, but he had sold it to a friend.  He called the friend, and it
turned out the computer was still in use, old as it was, and the friend had never
bothered to take out the antique tape drive.  So we rushed our tape to the friend’s
house and copied the data onto the latest backup system, a ZIP drive  Then the tape
joined a six-foot-tall file cabinet full of IBM cards in one of my storage units, which await
a time when somebody can find a card reader, and contain data too good to throw out.

Archiving scientific and personal data isn’t the only storage problem our
civilization faces.  As the newest technology and ways of thinking arrive, we do not
seem to have room for the old.  Forestry schools used to have specialists in wood
technology who had collections of hardwoods from all over the world —  beautiful-yard
long and several inch wide strips of wood of gloriously different colors and patterns —
almost-black walnut; rich brown mahoganies; speckled woods few  could identify
anymore.  But this passed out of fashion several decades ago.  

Yale University once had a major collection of these woods and a professor who
could actually name them.  But when he retired, Yale decided wood technology wasn’t
with it enough anymore and threw out the collection.  Those of us on the faculty and
graduate students at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies knew the
exact morning when the collection was going to appear at a university dumpster.  Like
African vultures circling a carcass, about twenty of us arrived at dawn and hovered
around the garbage, waiting.  When the truck arrived and poured the wood samples
out, we went into a feeding frenzy, all of us grabbing whatever we could.  During the
next year, we had an informal contest of who could make the most beautiful piece of
furniture from the hardwood strips, few of which we could identify.

Then there are the old phonograph records and early audio wire and tape drives.
You can get most of these played at the Library of Congress, but the guy who knows
how to make and maintain the players is about to retire.  What then? 

Many kinds of heritages of civilization are apparently not “pop” enough for even
our scholarly institutions to want to save.  It’s like old furniture. A sixty-million-year-old
dinosaur seems to be something everybody wants, but my collection of letters has a
small market.

That we were truly confronting an archive crisis came home to me when I met a
man involved with creating a warning sign that would last 10,000 years and be placed at
a dump for nuclear wastes.  He had reviewed the longest-existing human artifacts and
found that there were two kinds: graffiti, mainly people’s names; and large stone
objects, like Stonehenge, whose real purpose we still do not fully understand.  Aha.  A
Stone-jet printer is the answer to my archival problems I realized.

Faced with the potential demise of civilization, I began work, surrounded by piles
of old newspapers, constructing a stone-jet printer.  The early versions have been a
little crude.  The first used a small pneumatic hammer that chipped at thin sheets of
flagstone that could be loaded into the stone tray, fifty sheets at a time.  A very large
vacuum system lifted the stones one by one and fed them into the printer’s flatbed,
where the hammer chipped away.  But the chips kept clogging up the stone feeder.
Next I tried an automatic drill, which produced a fine dust that lubricated the stone
sheets, but it got into the air and made me sneeze.  Then I went to a mortuary and
learned that the latest  technology for gravestones was a laser writer.  Another aha. 

My latest printer uses the same vacuum feed system for thin sheets of flagstone,
but the messages are vaporized into the sheet by a high-energy laser.  No mess.  While
my patent application is in the works, I am considering where to archive  the sheets,
which at this time are piling up rapidly all over the house and in the backyard.  The
flagstone is also good for building, so my plan is to make tombs out of them.  Each
person buying a stone-jet printer could also order a burial site and be spend eternity
surrounded by and protected by his favorite sets of data, old love letters and other
correspondence.  My collection of short essays, each a thousand words long, is serving
well as a wall between my house and my horse pasture.  My next plan is a small
pyramid behind the garage. 

Anybody interested in purchasing a stone-jet printer, can contact me at my web
site.   While you at it, you might want to purchase a useful attachment, a small crane to lift the stones.¼/p>

The news that residents of New Orleans are giving up and leaving after trying hard to stay makes us wonder whether the city can survive as anything like it once was. While we may blame events on particularities, including mistakes by politicians and government officials, underlying all this is an ecology of cities, an almost environmental determinism about where and when cities survive, prevail, and rise to glory, especially cities that are on bodies of water, rose because of them, and depend on them.

The small town of Weston, Missouri is a useful comparison. When Lewis and Clark passed this way on their 1804 trip up the Missouri River, Clark noted a natural harbor, created because the river threw the force of the water against the shore, and this happened because an island in the river made the Missouri flow rapidly and erosively around it. Clark wrote that this would be a good site of a harbor where crops could be shipped to St. Louis — he saw also a stream for drinking water and flat lands for building. He was right; within thirty years Weston was a thriving a harbor town — until 1881, when the fickle, rambling Missouri River cut through its meander and overnight stranded Weston two miles for its flowing waters. Shortly after people abandoned Weston, not bothering to take down its buildings — to our benefit, as today Weston is an attractive historic tourist town and home to commuters working in nearby Kansas City. Weston’s lovely buildings contrast with the blander constructions of the twentieth century, and the town claims, among other attractions, the oldest continuously functioning bar west of New York City. That is to say, the historical, but not the river-business, aspect of the town survived and has revitalized.

The same thing happened to Bruges, Belgium, originally settled as an Atlantic Ocean port. But over the centuries the ocean inconsiderately deposited miles of sandy beaches, until Bruges was just too far from the ocean to be a useful port. Like Weston, Bruges suffered rapid population loss. Like Weston, Bruges has revitalized as a lovely tourist town with Venice-like canals and beautiful buildings of a bygone time.

