The Regulatory Community
I attended a forestry conference today, which I will post about in some depth tomorrow. This evening, though, a minor incident that transpired this morning occupies my thoughts.
During one of the question-answer periods a young (20-something) participant referred to herself as a member of “the regulatory community.”
Pardon my provincial lack of sophistication, but I had never heard of “the regulatory community” before. Evidently “the regulatory community” is made up of government functionaries who promulgate regulations, and by extension all the rest of us must be “the regulated community.”
Those are not vernacular communities; that is, they do not occupy some particular place. They are ersatz, pseudo-communities that exist in concept only. Calling one’s special interest group a “community” is common these days, I suppose, some examples being the Internet community, the bowling community, and the toe fungus community.
In the case of the regulatory community, the special interest group that uses the term consists of THEM, and the rest of us are US. This way of looking at the world is thus about as divisive as can be.
Now, I did not invent the concept of the regulatory community; it was heretofore not my way of looking at the world. However, apparently it is the way that government functionaries who promulgate regulations conceptualize their social caste. In the spirit of civil communitarianism [here], I accept their self-proclaimed ideological divisiveness — especially in recognition of the fact that I can’t do anything about it.
Hence I address the following remarks to the members of the regulatory community, whomever you are, speaking as a representative of the regulated community.
Firstly, let me point out that we in the regulated community pay your salaries. Without us, you would be penniless beggars scrounging for (hopefully useful) detritus on the town dump. I use the word “town” in this case in the vernacular, meaning a real community that exists in a real place.
Secondly, the money you get paid comes from the wealth we in the regulated community create. If we did not create wealth from our regulated properties, there would be nothing to pay you with, and you would be s*** out of luck (see the previous paragraph).
Hence (and I use the term “hence” to imply a logical conclusion drawn from the previous propositions) if you in the regulatory community screw the rest of us so badly that we cannot produce wealth, then you get screwed, too.
Do you see how that works? Can you follow that logic?
Now, I realize that you in the regulatory community feel as though you exist quite apart from the rest of us, as a separate social entity, almost as if you were aliens from the Planet Klothead. But in fact you are not all that separate. In fact you are our dependents, as it were, since you depend on us to provide you with succor and sustenance that keeps you from crawling around on the town dump grubbing for bits of discarded cheese sandwiches, etc.
The impression I received from today’s discussion is that you, the regulatory community, wish to eliminate all possibility that we, the regulated community, might produce wealth from our properties. By the term “wealth” I mean food, fiber, and other forms of commodities that feed, clothe, and house us all.
It is your raison d’etre (that’s French for reason for existence) to regulate us into oblivion by denying us (the regulated community) all productive uses of our properties. However, if you follow the deductive reasoning in the logical syllogism above, that would result in all of us (regulatory and regulated) being forced to crawl around on the town dump, except that there would be no discarded cheese sandwiches since there would be no cheese, no bread, and no other items necessary for survival.
I realize that deductive reasoning is not your forte (that’s French for strong point). Still and all, and even though you hail from the Planet Klothead, I believe you are capable of grasping this reality. By the term “reality” I mean the the quality or fact of being real.
At least, I hope you can grasp it. Because if not, we are all s*** out of luck.
Nor should you. Enjoy this. There is NOTHING about forests in the papers or on the internet that makes sense to anyone but a pie in the sky dreamer with no foundation in the realities of biology or weather.
by bear bait
OK—I was wrong. I have read the morning paper and we have the Obama equivalent of the Clinton Northwest Timber Plan coming to town. The Obama Nation’s top scientists and the generals of the Corps of Engineers are going to be in town for a week to do a cursory examination of the Columbia River dams and speak from on high about the solution to having green hydroelectric power and a robust salmon runs. Of course, only dams on the Oregon border below Idaho are to be looked at. The Idaho Power dams on the Snake, none with a fish ladder, the runs extirpated behind those very dams and the cost effective no-fish ladder atonement Idaho Power got from Senator Frank Church and the irrigation users upstream to Wyoming, are never in play. Nor are those dams supplying power to Seattle and Tacoma, or water to the million acres of DNR leased farms that fund schools in Washington.
Some things are beyond government oversight, to protect whom they never say. Not unlike the Lewiston Dam on the Trinity River in California, the cold water half of the Klamath River, which has gotten its artificial spring freshet released from Lewiston Dam, and now the water will be diverted through mountains by canals and tunnels to go down hydro power penstocks to the Sacramento River, where that water will go to far up the southern end of the San Joaquin River, assisted by massive pumps that macerate every fish that falls within their influence, to irrigate Federally subsidized cotton, and fill swimming pools to abet the California desert lifestyle.
