I can't even fathom how many shades and textures of green are in this picture. I would imagine there's more than 30 different species of plants and mosses in it, plus others I cannot see. Some, like the Sword Fern on the right, will be only in the watershed for a few months. Others, like the Oxalis clover at the bottom, persist about half of the year, and the mosses are constantly changing and growing. The trees remain year after year, the fallen ones decomposing and making homes for new plants. As the watershed gets older, it gets more complex. You can solve bioenergetics equations and put some numbers on the increasing entropy of the site. Or you can look at this picture. A picture is worth, in this case, quite a large number of bytes.
This just blew me away, and I don't mean that as a pun on mountain-top mining. I guess the most deep-down issue I want to be a part of solving is the energy crisis. And as a forester, I believe that trees are a tremendous part of that goal. But this is just a reminder of how big this crisis is.
As most southerners know, all of the "lakes" in the south are fake. (Many of the lakes in Oregon are also fake, but they would normally be in places that would get seasonal pooling due to melting of snowpack). In places near Clemson, there are little lumber towns that have quite literally "dried up" because of the damming of the rivers... the Keowee and the Tyger, particularly... that took the power from their mills.Yet at the same time, I and every other person in natural resource management at Clemson greatly enjoyed getting out on the lake in boats or swimming, or making a bonfire on the "beach" (clay beaches that were once mountain-tops), or looking out at the lake from the top of the stadium. With situations like this, what is the balance?
As an ecologist, we have a tendency to think that externalities are only spatial. Be it Tobler or Newtonian thinking, we find that what is near to us in space is more influenced than that far away. As a resource economist, I became very familiar with this (mathematically too complicated for me at the time) concept of "lambda"- the scarcity term. Essentially, lambda was a way in which you weight the present today in order to account for its accruing impact on the future.
When I see things like this, I wonder-- what is the lambda? Or more, what was the lambda 30 years ago when someone thought, well, it would be a lot easier to get coal if we didn't have to mine. It would be a lot easier to get timber if we cut down the whole forest. It would be a lot easier to get food if we had McDonald's everywhere. It would be more convenient to get to work if we all had a car...no TWO cars. And yet I'm guilty as the next person in using the energy from that coal, cutting down those trees, going to the major chain stores, and driving a car.
I love this kind of ethical-economical debate and to challenge myself to think about being on all sides, to try to pick and defend a side. I love it because it's intractable and deep, and I can't figure out the answer.
But I do look forward to seeing this film in Portland.
