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We know it by heart:  “I am the Lorax.  I speak for the trees.  I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues.”  The trees got their voice on this day, August 12, in 1971, when Dr. Seuss published The Lorax.

Dr. Seuss is one of the most beloved authors in 20^th Century American literature.  Kid’s literature, true, but I’d guess that every adult still thrills to read his anapestic tetrameter, see his phantasmagoric drawings and escape to his whimsical worlds.

Dr. Seuss was born as Theordor Geisel in 1904 in Springfield, Massachusetts (died 1991).  He was an industry cartoonist, and Standard Oil was his biggest client.  But he wanted to accomplish more significant work, writing serious books.  The only problem was that his Standard Oil contract forbade almost every kind of moonlighting.  There was one loophole—he could write for children.  And so he did, writing and drawing more than 60 books, many of which can be found in every child’s room in America.  He wasn’t immediately successful—his first book (And To Think I Saw It On Mulberry Street) was turned down by 26 publishers before hitting bookshelves in 1937.

Fast-forward to the start of the 1970s.  Seuss, now a publishing whirlwind, was living in La Jolla, California, and was increasingly disturbed by the commercialization of the town and its environment.  He decided to write a book about taking care of the world rather than just exploiting it.  But he was blocked, unable to grasp how to present his ideas.  A friend took him to Kenya for inspiration, and while watching a herd of elephants, inspiration struck.  Back at camp, he sat down and wrote the text for The Lorax on the back of a laundry slip—in 90 minutes!

When the book hit stores in 1971, it wasn’t very popular.  Readers and critics were disappointed that this story was serious, a downer compared to the zany tales they had come to expect.  Some politicians and forestry leaders objected to what they saw as an indictment of the logging industry.  After all, the Once-ler did cut down every last Truffula Tree to turn them into Thneeds.

But Dr. Seuss didn’t intend it that way.  The book was about conservation, not preservation.  Seuss didn’t object to logging, just to logging that was excessive and thoughtless.  He said, “The Lorax doesn’t say lumbering is immoral.  I live in a house made of wood and write books printed on paper.  It’s a book about going easy on what we’ve got.  It’s anti-pollution and anti-greed.”  He wanted to support the idea of sustainability—to live today so that others can live as they wish later.

As the environmental movement gained traction, so did The Lorax.  When Lady Bird Johnson, the U.S. First Lady, began her environmental work, she positioned The Lorax at the center of her campaign.  Anti-logging sentiment in the West also drove sales of the book, perhaps spurred by a rebuttal book by the logging industry called Truax.  Since then, The Lorax has sold more than one million copies and been adapted into a feature film and TV special.  It sits at 33 on the list of the 100 best picture books of all time as judged by school librarians (in 12^th place is another Seuss book, Green Eggs and Ham).

The Lorax is far from Dr. Seuss’ most popular book, however.  Green Eggs and Ham takes that honor, also, with about 8 million copies sold.  In all, Dr. Seuss’ books have sold about 70 million copies, making him the most popular children’s author of all time.

So three cheers for Dr. Seuss, whether he’s just making us smile or also making us think.  And let’s get out there and plant some real-life equivalent of Truffula Trees!

References:

Ayers, Kyle.  2012.  The Environmental Message Behind ‘The Lorax.’  CBS New York, April 9, 2012.  Available at:  http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2012/04/09/the-environmental-message-behind-the-lorax/.  Accessed June 14, 2018.

Barber, Bonnie.  2012.  Professor Donal Pease Shares the ‘Story Behind The Story’ of The Lorax.  Dartmouth News, February 29, 2012.  Available at:  https://news.dartmouth.edu/news/2012/02/professor-donald-pease-shares-story-behind-story-lorax.  Accessed June 14, 2018.

Bird, Elizabeth.  2012.  Top 100 Picture Books Poll Results.  School Library Journal.  Available at:  http://blogs.slj.com/afuse8production/2012/07/06/top-100-picture-books-poll-results/#_.  Accessed June 14, 2018.

Priceonomics.  2001.  The Statistical Dominance of Dr. Seuss.  Available at:  https://priceonomics.com/the-statistical-dominance-of-dr-seuss/.  Accessed June 14, 2018.

“Conservation means the greatest good to the greatest number for the longest time.”  The man who coined that sentence, adding “for the longest time” to the end of a long-used democratic sentiment, was Gifford Pinchot, the country’s first professional forester and the father of the profession.

Gifford Pinchot was born on August 11, 1865, in Connecticut (died 1946).  His family was wealthy, made rich by lumber manufacturing, real estate brokering and importing fancy French wallpaper for upper-class homes.  He received the best education money could buy, including an undergraduate degree from Yale and repeated European travel.  But he was always attracted more to the outdoors than he was to the schoolroom.  Eventually his father, seeking a future for his son that would build on his happiness in the woods, asked Pinchot, “How would you like to be a forester?”  He jumped at the chance.

No training existed in the U.S. at the time, so Pinchot journeyed to Nancy, France, to study at their National Forestry School.  He learned the principles of European forestry, including selective harvesting and silviculture—the planting and care of forest trees.  Cutting his schooling short so he could start practicing forestry, he returned home after one year and began work as a professional consulting forester—the first in the nation’s history.

