Are All Endangered Species Worth Saving?

Is it important to preserve Endangered Species? 

The answer is not quite as simple as some try to make it.

Over the history of the earth an estimated 1 – 4 billion “species” have gone extinct.  In today’s world it is estimated a few hundred species per year go extinct.

Would cuttlefish exist if something else had not gone extinct?  Will some future species not come into existence if we "save" the cuttlefish?  Hmmmm...I wonder how much money I could raise if I began a "Save the Cuttlefish" foundation?  Could I raise more if we renamed them cuddle fish? 

The knee jerk reaction (pop-environmental) to the question, “Is it important to preserve Endangered Species,” especially on the part of the pop-environmental movement, is generally a resounding, “Yes!” 

But some thought needs to be given to that answer.

Why “Yes,” as an automatic answer?  To assert we should go out of our way to “save” a species we should have some basis for the assertion.  What benefit does the species provide?  Is it a benefit we would miss if the species disappeared?  If one species is preserved, do we doom another from rising from insignificance to a place of prominence?  If someone had “saved” the dinosaurs, for example, would there have been mammoths and, eventually, elephants?

A bigger problem we run into with the glib answer is, “What is a species?”

The problem comes when formally listing a species as endangered, or threatened happens because a government agency or one of the environmental organizations feeding off those governments wants to expand its influence over a broad range of private and public actions, land uses and other aspects of day to day life.  The species is an afterthought.  

In the Pacific Northwest, for example, Chinook Salmon are a highly valued sport and food fish.  The fish are found in a great variety of habitats both coastal and inland.  They are plentiful in general but, due to the U.S. Endangered Species Act and pressure by a broad variety of pop-environmental groups, the salmon have been divided into “Evolutionary Significant Units.”

It is interesting that despite many river systems, each with Chinook, Oregon and Washington Chinook are simply Chinook but in areas where one group or another wants to expand control the Chinook suddenly becomes a discrete species even in portions of river systems.

Division into Evolutionary Significant Units allows for micro management of a generally plentiful species because the claim can somehow be made that, for example, a particular fish normally found in a very specific area is “Endangered” or, “Threatened.”  The listing is then used as a way to gain intimate control of all activity in areas amounting to millions of acres because, after all, we must save the fish, no matter how plentiful it might be.

The listing process can become rather silly.  The guppies in my fish tank, after a few generations, would be considered to be a “species” all on their own by some.

In the case of the Chinook Salmon (see below from the NOAA web-site) 17 discrete “species” are set aside.  Caught in the ocean there appears to be no real way to tell them apart.  Two “species” are endangered, seven are “threatened” and the rest are candidates or, of no concern.
 

Even DNA testing appears not to be a certain indicator demonstrating one “species” of Chinook is different from another and the issue is confused because, despite the stories about salmon always returning to their stream of origin, some “stray” or return to spawn in rivers other than the river they were hatched in.  That means “new” DNA is always being introduced into populations all the time.

Straying is an important survival mechanism.  For example, much of everything needed to support fish in the Columbia River in Eastern Washington, State was washed out to sea in the great Missoula Floods of ten – fifteen thousand years ago.  Everything was scoured down to bedrock.  If new populations of fish had not moved in since, there would be no runs in much of the Columbia River.

On the Washington Coast a similar disaster is recorded as having taken place on the Skagit River in the 1850s when Mt. Baker erupted and sent poisons cascading into the river.  Today, the Skagit is famous for its runs of some kinds of fish.

However much the various fish “species” may lack any special uniqueness, they are very handy for asserting control over large areas of land hence the constant hunt for “new” endangered species, especially those with potentially large habitats that can be snatched up and “preserved.”

Species come and go.  Extinction is a part of life and should be recognized as such.  If we, as a society, choose to “save” an endangered species we should do so for the sake of the species we target, not for reasons having more to do with expanding control over landscapes, expanding bureaucracies, creating the need for yet another “save the red whales of Mars” activist group or, for some other reason only remotely related to the species.

Bad Study... Go Away: Suppressing Evidence In The Environmental Discussion

Whatcom County in Washington State is home to a holy body of water.

The water must be holy because nothing else can explain the almost religious fervor exhibited by the pop environmental movement as it mounts battle after battle over what the movement appears to consider the sanctity of the holy water flowing through the lake and on into Puget Sound.

