Biodiversity

["Tom Condit" <tomcondit@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Oct. 12, Chris Sciabarra wrote:

"I simply don't know how poor the market record would be
considering that public lands have never been privately owned. ..."

I do. The record is quite clear, and Chris won't have to travel far
to examine it with his own eyes.

The "Northern Forest", the woods stretching from eastern Maine
through northern New Hampshire, Vermont and New York, is 85%
privately owned. It looks very pretty to anyone who's never seen a
real ancient forest, but it doesn't look much like the old-growth
forest of white pine, spruce and fir which was there when the
Europeans came, and it's not inhabited by many of the same species
of birds and animals. 99% of it has been logged at least once. The
logs were floated downriver to mills in huge rafts, destroying the
riparian habitat along the way.  (If you want to know what I mean
by this, imagine yourself standing in the path of 1,000 trees
coming toward you at five miles per hour.  Now imagine the same
thing happening over and over again for decades.)

A major stimulus to the "progressive movement" in the midwest in
the 1890s was the incursion of lumber companies into the woods of
the "old Northwest".  Large areas of Michigan had been virtually
destroyed and the timber companies were moving westward, buying up
legislatures in their path.  The whole creation of the national
forest system was a reaction to the unregulated destruction of the
forests by the "market forces".  Those who created it were anxious
to prove their contention that capitalism didn't *have* to be
irrational, that it was possible to combine private profit and
public good with the state standing as mediator.

Our new wave of capitalist politicians assure us that capitalism
*does* have to be irrational, that only free and unchecked greed
accomplishes anything within the confines of the market system.

I think, by the way, that the environmental destruction in the
Soviet Union wasn't primarily a result of "cold war pressures" as
some have argued.  It was a result of looking at the prosperity of
the U.S. and attempting to emulate its technological processes
while trying to avoid the domination by private capital.  We see it
in Lenin's uncritical remarks about the Taylor system, in attempts
to emulate midwestern agricultural practices, etc., without
understanding the underside of these processes.  Like stalinism,
capitalism looks better from a distance than close up.

Tom Condit
Tom Condit
<tomcondit@xxxxxxxxxxx>
1801-A Cedar Street
Berkeley, California 94703
510-845-7251


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