His big break came in 1892 when George Vanderbilt hired Pinchot to manage the forests on his sprawling estate in Asheville, North Carolina.  Pinchot was given wide latitude, creating a forest management plan modeled in the European style but with changes unique to American trees, landscape and climate.  He specified all aspects of management—which trees to grow, how dense to plant them, when and how much to thin, what to expect in terms of growth and yield.   He hired a German silviculturist, Carl Schenck, to conduct the work directly.

His efforts led to broad recognition, and he was appointed to the Forest Commission of the National Academy of Sciences in 1886.  That commission recommended that the federal government create what we now call national forests, recognizing the need for more pro-active management of the public lands.  Two years later, President McKinley appointed Pinchot as the chief of the Division of Forestry, responsible for carrying out the commission’s recommendations.

Pinchot continued in this role when Teddy Roosevelt succeeded McKinley as president.  The partnership of Pinchot and Roosevelt is the stuff of legends—both vigorous outdoorsmen, both ambitious and tireless, both committed to the idea of conservation.  When Roosevelt created the US Forest Service in 1905, he appointed Pinchot its leader, the first Chief Forester of the United States.  He stayed in the position until 1910, when Taft succeeded Roosevelt.

Pinchot used his opportunity as chief forester to the fullest.  He expanded national forests from 32 to 149 and from 75 to 193 million acres.  He arranged for national forests to be transferred from the Department of Interior to his own agency in the Department of Agriculture.  He increased the agency’s professional staff by an order of magnitude, hiring virtually every graduate forester the country produced.  And virtually all of those were produced at Yale University, graduating from the School of Forestry that Pinchot founded with his brother in 1900.  In the same year, he helped found the Society of American Foresters, still the nation’s premier scientific and professional forestry organization.

Along the way, Pinchot also established the principles that drove conservation—of forests, wildlife, fisheries, soil and water—for most of the 20^th Century.  In his 1910 book, The Fight for Conservation, Pinchot established that conservation was about the wise use of resources.  Natural resources should not be wasted and overused, but neither should they be squandered by lack of use.  He wrote, “Conservation demands the welfare of this generation first, and afterward the welfare of generations to follow.”  This has come to be known as the “gospel of efficiency,” as controversial then as it is today.  John Muir, for example, split with Pinchot over the question of preserving at least some forests without using them, and Aldo Leopold re-framed Pinchot’s idea of “use” by adding preservation (or non-use) as a legitimate kind of “use” for some lands.

Pinchot also deserves great credit for moving the idea of conservation into the mainstream of political and philosophical thought in the United States.  He wrote about the importance of conservation in all parts of life:

“The principles of conservation thus described—development, preservation, the common good—have a general application which is growing rapidly wider.  The development of resources and the prevention of waste and loss, the protection of the public interest, by foresight, prudence, and the ordinary business and home-making virtues, all these apply to other things as well as to the natural resources.  There is, in fact, no interest of the people to which the principles of conservation do not apply.”

            Pinchot followed his career in national forestry matters by a career as a politician.  He helped Teddy Roosevelt form the Bull Moose Party and lobbied for the party’s progressive ideas.   He was twice elected governor of Pennsylvania.  As governor, he worked tirelessly for rural development and the common person.  He built 20,000 miles of rural roads in his state, known then and now as “Pinchot Roads.”  He greatly expanded Pennsylvania’s state park program, with the goal of having a state park accessible for every citizen for day-use.

Pinchot died in 1946, aged 81.  His home, Grey Towers, in eastern Pennsylvania, was donated to the US Forest Service as a museum and educational center.  A national forest in Washington was re-named for Pinchot.  The highest honor in the Society of American Foresters is called the Gifford Pinchot Medal, awarded bi-annually.  All fitting for the father of American forestry.

References:

Dennehy, Kevin.  First Forester:  The Enduring Conservation Legacy of Gifford Pinchot.  Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies.  Available at:  http://environment.yale.edu/news/article/first-forester-the-conservation-legacy-of-gifford-pinchot/.  Accessed June 13, 2018.

Encyclopedia Britannica.  Gifford Pinchot.  Available at:  https://www.britannica.com/biography/Gifford-Pinchot.  Accessed June 13, 2018.

Pinchot, Gifford.  1910.  The Fight for Conservation.  University of Washington Press, Seattle.  (facsimile printing 1967).  152 pages.

U.S. Department of Interior.  2017.  Gifford Pinchot:  A Legacy of Conservation.  Blog, 8/9/2017.  Available at:  https://www.doi.gov/blog/gifford-pinchot-legacy-conservation.  Accessed June 13, 2018.

Wilderness Connect.  Gifford Pinchot:  America’s First Forester.  Available at:  https://www.wilderness.net/nwps/Pinchot.  Accessed June 13, 2018.

Townsend’s Warbler, Townsend’s Solitaire, Townsend’s chipmunk, Townsend’s ground squirrel, Townsend’s mole.  Ever wonder who this Townsend fella was, who has all these animals named after him?  He is a largely forgotten early ornithologist and naturalist who died a much-too-early death.  Let’s restore his history a bit.