Whatcom County residents discuss Lake Whatcom water quality

Controversy has surrounded use of the lake for at least the last two decades.  Anyone reading the history of discussions regarding the lake would think they’d been transported back to the days of the Crusades as the knights of the lake raise huge sums of money to outfit yet another attack on the infidels occupying the shores of the holy waterway.

The discussion regarding Lake Whatcom over the years serves to illustrate a serious problem with most discussions about environmental issues in recent times; science has become something to be manipulated for result and, if the result cannot be manipulated, science is to be suppressed.

That on-going attacks on science by the environmental movement would be the cornerstone of the future movement first came into clear focus for me when, nearly 20 years ago, I attended the Clinton Forest Summit in Portland, Oregon as an analyst for a number of forest products industry oriented trade magazines.

The experience was a stunning one in a number of ways, especially since I was considerably more naïve in those days regarding the environmental movement and some of its approaches; I still thought that science and reason mattered when it came to environmental issues and that the excesses of the pop-environmental movement mostly came from lack of information.

So I was pretty optimistic about the Summit.  It was billed as a science based, rational look at environmental issues surrounding the health and use of the forests of our nation.

The event was held in Portland’s convention center.  Reporters, including myself, were allotted space at tables surrounded by broadcast trucks sent in by the major U.S. and regional media.  Around the edges of the Convention Center floor were several hundred stations manned by activist groups providing studies, brochures, letters, press releases and other material designed to influence the reporters at the event.

Had I not known in advance the Summit was about forestry I’d have thought I was attending a druid’s convention.  At least 80% of the materials provided by “environmental activists” had to do with Earth Mother Gaia, the sacred ocean or some other religious enterprise involving how trees scream when they are cut down and so on. 

Almost nothing involving forest health, responsible harvest, fire reduction strategies or any other aspect of the actual point of the Summit was offered.

Even worse, twenty years ago the Northern Spotted Owl was all the rage, or at least everyone was all enraged, over the controversy surrounding the little bird.

The timber industry in the United States was in the process of being decimated with the need to protect the Spotted Owl being used as an excuse to suspend logging over huge expanses of timber land.

But wait!  Scientists had discovered in the years immediately preceding the conference that the Spotted Owl was not only far less endangered than had been thought, the little creature could also survive nicely in second growth timber stands; a cornerstone relied on by the pop-environmental movement to prop up their end of the discussion had been removed.

Whoops!

Guess what?  Evidence regarding the potential widespread occurrence of the bird in ranges previously thought unsuitable was very specifically banned from discussion.  Only discussion revolving around the need to preserve old growth forest to save the Spotted Owl was allowed to be presented.



The Pop-environmental View - Nothing Should Ever Change



Back to holy water.

Near the turn of the century, after years of discussion about Lake Whatcom, a highly respected engineering firm was hired by local authorities to prepare a report at assembled all of the various studies about Lake Whatcom, analyze them, then draw conclusions regarding the entirety of the data about the lake, especially in terms of the Lake’s being used for drinking water.

Well, unfortunately, the firm hired to do the analysis was infested by engineers and scientists who hadn’t been informed about the desire outcome of the study.  That meant the draft was based on science.  The final report was particularly disdainful of some of the work being done by the local university so, when a preliminary draft was circulated to a small number of local officials, the proverbial excrement hit the fan.  In very short order the report was fitted with concrete boots and “disappeared,” to use a term often attributed to gangsters eliminating a rival. 

Similar studies in recent years have suffered the same fate as the jihad against any use of land around the lake has continued. 

The experience with Lake Whatcom data is, of course, not unique.  More and more we see science being cooked to match emotional needs rather than as a learning tool. 

The essence of drawing conclusions about any issue is the attempt to use observable fact and rational thought to inform decision-making.  Often, properly done studies will point to data allowing for differences of opinion.  We learn when we, from the differing perspectives we all have, discuss, comprehend and arrive at agreement with the data in mind.

The problem comes when data is deliberately suppressed so that pre-determined decisions can be supported.  If only data supporting one point of view or another is allowed in the discussion we get only one result; the wrong one. 

