Slow and steady

There is no better way to get moving than on a bike. While it might take 15 minutes to walk a mile, on a bike you can do it in 4. It's heart-healthy, and there is no pollution. It's the best way to get to know where you live. I knew the area from Sawtooth Fish Hatchery to the 10-mile marker better than any of the country between that marker and Ketchum. I could stop by the side of the road frequently to take a drink of water and look around. Early-on I knew that Gold Creek was about halfway between the hatchery and the roadside station. I could stop and watch the fisherman pulled off to the side of the road, or stop and watch a bird fly overhead. It isn't a big deal to stop. In a car we are usually looking to get somewhere far away or in a hurry, and it seems silly to stop every couple of miles to look at interesting things.
When I started daily bike rides year ago, there was no bike path in town, and I found myself being honked at and getting dirty looks from drivers who apparently assumed that wherever they were going was far and away more important than wherever I was headed. Many times they probably did, but why be rude about it? It doesn't necessarily follow that just because you are the one going faster, you should take precedence over someone obeying the speed limit. Besides, sometimes taking your bike allows you to get somewhere faster, or at least take a short cut. When I first started riding around town, going by the roads made me nervous because 1) everybody in a car seemed to assume increased importance, thereby endangering me, and 2) it seemed the route added at least a mile to where I was going. I recall a nurse being completely amazed that I had ridden 3 miles out to the office (using the back roads), but then, she didn't realize that my normal bike rides are anywhere between 10 and 40 miles. I keep having to remind myself that not everyone is in the shape I am, but I bet starting with the small jaunts to the grocery store would help.
I realize that biking isn't practical for everyone. I have had enough major wipe-outs during the winter that I prefer to walk or drive. It's not much fun to ride 5 miles with a headwind of 60 mph, but when I turn around it is smooth sailing. People with young children in their families can't very well tell them to bike a long distance. A fantasy of mine has always been a family bike, shaped like a car, but set up so everyone can pedal. Emissions-free, healthy, and a tune-up would rarely cost more than $200-$300!

Quit relying on temporary fixes

I am a little amazed that Bush is still trying to push drilling in ANWR through Congress since it's been defeated in the Senate twice, but I guess it isn't that surprising since the guy is amazingly persistent when it comes to getting what he wants. Almost as amazing is that people have deluded themselves into thinking that this will be such a great boon for the economy. It's not as though we'll actually become oil exporters or anything. There isn't much oil there--only enough to power the U.S. for 6 months or 3 years, depending on the source you use. I hear 6 months cited a lot more often, and given the current rate of energy consumption it's the one I'm more inclined to believe. Six months of oil sounds like a lot when it is spread over 100 people, but over the 270,000,000 in the United States, not so much.
The most ignorant and callous reaction I have heard to this so far is, "Open ANWR up for drilling, the polar bears will be fine." Of course we'd be upset if the polar bear was (and of course it is, and so we are) endangered, but the ramifications of this action go so far beyond the polar bear. Bush has told us that the oil is only in an area the size of a small airport, but he manages to give the misleading impression that that is the only area that would be damaged. The spots where the oil is located are found at different locations in the park, so the environmental impact to the area would be a lot moire extensive than he lets on. The companies that are planning to drill there would go in over the wetlands bounding the area, and as I have mentioned before, it takes wetlands a very long time to recover from such damage, if they recover at all. A lot of habitat for migrating birds and caribou would be either damaged or completely wiped out, to say nothing of the polar bear. Too many people think that area is a frozen wasteland. Clearly, they have no idea how ecology works, or that people live in those areas even if they see them as uninhabitable.
Finally, drilling more oil just prolongs the problem of global warming. We need to seek and implement answers now, before it's too late. It's hard to do that when our politicians are blithely telling anyone who will listen that things are just peachy and that ecologists are making a big deal out of nothing, as though we have nothing better to worry about.
A lot of Alaskans are all for the idea, and with good reason. It would bring a lot of outside money into the state, but only temporarily. I have a hunch that if you talk to the people in far northern tribes who depend on solid ice and migrating caribou for survival, you'd get a different opinion.

