Actively Managing Ecosystems

By Damerfie @Adobe Stock

Correcting Human Meddling

The state of California is blessed with about 30,000 square miles of conifer forests, reports Edward Ring in American Greatness. A healthy ecosystem has protected the conifer forests through the millennia. For example, lightning strikes routinely ignited fires that thinned the underbrush as well as many of the forest’s smaller trees. This thinning process was essential to maintain a healthy ecosystem.

But times do change. Observe today’s transformation in California’s forests, where tree density is 5 to 10 times greater than historic levels. Couple that with environmental regulations meant to mimic the role that natural fires used to play, what Mr. Ring calls ‘suppressed human activities’ – logging, grazing, prescribed burns, mechanical thinning – and you end up with catastrophic tinderboxes.

As a result, California’s forests are tinderboxes, and the wildfires that aren’t immediately suppressed become catastrophic rather than quickly contained. Hence, the debate grows: do we permit activities that manage California’s forests or adopt a completely hands-off approach and trust ecosystems to eventually rebound?

Fueling the debate is the perpetual charge that climate change is driving most of the observed ecosystem dysfunctions. Continues Mr. Ring, … if climate change is indeed a significant problem, it ought to strengthen the argument for more aggressive ecosystem management:

• Manage the density of the forests
• Bring back logging and grazing
• Allow landowners to harvest timber
• Cut and burn off underbrush.

The ecological problems aren’t confined to California forests that have been permanently altered. There’s the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, a 1,100 square mile floodplain that was channelized, with levees surrounding dry land that subsided as the peat bogs dried up. As Mr. Ring explains, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta cannot be restored. Much of this land is now at or below sea level.

Again, here come the environmentalist regulations, which have stopped activities that could have helped maintain this altered ecosystem.

For decades after the levees were built, farmers regularly dredged the channels adjacent to their land. This not only helped prevent flooding, but the deeper channels created habitat friendly to the native salmon, helping them successfully migrate while avoiding the introduced species of bass predators that prefer warmer and shallower water.

Cost-Prohibitive Gauntlets

Dredging in the Delta has come to a complete halt. Too expensive? Not really. The culprit is the gauntlet of local, regional, state, and federal agencies, all staffed with environmentalist bureaucrats who demand far more analysis, reports, and permit fees than any private landowner can hope to afford.

In California, government is so paralyzed by bureaucracy, corruption, litigation, and environmentalist fanaticism that the very idea of building even more infrastructure to remedy environmental challenges is anathema. Meet manmade challenges, whether they concern forests, deltas, or shrinking inland lakes, with approaches that embrace intervention rather than avoid it as much as possible.

Edward Ring discusses other ecological disasters around the world: Central Asia, Russia, Africa, etc.

Big infrastructure can be part of an interventionist package. If it weren’t for big infrastructure, the megapolis called Los Angeles would not exist. Nor, for that matter, would most of the territory of the Netherlands, where hundreds of miles of dikes protect farms, cities, and millions of people from the North Sea.

In a world profoundly altered by human civilization, choosing to actively manage ecosystems can often be the best option. In many cases, dogmatically ruling out intervention including massive investments in new infrastructure can do more harm than good.