The larger problem comes in that suppressing data that might be in opposition to a desired conclusion is no longer seen as particularly inappropriate by the environmental industry. 

Lose An Industry; Lose A Forest

An interesting juxtaposition of events has the potential to teach a lesson both political decision-makers and the pop-environmental industry need to pay attention to. 

On the one hand, massive forest fires in the western United States are demonstrating what can happen when a forest products industry has been hounded nearly out of existence in states like Colorado, Utah, and others with the subsequent lack of attention to forest health attending the loss. 

These trees were dead before they burned.  They should have been used for lumber.

Even as the environmental devastation caused by those fires continues, the pop-enviros in my community are taking steps likely to help assure the end of a significant forest products sector in the community. 

Over the past month in the U.S. State of Colorado more pollution has been pumped into the atmosphere as the result of forest fires than is likely to be produced by all human activity in that state for years to come.  Incredible tonnages of a variety of greenhouse gases, particulate matter and metals actually smelted from the earth as fires burn (much of the mercury in the atmosphere, for example, is there as a result of forest fires) are circling the earth today because of those fires.

The intensity of the fires could have been significantly reduced had the massive numbers of dead trees the fires fed on been harvested, milled into useful products and sold to build homes, businesses and other structures rather than being left in the woods to serve as torches.

Lumber or Torch?  The pop-environmental community has consistently fought harves in areas like this.

A big reason those trees weren’t used, aside from resistance to harvest by a strong pop-environmental movement, has been the lack of a harvesting and processing infrastructure capable of making use of the trees.  All of Colorado, based on Forest Service analysis released in 2009 contains only 3 softwood sawmills, none of them large.  Many other states are equally underserved, especially considering the billions of board feet of potential lumber that could be milled from dead and dying trees. 

A business building being constructed out of lumber and logs milled from dead trees.  The bluish tint is typical of lumber cut from trees killed by the pine beetle.

Cut to my neck of the woods, Whatcom County, Washington.

Whatcom County’s first industry in the mid-1850s was a softwood sawmill.  The first non-native, permanent resident built a mill on a waterfall at the edge of Bellingham Bay and got to work.  At the turn of the 20^th Century dozens of sawmills, large and small, served the county’s forest products industry, mills fed by the 1.3 million acres of forestland contained in the County.

Times change; by the end of the 20^th Century well over a million acres of land in the County had been converted to national parks, national forests and other uses.  Today, about 100,000 acres, mostly owned by the State of Washington, remain formally set aside to provide the timber necessary to maintain an industry in the county while an additional 120,000 acres is privately owned forest, subject to conversion but, at present, mostly available to serve the forest products industry.

The former forest products industry was, of course, devastated by the constriction in supply.  Sawmill closures, reductions in the number of firms engaged in harvest and other losses reduced the industry to a shadow of its former self.  Today, only one softwood sawmill of any size operates in Whatcom County with a few additional mills available in neighboring counties.  The forest products industry has become a regional industry with most harvesting firms working in at least three counties and some in more due to lack of a sufficient supply of harvestable wood. 

Now, Whatcom County’s “environmental” community is preparing to administer what could be a fatal blow to the area’s forest products industry.  A desire to grow, over time, an “old growth forest” and a presumed need to avoid damage to a water supply even the State’s famously liberal Department of Ecology sees as unlikely, has led the pop-environmental community into promoting the conversion of about 8,700 acres of designated commercial forests into a “forest preserve” destined, for the most part, to never again see a harvest. 

The area to be set aside surrounds a local lake and was almost entirely incinerated in forest fires burning through the area a hundred years and more ago. 

The light tan represents areas of forest incinerated in the 1800s.  The X marks are the locations of the present day forest designated for commercial use but now under pressure for conversion.

So, now the question an environmentalist would always ask, a question that has received almost no discussion at all in the rush to judgment regarding the matter;   “Given recent events in Colorado, and elsewhere, should a community of 200,000 people, with almost immediate access to several hundred thousand acres of existing park land and millions of acres of park lands already available within an hour's drive, risk the health of its forests for the sake of yet one more park?”

I suspect the recently chastened people of Colorado would at least think about the answer to that question. 

Too many in Whatcom County answer simply, “Park good.  Cut trees bad.  It probably won’t burn anyway.”