John Townsend was born in Philadelphia on August 10, 1809 (died 1851).  He was raised and educated as a Quaker, attending schools known for their scientific and natural history expertise.  He studied the birds around his home, becoming well known as a local naturalist, and became an acquaintance of John James Audubon. As was required of a birder at the time, he became an expert shot, willing and able to kill the specimens he wanted.   In 1833, he shot a small bird that was previously unknown and gave the specimen to Audubon, who named it after him (since then, the reality of it being a different species has been debunked).

A wealthy easterner with ambitions to enter the western fur trade mounted an expedition to the Pacific Northwest, inviting Townsend to join as a naturalist along with the much more famous botanist Thomas Nuttall.  Starting in 1834, they journeyed from St. Louis west, eventually traveling down the Snake and Columbia Rivers to Fort Vancouver.  Nuttall was a bit of absent-minded professor, roaming ahead of the caravan to find undisturbed plant specimens.  Townsend, an expert marksman, regularly rescued his senior mentor by shooting animals stalking him.

The flora and fauna entranced the team.  Townsend wrote, “None but a naturalist can appreciate a naturalist’s feelings—his delight amounting to ecstasy—when a specimen such as he has never before seen, meets his eye….”  They collected hundreds of specimens, but the rigors of the journey often got in the way.  Once a worker craving alcohol drank all the preserving alcohol from a vat of reptiles, leaving the specimens to rot.  On another occasion, Townsend shot a unique owl specimen, but before he could prepare the specimen a hungry worker had eaten it.

After reaching and exploring the Oregon coast, the team sailed to Hawaii to continue collecting.  He returned home in 1837, after a 3 ½ year expedition.  In all, Townsend collected about 30 species previously unknown to science.  Back in Philadelphia, he sold 93 specimens to Audubon for inclusion in his Birds of America.  Townsend’s specimens were the models for 74 of Audubon’s bird paintings, which irked Townsend because Audubon didn’t credit his contributions.

But others appreciated Townsend’s ornithological skills.  He was hired as a bird curator for the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences and for a precursor of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.  He was an expert taxidermist, as one colleague noted:  “Townsend can skin, stuff and sew up a bird, so as to make it look far superior to any I have ever seen, in five minutes.” However, Townsend’s taxidermy work for the government became his downfall.  His brother-in-law reported watching “John when employed by the government to mount specimens in Washington, bending over a big tray of arsenic, ….enveloped in a cloud of dust.”  Arsenic poisoning brought Townsend an early death in 1851, at the young age of 41.

Townsend wrote a popular memoir of his western journey, two books of natural history and many papers in scientific journals.  Although little known today, he was considered one of the leaders of “the second wave” of western exploration.  His collections provided a window into the biota of the West almost totally unknown during his life.   As we like to say, he is one of the giants upon whose shoulders later conservationists have stood.

References:

Jobanek, George A.  1999.  Introduction to “Narrative of a Journey across the Rocky Mountains to the Columbia River, but John Kirk Townsend.  Oregon State University Press.  Available at:  http://osupress.oregonstate.edu/book/narrative-of-journey-across-rocky-mountains-to-columbia-river/intro.  Accessed June 12, 2018.

Linda Hall Library.  2017.  Scientist of the Day – John Kirk Townsend.  Available at:  https://www.lindahall.org/john-kirk-townsend/.  Accessed June 12, 2018.

Oregon History Project.  John Kirk Townsend Biography.  Available at:  https://oregonhistoryproject.org/articles/biographies/john-kirk-townsend-biography/#.Wx_TvkgvxRY.  Accessed June 12, 2018.

Rose, Mary.  Tributaries:  A Confluence History Blog.  Available at:  http://www.confluenceproject.org/blog/1834-letter-describes-awful-magnificent-grandeur-at-the-mouth-of-the-columbia-river/.  Accessed June 12, 2018.

Williams, Sartor O. III.  2009.  John Kirk Townsend:  Collector of Audubon’s Western Birds and Mammals.  The Auk 126(2):468-469.  Available at:  http://www.bioone.org/doi/full/10.1525/auk.2009.4409.2.  Accessed June 12, 2018.

Perhaps “born” isn’t quite the correct verb.  Smokey “was conceived” on August 9, 1944, when the first poster bearing his imaged was commissioned.  Since then, Smokey Bear has become one of America’s best known and best loved images, filling out the trio of Mickey Mouse and Santa Claus.

Smokey was, from the beginning, a patriotic bear.  The impetus for Smokey came from worries during World War II.  After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Japanese submarines and other vessels appeared along the country’s Pacific Coast and once successfully fired shells into a coastal oil field, starting a fire adjacent to a national forest.  Forestry officials worried that enemy shelling of coastal forests could cause devastating fires.  And with most fire-fighters and other men away on war duty, those fires might readily spread out of control.

In an effort to raise the awareness of forest fires as a national-defense issue, The US Forest Service, Association of State Foresters and the War Advertising Council formed the Cooperative Forest Fire Prevention program.  The program began promoting forests as essential to winning the war—and preventing forest fires as a patriotic duty.  Slogans included “Forest Fires Aid the Enemy” and “Our Carelessness, Their Secret Weapon.”

