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I have to admit
to a pronounced level of skepticism when it comes to the certitude
of those who profess final, incontrovertible answers to issues
still up for debate. If anything is incontrovertible, it is
that very few “absolutes” have stood the acid
test of time, and that many “truths” of our forefathers
appear quaint if not downright ridiculous today. Every generation
gets to experience this wonderful sense of moral and intellectual
superiority, so it should be reassuring to know that our grandchildren’s
legacy is nearly certain to be a horselaugh at some of the
idiocies we know to be true.
This apparent
truth puts me in mind of two of the remarkably few memories
of my school days that have withstood the wash of time. Both
come from my very first morning in college when in successive
classes I was treated to what remain to this day sterling
icons of the malapropos.
My nine o’clock
Geology 101 class got off to a rip-roaring start with the
department dean—also the head of the US Geological Survey,
located 6 miles up the road—winding up his catalog of
earth-building processes with a snigger for the small body
of heretics who preached the theory of continental drift.
He laughed. We all laughed … right from that moment
(1954) until 1957 when deep ocean research undertaken as part
of the International Geophysical Year brought about The Unified
Theory of Plate Tectonics, a very simplified version of what
today is a highly diverse and increasingly contentious vision
of what’s happening beneath us.
Ten O’clock
Wisdom
Economics 101, taught once again by the department
dean—began with a snap overview of what the course was
and wasn’t about. “There are two kinds of goods
in the world,” he pronounced with that certainty reserved
for the deeply anointed, “free goods, and economic goods.”
Air, water, and dirt were the free goods to which he was referring
because they were not in that day’s thinking subject
to the laws of supply and demand.
Wow! In fact triple
wow! Even today I stand in awe of deep-seated moral certainty
that added tons of concrete to the pedestal on which he and
his scholarship stood. Would that I could make a statement
so cloaked in the mantle of infinite wisdom, but experience
has taught me that aside from a few bouts with gravity and
some painful sports consequences of F=MA, little in the way
of knowledge I acquired in childhood has made it untarnished
to my dotage.
You probably don’t
have to travel very far from home to see the serious impacts
our activities are having on all three of these freebies.
Because we are immersed in it, our impacts on air are the
most obvious (“Gee, how can you trust breathing something
you can’t see?”); nor do you have to be a fish
(or fisherman) to know that things are as bad—perhaps
worse—with our water resources. Which brings us to the
third leg of my professor’s non-economic universe …
soil.
How Are
We Doing in the Dirt World?
A. OK
B. Pretty well
C. A bit of dust maybe, but the big pieces
don’t go anywhere.
D. Umm. Maybe we could be doing a little
better.
Readers of our
sister publication Erosion
Control, which focuses on the subject of accelerated soil
loss resulting from human activity, might suggest that the
correct answer to the quiz lies further down the alphabet
… maybe H on average and Z where rainforest destruction
has been taken to an art form. Whatever your answer, if in
all sincerity it falls short of A, you know that there’s
serious work to be done.
It’s not
so much that most of us are unaware of the rules and regulations
in place for preventing soil loss or the fines and penalties
for ignoring them—nor would most of us knowingly take
part in or sanction actions destructive of the environment—but
there is incontrovertible (there’s that word again)
evidence in the degradation of our air and water resources
and accelerating soil loss that we’re waging a losing
war. Part of the problem is the absence of strict monitoring
and enforcement activities that allow shortcut practices to
appear economically sound, but the crucial factors for success
lie in the realms of knowledge and a commitment to effective
soil management practices.
Erosion
Control magazine is the go-to place for best management
approaches, techniques, and practices aimed at limiting our
destruction of fragile earth resources. Also, many of its
feature articles are designed to help you stay straight with
the increasing volume of regulations that have arisen to complicate
our lives over the past several years.
While its content
is international and multi-spectral (agriculture, construction,
recreation, etc.) a full half of its articles are relevant
to development and dirtmoving activities. All of its articles
since 1999 are available online at www.erosioncontrol.com,
so why not take a moment to check on the kinds of information
the magazine presents in every issue? While there why not
click on the “SUBSCRIBE” button and sign up for
a free subscription? That’s pretty sound economics for
a free good.
Send
John an Email
GEC
- March/April 2006
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