However much land you think we have, rethink that estimate

From what I can tell, everything going on in Washington right now is wishful thinking rather than environmental reality. The senators and lone representative for this state are hell-bent on auctioning off all the available land to out-of-state oil companies. I have replied to all their 'reassuring' e-mails to me, particularly the ones that give the "silly girl, you're just a poor, out-of-work biologist, and I'm a high-powered Congressperson, so you don't know what you're talking about' impression. The problem between biologists and politicians is that we think on different time lines. The politician thinks toward the next election, while I, upon hearing that the 'leak-proof' rock container we could use to sequester carbon dioxide would hold all the CO2 we could produce for the next 400 years, my first though was, "Great. What do we do after that?"
Each politician that has written to me has used the magic word 'economy.' "We must be in the forefront of economy, and drilling for oil will bring more money into the state." The state is not going to see very much of that money--the oil companies are from out-of-state, remember? Besides, oil is a finite resource, so what happens when all the oil is gone? We'll have a bunch of people either out of work or migrating to a different state with the oil companies. Those of us who stay, however, will be faced with an immense clean-up responsibility, not enough people to do it, and quite probably a number of extinctions. (Yes, I know oil companies are required to supply clean-up funds in some cases, but I'm not sure how well that works. My guess is that it works about as well as the mandate signed by President Clinton to get construction companies to mitigate wetland damage.)
Outdoor recreation brought upwards of $4 billion in the United States in 2006. I don't know what our share in that is, but a lot of people come to this state to hike, photograph, fish, and hunt. If oil rigs are built in those supposedly solitary areas, a lot of people will find outdoor recreation elsewhere. Our elected officials probably hope that once the oil is gone we can restore the land to what it was. Great thought, but easier said than done. As I have noted elsewhere, it is extremely time consuming and expensive to restore a landscape, and a lot of problems can crop up in the form of invasive species. Once the ground is denuded, it is easy for unwanted species to grow and it takes a lot of work to control them. That's partly why some scientists do not recommend using fire as a tool in sagebrush communities. Sagebrush is adapted to fire, but only once every 100-200 years, and it comes back very slowly. Meanwhile, a bunch of ruderals spring up, appropriate all the water and nutrients, and outcompete the bushes. It has been documented that sage grouse do not like to nest within more than a mile of a developed oil field, and usually prefer that there are no oil rigs within 3 miles. I can't blame them. I'm not fond of them, either. I'd prefer to hike a truly wild area without an oil rig every mile. In my opinion if you're in a developed area, it isn't a hike.
So will developed oil fields help the state's economy? Maybe for a little while, but it's not sustainable.