They soon hit on another idea that proved to be a winner.  Walt Disney aired the film “Bambi” in 1942, including the blazing forest fire scene that scared us all as kids.  Disney allowed the program to use Bambi’s image on a fire-prevention poster for one year.  It proved so popular that the program knew it needed a permanent mascot for their cause.  On August 9, 1944, the program agreed that a bear should be their symbol.

They commissioned artist Albert Staehle to draw the poster.  Staehle, who lived from 1899 to 1974, was one of the best known advertising artists during the first half of the 20^th Century.  He was especially renowned for his animal subjects, including Elsie the Cow, Borden Dairy’s famous spokes-animal (remember the contented cows?).  Staehle’s initial rendition of Smokey appeared on October 10, pouring a bucket of water on a campfire.  The poster read, “Smokey says—Care will prevent 9 out of 10 forest fires!”

A star was born!  Smokey’s image became so popular that the federal government had to pass a law that removed Smokey from the public domain and trademarked it for commercial purposes (royalties that still come in are used for wildfire prevention).  Over the years, Smokey’s look evolved, from a bear cub to a realistic adult bear, complete with fearsome fangs and claws.  US Forest Service artist Rudy Wendelin took over Smokey’s image, eventually molding him into the human-like character we know today, complete with human hands and dressed in jeans and hat. Being Smokey’s “caretaker” became Wendelin’s full-time job for the remainder of his career with the Forest Service and on into retirement.

The message evolved, too.  In 1947, his slogan became, “Only you can prevent forest fires.  In 2001, his slogan changed again, to “Only you can prevent wildfires.”  The change emphasizes the danger of wild fires to human life and buildings.

It was inevitable, I suppose, that the imaginary Smokey would turn real one day.  During a forest fire in New Mexico in 1950, fire fighters rescued a small black bear cub from the fire.  The bear’s paws and rear legs were burned, but it recovered under care by the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish.  The story of the rescued cub “went viral.”  Soon, Smokey was transferred to the National Zoo in Washington, where the bear lived until its death in 1976.  Smokey is buried at the Smokey Bear Historical Park in Capitan, New Mexico.  No living specimen replaced the original.

But Smokey’s legacy certainly lives on.  He is still so popular that he has his own zip code (20252), along with his own Facebook (300,000 friends), Twitter (24,000 followers), Instagram, YouTube and Flickr accounts.

One final point.  There’s an old joke, “What is Smokey the Bear’s middle name?”  The corny answer is “the.”  Except it isn’t.  Smokey doesn’t have a middle name.  He is simply Smokey Bear, always has been and always will be.  However, a song about him, written in 1952, stuck  “the” in his name so the lyrics would match the song’s rhythm.  Remember that for your next trivia contest.

References:

American Art Archives.  Albert Staehle (1899-1974).  Available at:  https://www.americanartarchives.com/staehle.htm.  Accessed June 11, 2018.

CBS News.  2014.  Smokey Bear turns 70, and he’s burning up social media.  CBS News, August 8, 2014.  Available at:  https://www.cbsnews.com/news/smokey-bear-turns-70-and-hes-burning-up-social-media/.  Accessed June 11, 2018.

Pearson, Richard.  2000.  Rudolph Wendelin Dies at Age 90.  The Washington Post, September 3, 2000.  Available at:  https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/2000/09/03/rudolph-wendelin-dies-at-age-90/676783da-263d-41e4-a920-9782c69b4337/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.16b43e68c384.  Accessed June 11, 2018.

Smokeybear.com.  About the Campaign.  Available at:  https://smokeybear.com/en/smokeys-history/about-the-campaign.  Accessed June 11, 2018.

This is a day for dams—or against dams.  In the U.S., on August 8, 1937, the Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River began generating power.  The Bonneville Dam was the first on the river, part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, bringing jobs and electricity to the Pacific Northwest.  Dams generate huge benefits in terms of water availability, electricity and flood prevention.

But 38 years later, on August 8, 1975, another truth about dams proved itself in central China—dams are dangerous.  On that day, the Banqiao Reservoir Dam collapsed, devastating the people and landscape of Henan Province.

China has always been plagued by severe flooding, causing human tragedy year after year.  During the 1950s, the Chinese government began an ambitious program of dam building to control that flooding while also producing electricity and providing irrigation water for agriculture.  A principal target of dam building was the Yellow River watershed, the second longest river in China and central to the history and economy of the nation.  Hundreds of dams were built in the watershed.

Among them was the Banqiao Reservoir Dam on the Ru River, a tributary of the Yellow.  It was an earthen dam, nearly 400 feet high, impounding a large reservoir behind it.  The dam was built to withstand a 1000-year flood, one caused by half a meter of rain over a three-day period.  Over the years, the dam experienced some structural problems, but Soviet engineers reinforced the dam, calling it then an “iron dam,” incapable of failing.

But in August of 1975, Typhoon Nina settled over the area.  In three days, one meter of rain fell, twice the engineered capacity of the dam.  As the rains continued and the water rose behind the dam, workers heroically piled sand bags atop the dam.  Their efforts were unsuccessful, however, and the dam began to fail.  One worker cried, “Chu Jiaozi”—“The river dragon has come!”

Just after midnight on August 8, the dam collapsed.  A wall of water 30 feet high and 7 miles wide rushed downstream at 30 miles per hour.  An entire village, Daowencheng, below the dam was obliterated, killing nearly 9,600 residents.  In five hours, the entire reservoir drained.  Downstream dams could not contain the water and began failing.  More than 60 dams collapsed in all.