The ecology of cities is that people create them where it is easy to meet (good transportation to and from) and there is a good site for building, or, as in the case of New Orleans, its location is so good that people create a city in spite of poor building conditions. The Venetians did this by driving millions of tree saplings into the shifting mud and sands of the Adriatic.

From an ecologist’s perspective, New Orleans is three cities: a harbor, a business and residential city, and an historic city. Since New Orleans was founded, the Mississippi, like its rambling tributary the Missouri, has messed around with New Orleans’s site, depositing huge quantities of sand, mud, and soils past the location of the original city and changing its channels many times. The Army Corps of Engineers has added to these changes, and the best location for a harbor at the mouth of the Mississippi need not be exactly where New Orleans’s harbor is. Given the history of other cities which have suffered dramatic environmental change, and given the almost-environmental determinism of cities, it is unlikely that New Orleans will survive in anything like its past glory. What is likely to remain, as it has in Weston and Bruges, and for that matter, in Venice, Italy, is the charming and creative historic city, a small remnant of its former self. The harbor is likely, given enough time, to move to the most practical location. The business and residential New Orleans seems fated to fade away. Unless, of course, massive amounts of funds, beyond those paid out and promised, are forthcoming. Our society could resist the almost inevitable rules of ecology, a kind of new battle of New Orleans, but given the human tendency to muddle through rather than solve environmental problems with great foresight and wisdom, perhaps we need to accept the almost inevitable and help the much-suffering residents of the city move onto happier and more productive locations.

The First Nation asked me write a report about the possible environmental effects of the mining road, and I did this in the early fall of 2004, getting a small group of scientists and engineers together who had experience and knowledge about wilderness ecosystems, wildlife conservation, and road-building. Directing this kind of meeting of a small group of scientists and technical experts is something I have done repeatedly in my career, and I agreed to take on the work.

Although the kind of work was familiar to me, there was something unique about this task, as I soon discovered: In my 40 years experience as a biologist, dealing with environmental issues, I have usually found that the issues are complex and subtle, and one can understand the positions taken on both sides. Such was not the case here. Never had I come across an issue in which the government response so blatantly ignored simple and obvious facts and conditions. Never had a case been so clear nor the response of a government agency so misguided and inappropriate.

Yet more recently the federal government of Canada also approved the mining road. This seems to be a classic example of our current issues concerning environment, development, and people. Rather than a 21 st century as a time of good will and good intentions by governments, a time that would have fit in with the traditional idea of progress, we seem to be witnessing a return to the early nineteenth century attitudes of exploitation and one-time use of our resources. And so I want to share the work of our independent panel with you, the readers of this Website. You can read the final report online, in PDF format.

Copyright © 2005 Daniel B. Botkin

As an ecologist who has done research on wildlife populations for decades, I recognize this as an inevitable consequence of a rule of ecology: what’s good for an individual is not always good for its population or species; and what’s good for the population or species is not always good for an individual. Each of us wants to live forever — myself included —- but a world in which nobody died and babies continue to be born would soon be unlivable —- Earth’s finite resources would not be enough. For a species to persist indefinitely, its individuals either cannot reproduce or cannot live forever. For an individual, a long live with many offspring is desirable.

We did not make nature, and we cannot change her rules. We can only learn what they are and try to figure out how to live with them. From a human point of view, this leads to an inevitable conflict of values. Each of us, as individuals, enjoys other individual animals. Each of us likes to see a population of animals healthy in a habitat that provides a wealth of resources. Natural rules of ecology tell us that the two are not obtainable for all time in any one place. The issue, based on a scientific understanding of population dynamics, leads to a choice based on values.

If we opt for the individual deer, then we have to find other ways that hunting to reduce the present population and future reproduction. We might introduce anti-reproductive hormones into the environment which pose their own environmental issues. And if this is all we did, we would have to watch many deer slowly die of starvation and disease, with their clear watery doe eyes replaced by eyes clouded with pain.

Another option is to make the habitat less favorable for deer. Our suburbanization of the landscape has created a wonderful deer habitat — all those yummy flowering plants easy to reach, those tasty young trees planted near new houses. We could impose zoning laws, or have a voluntary agreement in all suburban neighborhoods to plant only deer-hostile vegetation, whether or not these were beautiful or useful.

We could transport the deer as they became crowded to some other place — a costly solution and one that merely places the problem in someone else’s backyard — our nation is filling up with deer as suburbs expand nation wide.

The point here is that there is no easy solution, and no single right or wrong. Nature has given us the population dynamics of wildlife, and we have to acknowledge these rules. Solutions that make all sides happy may be expensive, have environmental consequences we do not like and perhaps can not predict.

With this understanding that the predicament is not one or the other side’s fault, but a consequence of nature, perhaps we can create an atmosphere where all the people of good will can sit down together and work out a solution that, while not being perfect from any single point of view, becomes an acceptable part of the values of our civilization.

Copyright © 2003 Daniel B. Botkin

It is estimated that only one in ten Americans has been to a national park. What if a program provided funds to send many young, poor people from our cities to visit one national park? Sounds good, but our national parks are understaffed, and their buildings, roads, and trails need renovation. As presently funded, our parks could not absorb those new visitors.

An Urban World

Are we becoming city-folk? Today, 2.75 billion people –45% of the world’s population —live in cities. By 2025, this will increase to 62%. The question then is how do we bring people to nature, or nature to people?