I like the irony of that. All the hullaballoo over Oregon farmers high on a tiny tributary of the Klamath, getting irrigation water from Clear Lake reservoir, which is mandated to maintain a specific level to enhance the survival of a chub in a reservoir (sort of like barn owls—-what did chubs or owls do before reservoirs or barns?), that water now needed for salmon but the 68% (that would be about a third of the Klamath flow below the joining of those two rivers on the way to the ocean) of the total annual flow of the Trinity going to irrigate in Southern California is protected, makes a lot of electricity, and actually is used to kill salmon more than once.
All the water taken out of the Trinity is lost habitat, because the last I knew, a cubic foot of water was salmon habitat, and only having one out of three for the year means only a third of the habitat is available. Then it is used to super saturate nitrogen into the Sacramento River, and then it is used to feed those notorious salmon grinding pumps to raise the water and send it uphill to the southern part of the San Joaquin Valley, killing more fish, where it takes at THE LEAST TWO ACRE FEET OF WATER TO SUPPRESS SOIL SALTS SO THAT A CROP MIGHT BE GROWN!!!!. And then three more acre feet of water to overcome evaporation and grow the plants in the desert.
In contrast, of course, to Oregon where the statutory limit to a water right is two and one half acre feet of water per acre of land. Period. Those Klamath farmers can’t even waste water, which is encouraged in California. No justice, man. No justice. Take out the Klamath river dams so fish might access a couple of small streams in Oregon. Never mind the Shasta river below those dams is oversubscribed for irrigation by 125%, or the Scott River below that is de-watered by irrigation withdrawals.
Political Power is what it is all about. If you don’t think the Pelosi, Waxman, Boxer, Waters, Feinstein, Miller crew is about Democrap power and not resource conservation, you don’t read enough or even pay attention to the world. The Columbia will run down a canal to Merced some day. And our emasculated Congressional delegation from Oregon will only be there to make sure the canal tenders are riding bicycles or driving solar powered pickup trucks to monitor the water theft by majority vote. The tyranny of the majority is alive and well, and Portland knows it, but has no defense against the majority in Congress from California. Just ask DeFazio or Walden or Shrader. The rest don’t think they have a dog in the fight, unless their minders from the green side think they ought to be involved.
So where is Jane Lubchenko on that area of anadromous fish concern? How about wild and hatchery salmon returns in California, outside of the Klamath area of influence, that are 5% of the new normal with fish stopping dams and irrigation withdrawals for the last 50 years? Yep. We don’t fish for Chinook off the Oregon coast because we might catch either a Klamath salmon or a Sacramento salmon, and there is not one teeny bit of concern about the Lewiston Dam was theft on the Trinity River, half the flow of the Klamath at their junction and the cold water tributary due to its origin and length through timbered banks. Not one bit of concern about irrigation and power dewatering the Central Valley to where the salmon are now less than 5% of what they were just 7 years ago. Salmon are first on the priority list on the Columbia, and hardly present on the San Joaquin-Sacramento River system, once a greater producer of Chinook salmon than the Columbia River. The Columbia has more species of salmon, and therefore had more fish, but not more Chinook. The real missing link on the Columbia was the once huge sockeye, chum, and coho runs, now missing. The coho from Washington streams, and the sockeye from Washington, Oregon and Idaho streams, all with a lake involved. But the issue is to produce more carbon with replacement electrical power, lose the fuel saving barge traffic on the Snake River from Clarkston and Lewiston. Punish the Northwest, anywhere you can, because that is where there are the fewest people with congressional representation. Pure Power…
You forgot to mention that the salmon in the Sacramento River system are descended from Washington salmon planted there in the early 1900’s.
They aren’t even natives!!!!! I guess the joke is on all of us.
It seems that the “Regulatory Community” is a group of self-designated watchdogs who feel qualified to oversee and judge Forest Service professionals and scientists. People like George Weurthner, who know everything about nature because he is a “naturalist” and he wrote a book.
I don’t mind having these folks around, as long as I get the chance to make them look really, REALLY stupid, in the same public eye as they get.
After another 12-hour day in the garden, I am worn out. Hence my in-depth report on the funky forestry conference will have to wait another day.
Sorry to be so behind schedule, but sunny days are a rare and glorious commodity in Western Oregon, and I can’t bear to sit inside and miss them.