More than 25,000 people died directly from the flood, but as many as 220,000 died subsequently from contaminated water and famine associated with the dam failures.  Nearly 6 million buildings were destroyed, leaving 11 million people homeless or otherwise displaced.  The total loss of life and property makes the Banqiao Dam failure the most disastrous in history.

Dams produce great value in modern civilization, controlling floods, storing water for human use and irrigation, and producing electricity.  We can’t seem to live without them.  Although construction of large dams in the U.S. has ground to a halt, the developing world continues to build dams at a rapid rate.  China rebuilt the Banqiao Reservoir Dam soon after the tragedy, completing it in 1993.

As the largest human modifications to the landscape, however, storing massive quantities of water behind equally massive concrete or earthen walls, dams also inevitably create danger.  Dams fail regularly—one storm in North Carolina in 2016, Hurricane Matthew, produced 17 dam failures.  Eventually, as that anonymous dam worker foretold in 1975, the river dragon will come again.

References:

Encyclopedia Britannica.  Typhoon Nina-Banqiao dam failure.  Available at:  https://www.britannica.com/event/Typhoon-Nina-Banqiao-dam-failure.  Accessed June 8, 2018.

Environmental Justice Atlas.  Banqiao dam failure in 1975, Henan, China.  Available at:  https://ejatlas.org/conflict/baquio-dam-failure-henan-china.  Accessed June 8, 2018.

Watkins, Thayer.  The Catastrophic Dam Failures in China in August 1975.  San Jose State University, Department of Economics.  Available at:  http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/aug1975.htm.  Accessed June 8, 2018.

ngham, William F.  Bonneville Dam.  The Oregon Encyclopedia.  Available at:  https://oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/bonneville_dam/#.WxqnUEgvxRY.  Accessed June 8, 2018.

The idea that tragedy always results when common resources are exploited became dogma in the environmental world when Garrett Hardin published his essay, Tragedy of the Commons, in 1968.  Not so fast, said Elinor Ostrom—and she proved it.

Elinor Ostrom was born in Los Angeles on August 7, 1933 (died 2012).  She was the only child in a poor family, but her family lived just outside of Beverly Hills.  As a girl, she planted Victory gardens and knitted scarves for soldiers, a foreshadowing of her interest in community. Her mother arranged to get Elinor enrolled in the Beverly Hills High School, mixing with her privileged neighbors.  She said this was fortunate, partially because she assumed, like her classmates, that she would go to college, and partially because she was able to join the debate team, learning that every argument had two sides.

She did go to college, graduating from UCLA in three years and then added a Master’s degree in 1962 and a doctorate in 1965, all in political science.  Married two years earlier, she moved with her husband (and life-long research partner, Vincent Ostrom) to the University of Indiana, where he had landed a professorship.  Ostrom took a temporary teaching position, covering 7:30 AM classes that no one else would teach.  The university soon recognized what they had and offered her a regular appointment.  She stayed at Indiana University her entire career, rising to named professorships and to be departmental chair.

She was not satisfied that Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons” sufficiently described actual conditions in the world.  “Relying on metaphors as the foundation for policy advice,” she wrote, “can lead to results vastly different from those presumed to be likely.”  So she went into the field to see what was happening in resource-dependent communities, studying water use, fisheries, forestry, grazing and other resources.  Her work ranged across the globe, with studies on every continent except Antarctica.

Everywhere she looked, Ostrom found communities that had managed to exploit natural resources for generations, sometimes centuries, without destroying the resources and suffering the resultant hardships.  She found that these small communities developed sensible ways to share resources, without resorting to private ownership or top-down governmental control.  She described her understanding in her now-classic book, Governing the Commons, in 1990.  The key is communication within the community, so individuals can gather to discuss their personal and group interests and develop a strategy that works for them.  Decisions get made locally, group after group, which she called “polycentrism.” What works in one place might not work in another, and pretending that a simple theory—based on attractive but perhaps misleading parables of grazing on a commons—explained human behavior was an error.  “No panaceas,” she often said.

She built her research around the same sense of community.  With her husband, Ostrom developed the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University.  The name suited their style, to bring people from different backgrounds—disciplines, resources, nations—together to consult and learn.  The group met with their genial hosts and mentors in a cottage-like facility, informal and unregulated, mirroring the findings of their research.  They used empirical research to inform their ideas and tested those ideas with more field work.  The approach was essential, she wrote,

“If the research that one wants to pursue can all be done sitting in a library carrel somewhere in one’s home institution, then one does not need to develop the equivalent of a Workshop. However, if one is trying to understand and test theory in the field and in the experimental lab and to really pursue in-depth studies of diverse institutional arrangements around the world, then working with colleagues located in diverse settings at various stages of their careers is crucial for making scientific progress.”

            Both her research and approach caught on.  Including the human component into the understanding of natural resource management has become known as “social-ecological systems.”  Over the years, Ostrom grew to be an international leader in this emerging discipline, with more than 25 major awards and 12 honorary doctorates.  She was president of the American Political Science Association during 1996-1997, and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2001.

