destroy everything you touch
As the semester advances, it's beginning to look more and more like my thesis work's going to focus on the media and the environment, namely, the feedback loops that exist between a reader's perception of the environment and nature, and the kind of reportage they receive. The idea's that the study will try to break down the walls between citizen and reporter, and the result, hopefully, will be a kind of reading guide, a toolkit to address gaps between what is and what's being communicated to us.
So, this is the sort of thing -
[Former Interior Secretary Gale Norton] said that utilizing biomass will help keep the nation's forests healthier by removing excess woody debris.
that drives me mad. Or maybe it should make me glad that there's work to be done.
At any rate - who cares what Gale Norton thinks about who should be her replacement? We all know what sort of "Westerner" she has in mind - where's the work there? When has Gale Norton ever shown any concern for a healthy ecosystem, or even shown she knows what one looks like? Did the Post's enviro reporter cover this? Why not? If Tony Soprano was giving an interview, wouldn't you expect the cops and courts reporter to being doing the scribbling?
And why let that last graf pass without comment? I mean, come on:
It is a common misconception that a tree that dies in the forest without being harvested is wasted. Nothing could be further from the truth. Trees have been dying in forest ecosystems for as long as there have been forests, and the function they perform is critical to maintaining the integrity of those ecosystems. Snags and down logs provide animal and plant habitat; build, diversify, and protect soils and aquatic ecosystems; and provide sites for microbial activity critical to forest productivity. In many cases, fire plays an important role in the creation of dead trees.
When a tree dies, it may remain upright with at least some portion standing as a snag, or it may fall over taking a piece of the forest floor with it. Both processes are important events in forest development. In the case of a snag, the death of a tree is the birth of a new and vital structure. As snags decay, they provide protected sites above the ground that are used by a variety of forest creatures. Young snags, with clinging, curling bark, provide roost sites for a number of bats. Woodpeckers also rely on snags as sites in which to excavate nest cavities, and other "secondary cavity nesters" rely on the woodpeckers to excavate their home sites. At least 42 common North American birds nest in cavities. Many of these snag dependent bats and birds play an important role in checking insect population outbreaks, thereby protecting remaining trees.
If a tree falls over and takes soil with it, it creates important forest floor diversity. Over centuries, this process of "pit-and-mound formation" and the accumulation of large woody material create a complex soil architecture of organic debris and ridges of mineral soil. The effect is to enhance diversity of microhabitats occupied by small organisms that are important to overall ecosystem processes. Some species preferentially colonize either mineral soil or organic debris.
Logs on the forest floor fulfill a number of functions. Like snags, logs provide important habitat for vertebrates as diverse as salamanders, shrews, and bears. While working as a research biologist, former Forest Service Chief Jack Ward Thomas identified 179 species that use dead wood in the Blue Mountains of northeastern Oregon, amounting to over half of the vertebrate species in the region. Dead wood also forms the basis of the forest food web, providing substrate for fungi, termites, beetles, and isopods, which in turn feed earthworms, centipedes, flies, ants, and wasps. Ants and wasps, like birds and bats, are important predators of insects that can kill trees at high population densities, and many ant species rely on dead wood for nest sites. In aquatic ecosystems, logs also form the basis of an intricate web of life. In addition to providing food to a variety of invertebrates, logs provide attachment sites for aquatic insects and hiding cover for predators. Channel features created by logs, notably pools, determine the kinds and amounts of fish that can inhabit a stream.
And so on; click the link above for more. This isn't to say that the rebuttal should be that long and detailed, but it took me three minutes using Google to find that document.
Salamanders, shrews, and bears - yeah, no money in that shit. Gale Norton's been nothing more than a trumped up real-estate shill for the Bush Administration; she might as well be wearing a red sport coat. And we may never be able to really take stock of just how much a Norton Interior has harmed this country. You'd never know that, though, if you opened up the Denver Post to that article this morning.
UPDATE: Nevermind the Denver Post, here's the Muckraker.
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