The hated ESA

The Endangered Species Act was signed into law by President Nixon in 1973 (though I have recently come across information that suggests it would have been signed sometime in the late 1960s, so don't quote that date), and it is legislation that landowners love to hate. I guess they are within their rights to feel that they should be able to do whatever they want with their land, given that they are the ones who purchased it, but I also wonder if they think about the trickle-down (or rather, up) effects that could have.
In 'Silent Spring,' Rachel Carson thoroughly documented the harmful effects of DDT. DDT got into the waterways, was consumed by microscopic organisms, which were eaten by larger organisms, which were eaten by larger organisms, etc., right up to the bald eagle where it caused serious problems in reproduction. Now that DDT has been banned, we have seen an upswing in bald eagles and other raptors. That was a relatively easy problem to fix. Given the harmful effects of DDT on people as well as animals, you can imagine what kind of uproar it would cause if a landowner sprayed DDT on his/her property.
I was on the landowners' side of things (sort of) when I first started formulating my thesis project. I wanted to keep disturbance of the plants I was studying to a minimum, so I wanted to spray insecticide in my experimental plots. When I turned in my proposal the board of trustees nixed the insecticide because I was working in a wet meadow right next to a stream and there was a very real possibility of the chemicals getting into the water. (It turned out to be a good thing since when I collected data I only had to deal with 36 plots as opposed to 96.) I ended up having to restrict it to just keeping rodents out (which also turned out to be a helpful as plants tend to germinate and grow better with a medium amount of disturbance).
I could have yelled and screamed at the board, but I was not the one who lived in that area. It was their drinking water they were worrying about, their streams that would have been poisoned, their fish that might not have survived. The key word here is 'them.' I was just a visitor to the area. Once I had finished my research I would pull stakes and head back west, leaving them to deal with any problems that might have arisen, however slight. So I grumbled under my breath a bit, but at the same time I could completely see the logic. (And they were right. About a year after I had established the experiment the field flooded.)
Now, the Preble's Meadow Jumping Mouse is arguably not in the same category. A landowner would be understandably upset if s/he found out that s/he couldn't build on a certain corner of land s/he owned because of the presence of something smaller than a hamster. We do have bigger problems than saving a mouse subspecies. On the other hand, if a species, sub- or otherwise, is endangered, it indicates that there is not enough good habitat for that animal. If there is not enough good habitat for an animal that might once have been widespread, that is habitat that we are losing and animals that we are losing. The ESA indirectly protects us--if something is not good for one life form, it probably isn't too good for others. Mourning a small patch of habitat might seem a little extreme to some, but I would miss it because I would never have the chance to study it and its animals and find out what makes them tick. What is important to me is a matter of unscientific opinion, but I think that being genetically poorer diminishes us just a little. We never know to what interesting stuff those genes (or the habitat) might lead.

Why should we care?

We shouldn't care about plants and animals going extinct because it really has no effect on us. Huh? Where did you go to school? What was your major? I see. Did you have to take any biology courses? Oh, well that explains everything. It seems self-evident to me that our environment includes us, and up until I started wrangling with politicians I thought it was fairly obvious to everyone. It seems it's only obvious to those of us who aren't engaged in oil drilling, strip mining, or money hoarding. I guess the whole acid rain thing a few years ago didn't wise anybody up. The polar bear is only one of a few species being affected by environmental degradation; it just happens to be the most visible.
Salamander numbers have been declining. The way the salamander is built, it needs to keep its skin wet and cool, which it does behaviorally. Unfortunately, its skin is more permeable than ours, so it ends up letting in a lot more impurities than the rest of the body is prepared to deal with, and the animal dies. This phenomenon has also been noted in frogs. (Quick, what's the difference between a frog and a toad? Toads can live in arid places because they have thicker, less permeable skin.)
At the rate the rain forests are disappearing, we will not get to test most of the plants for pharmacological compounds. There is a certain periwinkle in the Amazon that has shown promise as a treatment, if not a cure, for cancer. We can't replicate that compound without intensive study of that flower, but if the rain forest is cut down the flower dies, too. Besides, the forests in themselves are pretty neat. They generate a lot of their own rain through evapotranspiration. And trees--yes, I seem to recall something about trees using carbon dioxide. (They'll lose that ability when they die, obviously, but there's a lot of living stuff with a need for carbon down there.)
Fish in the ocean are dying because the ocean water is turning acid. The ocean is a carbon sink, but it is fast reaching its saturation point. I doubt all the radioactive heavy metals we put down there in cement bins is helping, either, especially not now that the bins are starting to leak. We've had a lot of strange-looking critters turn up because of living in a polluted area. Given what radioactive poisoning has done (look at Marie Curie), I'm not surprised that the people of Nevada aren't particularly enthused over the idea of storing radioactive waste in Yucca Mountain.
And, of course, there are the polar bears. When ice starts melting at such a rapid rate, it should be a clue that something isn't right. Dying salamanders, drowning bears, deformed babies, declining pikas--these might all be taken as an indication that something is wrong. So why should we care? We should care because we live in this world, this environment, too, so whatever is not good for other living things ultimately is not good for us.