Her crowning accomplishment, of course, was her recognition as the Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences in 2009 (co-awarded to Ostrom and Oliver E. Williamson).  She was the first woman to win the Nobel, but more interestingly, the first non-economist to do so.  At the conclusion of her Nobel lecture, Ostrom summed up her vision:

“The most important lesson for public policy analysis derived from the intellectual journey I have outlined here is that humans have a more complex motivational structure and more capability to solve social dilemmas than posited in earlier rational-choice theory. Designing institutions to force (or nudge) entirely self-interested individuals to achieve better outcomes has been the major goal posited by policy analysts for governments to accomplish for much of the past half century. Extensive empirical research leads me to argue that instead, a core goal of public policy should be to facilitate the development of institutions that bring out the best in humans.”

References:

McCay, Bonnie J. and Joan Bennett.  2014.  Elinor Ostrom, 1933-2012.  National Academies of Science.  Available at:  http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/ostrom-elinor.pdf.  Accessed June 7, 2018.

Nolen, Jeannette L.  Elinor Ostrom, American political scientist.  Encyclopedia Britannica.  Available at:  https://www.britannica.com/biography/Elinor-Ostrom.  Accessed June 7, 2018.

Ostrom, Elinor.  2009.  Beyond markets and states:  Polycentric governance of complex economic systems.  Nobel Prize Lecture, December 9, 2009.  Available at:  https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/2009/ostrom_lecture.pdf.  Accessed June 7, 2018.

Ostrom , Elinor.  2009.  Elinor Ostrom – Biographical.  Nobel Prize Organization.  Available at:  https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/2009/ostrom-bio.html.  Accessed June 7, 2018.

The Economist.  2012.  Elinor Ostrom.  The Economist, Jun 30^th 2012.  Available at:  https://www.economist.com/node/21557717.  Accessed June 7, 2018.

The Avari River, in the northwestern Indian state of Rajasthan, had not flowed for 60 years.  When a young doctor arrived to help local communities, they told him what they needed wasn’t doctoring, but water.  Rajendra Singh listened, and today the Avari River flows again, thanks to the “Waterman of India.”

Rajendra Singh was born on August 6, 1959, in the Uttar Pradesh region of India, just east of Rajastan.  He was a fortunate child, born into a landowning class and also a class that had responsibility for the community around him.  As a student, he learned “how to respect communities, democratic values, the poorest of the poor.”

Those lessons stuck with him when, as a 28-year-old, he gave up a comfortable government job to work for the benefit of the poor.  “You have only one heart and one mind,” he said, “When you work in government service, you use neither.”  He traveled to a small village in Rajastan, called a “dark zone” by the Indian government because of its lack of water.

Singh learned about the ancient practice of building small dams, called johads, on rivers to store water during the rainy season.  He began to build johads on the Avari River, starting at the upper end of the river.  “It was hard work,” he said, “We labored for 10-14 hours a day.  When the rains came, our water bodies filled up.”  With community support, he kept building more dams, supplying needed water to village after village.  When they had built 375 johads, the river began to flow again.  By 1995, the Avari River became perennial again, flowing with water all year long.

Over the next 20 years, Singh and his colleagues kept working.  They have built more than 8600 johads and brought water back to 1000 villages throughout Rajastan.  As a result, forests have begun to re-generate and wildlife is returning.

The real success, Singh insists, is that they “managed to involve the community.  Alone, we can do nothing.”  He has developed community-based practices for making decisions and getting work done.  A River Parliament, composed of elders elected by riverside villages, makes decisions about managing the Avari River, including distribution of water among villages and users.

Singh is known as the “Waterman of India” for his work.  He was awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Award, Asia’s highest honor, in 2001 for his community-based approach to water development.  In 2015, he was awarded the Stockholm Water Prize, considered the Nobel Prize for water.  In accepting the award, Singh said:

“When we started our work, we were only looking at the drinking water crisis and how to solve that. Today our aim is higher. This is the 21st century. This is the century of exploitation, pollution and encroachment. To stop all this, to convert the war on water into peace, that is my life’s goal.”

Today, it seems, Singh vacillates between optimism and pessimism about the future of water.  He believes strongly in the success of local, small-scale efforts, but he holds grave concerns about large-scale programs.  Mining of groundwater, especially for crop irrigation, “is a sin.” Large dams, he believes, have created both more drought and flooding, rather than solving those problems:

 “In the 70 years since independence, more than 10 times more land is under drought and eight times more land is under flood. I have seen people in some of these villages being displaced three, four, eight times. This is not really development.  These dams are damned.”

Rajendra Singh, regardless of his emotions at any time, remains the ultimate “waterman.”  He says, “Water is my life, my happiness, my teacher.”  May we all feel the same.

References:

Ganguly, Amit.  2017.  Q&A:  “Waterman” Rajendra Singh loses hope as India runs out of groundwater.  Reuters, September 7, 2017.  Available at:  https://www.reuters.com/article/india-water-crisis/qa-waterman-rajendra-singh-loses-hope-as-india-runs-out-of-groundwater-idUSKCN1BI0QX.  Accessed June 6, 2018.

Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation. 2001.  Singh, Rajendra, Community Leadership, India, 2001.  Available at:  http://rmaward.asia/awardees/singh-rajendra/.  Accessed June 6, 2018.