LaVelle Winery and Pony Boy Gilbert - Here's How Real Environmentalism Works

This is what the old steel winery structure looks like after being reclad by Pony Boy Gilbert

The wine industry has a great trade publication called Vineyard And Winery Management.  Below is a story I wrote for the magazine a year or so ago.  The story is a great example of how environmentalism, stripped of all the politics and emotion, is really supposed to work.  If you're ever in Eugene, Oregon, visit LaVelle Vineyards.  They put the fine in fine wine and if you ever need something really special designed and built in a cost efficient and environmentally sensitive manner call Pony Boy.  He's amazing.

To the right, the new wood, sawn from logs that would usually be ground up into chips covers the old steel clad buildingvisible to the left.  Serious environmental benefits were achieved even as costs were reduced

When Doug LaVelle decided his winery and tasting room in Oregon’s Southern Willamette Valley needed an upgrade he worked with his builder and the owner of a local custom sawmill business to design a most unique approach to the project. The result, Doug comments, was entirely satisfactory in nearly every respect.   An old, steel clad “warehouse” looking structure housing the winery was transformed in appearance over the course of a few months into an elegant “Oregon Lodge” style attraction without significant disruption to winery operations and for a fraction the cost of more traditional approaches.  Equally important, Doug comments, he was able to act directly on the environmental ethic he espouses, achieving documentable environmental enhancements at almost every stage of the project. 

LaVelle Vineyards became the oldest bonded winery in the Southern Willamette Valley surrounding Eugene, Oregon when founder Doug Lavelle acquired, in 1994, the existing bonded winery license, 16 acres of vineyard, and a winery from the previous owners.   

Using knowledge gained over 30 years in the corporate world, Doug began to build the kind of wine business he'd always envisioned as a post-corporate career pursuit.  By 2008 LaVelle Vineyards’ physical property included not only the vineyard, the winery and the tasting room tucked into the quiet and secluded hills north of Eugene but also a terraced garden attraction with seasonal landscape displays and a wine bar and bistro known as the  “Club Room” at the historic 5^th Street Public Market in downtown Eugene.

Doug says he was especially pleased in 2008 when his son Matthew, who’d been acting as operations manager for the firm while learning wine making from a master craftsman stepped up and formally became the LaVelle Vineyards winemaker.

What LaVelle did not have in 2008 was a destination winery and tasting room appropriate to the image Doug had created for the business. The winery structure, in its fourth decade of service, hadn’t aged beautifully.  By 2008, the industrial pole building’s siding had become sun bleached and parts of it were beginning to corrode.  The LaVelle’s decided it was time to upgrade their facilities to match the quality and image of their product. 

An early step was to contact one of Doug's contractor friends, Robert Stolle of Eugene's Ordell Construction for a brainstorming sessions. After some research, the men decided to investigate options other than tearing down the existing structure and constructing an entirely new building. 

Tearing the building down and starting over presented problems.  The winery would face extended downtime and would need to operate out of an alternate location for the duration.   "From an environmental standpoint," Doug recounts, "removing the existing structure and putting up a new one would have created a good deal of waste.  Recycling the old building was clearly a more attractive option.” 

“Possible alternatives investigated,” Doug continues, “including removing the old steel from the building and replacing it with new metal siding that emulated a stucco look, or actually resurfacing the building with stucco.

 A fourth option presented itself with the introduction of Pony Boy Gilbert into the discussion. 

Pony Boy is proudly Native American and, Doug says with a smile, possesses a boundless enthusiasm, a dedication to practical environmentalism and a portable, thin-kerf sawmill. 

The solution Pony Boy put forward was to utilize his sawmill to mill some grand old incense cedar logs that would otherwise be chipped into pulp for a paper mill into boards usable in recladding the existing LaVelle winery.

Making lumber from logs otherwise destined to be underutilized as pulp chips

“The idea was immediately appealing,” Doug commented.  “I had been focused on creating a Tuscan look for the winery, an architectural theme that is commonly used in our business because it evokes an Old World ambiance.  But we don't live in Italy, we live in the Pacific Northwest, and I really preferred a solution that used local materials and fit comfortably into the Northwest landscape.  Pony's proposal got us thinking about an "Oregon Lodge" look constructed from cedar and stone."