Stockholm International Water Institute.  2015.  Rajendra Singh – The water man of India wins 2015 Stockholm Water Prize.  Available at:  http://www.siwi.org/prizes/stockholmwaterprize/laureates/2015-2/.  Accessed June 6, 2018.

Zachariah, Preeti.  2017.  “Water is my life, my happiness, my teacher.”  The Hindu, June 10, 2017.  Available at:  http://www.thehindu.com/society/water-is-my-life-my-happiness-my-teacher/article18921839.ece.  Accessed June 6, 2018.

One of Robert Frost’s most beloved poems speaks of being faced with choosing one of two roads and taking “the road less traveled.”  In the U.S. today, he might have trouble finding a road less traveled—or so it seems with congestion on our highways and byways.

The city of Cleveland faced that dilemma itself when it installed the first electric traffic signal in the U.S.  On August 5, 1914, the city turned the switch at the intersection of Euclid Avenue and East 105^th Street, and a new era of traffic management was born.  The first signal had lighted green signs that read “move” and lighted red signs that read “stop.”  The device was operated by a worker stationed in a nearby booth.  The inventor, James Hoge, received a patent for his “Municipal Traffic Control System,” which the Cleveland Automobile club described as “destined to revolutionize the handling of traffic in congested city streets….”  And it has.  Today the U.S. has an average of one traffic light for every ten miles of road!

In 1900, the road system in the U.S. was already well established, with about 2 million miles of roads crisscrossing the landscape. More than a century later, the road network has about doubled to 4 million miles.  Of course, most roads in 1900 were one or two lanes wide, and today some interstates have 15 lanes.  A more accurate portrayal of our road-system capacity, according to the National Academy of Sciences, is lane miles.  The U.S. has about 8.3 million of those, meaning that most roads (76% of all lane miles) are still two-lane rural highways.

One might think that the U.S. is virtually covered in roads.  Roads cover about 1.2% of the U.S. surface area (about 0.2 miles of road per square mile of land area), but, of course, the density differs greatly from New Jersey (the highest) to Alaska (the lowest).  However, the U.S. isn’t even close to having the world’s highest road densities, ranking 44^th among the world’s countries.  The average for the 28 countries of the European Union is 2.5 times denser than the U.S. and for Japan is 4.6 times denser than the U.S.

Regardless of how many roads we have, we love to drive on them.  In 2019, we drove motorized vehicles—cars, trucks, buses, RVs, motorcycles—3.3 trillion miles, or about 10,000 miles for every person, adult and child, in the U.S. (highway miles dropped in 2020 to 2.9 trillion, no doubt as the pandemic caused us to park our vehicles and stay home).  We also spent a lot of time sitting in traffic, yearning for the road less traveled.  In 2014, Americans idled in congested traffic for nearly 7 billion hours, at an estimated cost of $160 billion in lost time and wasted fuel.  During that waiting, we burned up over 3 billion gallons of fuel, producing the greenhouse gases and other pollutants for no good reason.

The environmental costs of our road system and the mileage we rack up on it are huge.  Building roads changes the environment, often fragmenting habitat for wildlife and changing the hydrology of streams.  Pollutants discharged from vehicles travel outward from the road surface itself, for some just a matter of a few feet, but for others hundreds of feet.  And the impacts vary according to the terrain and climate—elevation, slope, rainfall, soil type and others.

Fortunately, most expansion of the road system in the U.S. today is not by building new roads across undeveloped lands, but by expanding the lanes on existing roads.  Consequently, the environmental damage from road building should be lower in the future than in the past, and new guidelines and regulations, based on past experience and ongoing research, help reduce the impact even more.

For those of us who can’t abide sitting in traffic—what my friend Rick Knight calls “the need for speed”—the news isn’t very good.  From that first traffic signal in Cleveland in 1914, the U.S. now has over 300,000 traffic lights, and uncounted millions of stop signs.  If you find a road less traveled, count your blessings and don’t tell anyone!

References:

American Society of Civil Engineers.  2017.  Infrastructure Report Card—Roads.  Available at:  https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Roads-Final.pdf.  Accessed June 5, 2018.

a.  2017.  1^st electric traffic light system installed, August 5, 2014.  EDN Network, August 05, 2017.  Available at:  https://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/edn-moments/4419285/1st-electric-traffic-light-system-installed–August-5–1914.  Accessed June 5, 2018.

National Academy of Sciences.  2005.  Assessing and Managing the Ecological Impacts of Paved Roads.  Available at:  https://www.nap.edu/read/11535/chapter/1.  Accessed June 5, 2018.

U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics.  U.S. Vehicle Miles.  Available at: https://www.bts.gov/content/us-vehicle-miles.  Accessed August 3, 2022.

The reports had been coming in for some time—a pair of white giraffes, a female and cub, were roaming around the northeastern Kenyan countryside near the Ishaqbini Hirola Conservancy.  On August 2, 2017, wildlife rangers finally filmed the pair, confirming the existence of the rare animals.  Soon thereafter, the video went viral!

The pair are reticulated giraffes, found throughout southern and eastern Africa.  They are not albinos, but rather have a condition known as leucism, which prevents pigments from forming in skin tissue.  Pigments are formed in other tissues, however, so that the animals eyes, horns, hooves and other features are colored normally (albino animals normally have red eyes).  Leucism occurs in many vertebrates, including not only mammals, but also birds, fish and reptiles.

Although leucistic giraffes are rare, sightings have been reported as far back as 1912, with other reports sprinkled in the 1930s and 1950s.  In 2016, white giraffes were reported in Tarangire National Park in Tanzania.  Leucism is genetic, so the animals are white or only lightly colored from birth, but a condition of progressive loss of pigment has also recently been reported in Kenya.

Giraffes, whether white or not, are among the most popular of the great African mammalian fauna.  The giraffe is the tallest land animal on earth, able to graze at heights beyond the reach of other animals. The IUCN considers all giraffes to be of one species (Giraffa camelopardalis), but recognizes nine subspecies.  The species is considered “vulnerable” by IUCN, because numbers have been declining steadily over the past 30 years.  About 100,000 giraffes live in Africa, down from 150,000 in 1985.  The major cause of population decline is habitat loss, as forests are converted to farmland and as other land uses, including mining and urbanization, make habitat unsuitable.  The species is also impacted by armed conflicts and illegal hunting.

Aside from white giraffes, the area is most known as the remaining habitat for the hirola (Beatragus hunteri), an antelope endemic to southeastern Kenya and southwestern Somalia.  The species, also known as Hunter’s antelope, is considered “critically endangered” by IUCN, with the adult population numbering around 250 individuals.  The Hirola Conservation Programme began in 2005 to preserve the hirola and to improve the living conditions for local people that share the hirola’s habitat, recognizing “that conservation is a multi-stakeholder initiative and does not occur in isolation.”

Dr. Abdullahi Ali, founder and director of the Hirola Conservation Programme, said about the discovery of the leucistic giraffes, “Nature is always stunning and continue[s] to surprise humanity! These rare snow white giraffes shocked many locals including myself but these gave us renewed energy to protect and save our unique wildlife.”

Lest we think that we’ve got nature all figured out, think about these white giraffes—and think again!

References:

Hirola Conservation Programme.  1917.  Anoter White (Leucistic) Giraffe Sighting in the Hirola’s Range.  Available at:  http://www.hirolaconservation.org/index.php/component/k2/item/24-another-white-leucistic-giraffe-sighting-in-the-hirola-s-range.  Accessed June 4, 2018.

Joseph, Yonette.  2017.  Rare White Giraffes Cause a Stir in Kenya.  The New York Times, Sept. 16, 2017.  Available at:  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/16/world/africa/rare-white-giraffe-kenya.html.  Accessed June 4, 2018.

Muller, Zoe.  2016.  White giraffes:  The first record of vitiligo in a wild adult giraffe.  African Journal of Ecology 55(1):118-0123.  Accessed June 4, 2018.

August 3 is a special day in the West African nation of Niger.  It is Independence Day, when, in 1960, the country changed from being a French colony to a fully independent nation.  But it is also Arbor Day, the day of the year on which every Niger citizen is expected to plant a tree—to fight desertification.

The simultaneous celebration of independence and tree planting is no accident.  Niger is one of the poorest countries on earth, partly because of the invasion of desert into former crop and forestland.  Droughts have driven much desertification, but so have the practices of rural people.  Needing firewood, they often cut shrubs, trees and sprouts from stumps.  With each passing year, forests were farther away and desert was coming closer.  So, in 1975, the Niger government assigned Arbor Day—a day of national tree-planting—to the same day as their independence.  Trees, they reasoned, were an essential part of their future.  As the mayor of one community said, “We will not let the wind blow us away.”

The results have been spectacular, partly due to the work of Tony Rinaudo, an Australian agriculturist working for the non-profit group World Vision.  Rinaudo was working in Niger in 1983, depressed by the worsening conditions and the lack of progress to improve food supply.  As he looked across a mostly barren field, he detected an occasional sprout.  “In every direction there were no trees.  But then these shrubs caught my eye, and I suddenly realized that this wasn’t a shrub but a tree trying to regrow.”  He calls this the “underground forest,” stumps with living roots that are able to re-sprout and grow.  He and his colleagues created a program called Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR) that taught and encouraged farmers to protect these sprouts as future trees.  Since then, more than 200 million trees have returned on more than 12 million acres.

Aerial photographs from 1975 to today show an enormous expansion in the numbers and density of trees growing in Niger.  Chris Reij, from the World Resources Institute, who has worked in the region for decades, called this “probably the largest positive environmental transformation in the Sahel and perhaps in all of Africa.”  According to the FMNR website, along with the increase in trees and tree cover have come many benefits—ground-water levels are rising in wells; soil erosion is down and quality is up; more firewood is available, locally and sustainably; crop yields of grain are up by 500,000 tons; a hectare of farm land produces $56 more income per year; and 2.5 million people are living a higher quality of life.

References:

AnydayGuide.  Arbor Day in Niger.  Available at:  https://anydayguide.com/calendar/2073.  Accessed August 3, 2017.

DW Akademie.  2010.  Niger:  Fighting the battle against desertification.  Available at:  http://www.dw.com/en/niger-fighting-the-battle-against-desertification/a-4475725.  Accessed August 3, 2017.