Robert Stolle was familiar with Pony Boy’s expertise and thought the idea might have merit so, at Doug’s behest he took the concept and began to play with the possibilities, figuring out how accomplish the task of affixing lumber to the old building, and costing out the alternatives.

“We were surprised by the costs for the various options,” Doug said.  “Although I didn't keep all those numbers, using lumber milled by Long Tom Custom Sawmill (Pony Boy Gilbert’s company) was approximately 40% less than resurfacing with steel would have cost, and steel was roughly 30% less than the stucco option."

According to Robert Stolle, a 40% estimate for the lesser cost of lumber milled by Long Tom Sawmill vs. lumber purchased at a lumber yard is probably quite conservative, if difficult to quantify, because Pony Boy could mill lumber to exact specifications.  “Traditional supply channels typically provide only standard dimensions,” he comments.  “With Pony milling the wood on site we were able to get exactly the sizes we wanted including the thicker, rough cut boards the owner preferred.  We were able to obtain precisely milled specialty sizes without the extra cost of specialty milling, so both cost and waste were minimized.”

The decision was made to move ahead with the innovative solutions Robert Stolle, Doug LaVelle and Pony Boy had worked out between them and work began on upgrading the existing structure.  Ordell poured a new footing around the structure to support the weight of the wood.  The original metal building was left intact albeit attached to and surrounded by a new façade separated from the old building by an 8” space.  Logs were delivered and sawmilling began. 

The sawmill used by Long Tom Custom Sawmilling to mill logs to lumber is a portable, thin kerf sawmill (kerf is the thickness of the cut taken when a saw blade passes through a log).  First broadly marketed some twenty-five years ago by Wood-Mizer Products of Indianapolis, Indiana, the mills allow one and two person entrepreneurial firms to recover very high end lumber from trees that might otherwise be land-filled, under-utilized or simply left in the woods to rot and release the greenhouse gasses stored in them to the atmosphere.  

Today, estimates are some 20,000 plus businesses like Long Tom Custom Sawmilling provide service to builders, architects and individuals with access to those services in virtually every area of North America.

The LaVelle effort, according to Pony Boy Gilbert, is a case study in demonstrating that carefully considered environmental approaches to construction can also be profitable. 

“Doug LaVelle deserves huge credit for his commitment to environmental sensitivity,” Gilbert put forward.  “He put his money where his passion is by taking a chance on an unfamiliar approach based on my assurances this could not only result in the construction of a beautiful facility but also provide important environmental enhancements.”

According to Gilbert, “Those enhancements are real and documentable.”

“First,” Pony Boy said, “Wherever an old building can be effectively reused it should be.  It’s a terrible waste of resources, both natural and financial, to rip something apart just to replace it with something new when viable options are available.”

“Next,” Pony continued, the wood used was harvested within fifteen miles of where it was used so the emissions and other environmental impacts of transport were minimized.”

“We wanted to use Incense Cedar to demonstrate how environmental sensitivity can be practiced on a project like this,” Gilbert explained.  “ It’s a beautiful wood often piled up and sold for making chips as a byproduct of harvest.  The LaVelle building is, I believe, an outstanding example of how local and typically underutilized species can be put to their highest and best use.  Now, landowners throughout Central Oregon can visit the winery and see how resources on their own lands can be responsibly and sustainably utilized to optimize value and reduce waste.” 

Pony Boy points to the sawmill he used to mill lumber for the LaVelle Winery as providing  additional environmental enhancements.  The very thin cut taken by his Wood-Mizer means about 30% more lumber is recovered from a log than is typical in a conventional sawmill.  “That means the carbon contained in that additional thirty percent continued to be trapped in the wood for decades and it means thirty percent more trees are left standing and still scrubbing climate change gases from the atmosphere as a result of this mill,” he contended.  “A thinner blade also requires less energy to produce the lumber.  This is waste reduction, recycling and reuse at its best.”

“This has been a wonderful project for us,” Doug Lavelle said.  “We know that cedar will require more maintenance than steel but the opportunity to live our environmental ethic, achieve our goals regarding the aesthetics of the winery, and still be financial conservative is rewarding beyond what we thought possible when we conceived this project. How many times in business does a single solution represent the lowest cost, the highest quality, and the most environmentally responsible alternative?  Not many."