Wednesday, October 9, 2019

Bureau of Land Management opens hundreds of thousands of acres of public land in California for oil and gas drilling.

This is part of a broader plan to strengthen energy independence.

That sounds big.

The BLM issued its final decision Friday affecting mostly the Central Valley and parts of the Central coast.  725,000 acres of public land had been off limits since 2013.

Critics call this a string of giveaways to the industry.

More details at Fox News. 




You can see how this will cause Trump-haters to go absolutely ballistic.

All that work sequestering federal land from development and one man tears it all down.

Finally our little children's encyclopedia makes sense of itself.

We had the best encyclopedia sets. Just perfect for our little minds at the time.

Give me a moment. I must now pray. "Dear Dad, thank you for that."

We really did use those things. We poured through them. As children, we read them together.  Each letter. Each book. We scanned every single page of them. We used them. We used them to pieces.

They were not an idle set such as you see in law libraries. Those books were used.

Those two main encyclopedia sets were crucial to our upbringing. They went with us everywhere. Right through to the end of the final household. I wouldn't doubt if one of my brothers or sisters still has them.

Before the Encyclopedia Britannica that we got when Barry and I were in junior high school, we had a children's set. These books were loaded with pictures, drawings and photographs on every single page. Nothing too difficult to scare off children. Perfect for holding our attention. Fantastically interesting to children.

Before the internet these encyclopedias were the fonts of accumulated knowledge from the big bang to John Kennedy's space race. (But not yet the moon landing.)

One of the most interesting pages was a 2-page cartoon map of the United States with little icons representing industries found in each state. A little sheep for Wyoming, a little cow for cattle states, a tiny picture of cheese, textiles, cotton, wheat, pine trees, corn, tobacco, a tiny picture of a black coal bin with wheels (that was the ugliest icon that stuck out), oil derricks, nuclear plants, dams, minerals, fish, shrimp, apples and so on.

Out of our interest in the material, we studied those pages. Thoroughly. It was fascinating seeing the industries in the states we had lived. The states where each of us was born. The things other states did. The states we'd like to see.

We learned where things came from.

Barry explained and we could see for ourselves that each state contributed some kind of different economic strength to the country and the wide variety of economic activity is what made our country so great and so independent. With a very good deal of overlap. And we were so good at exploiting natural resources that we had extra production to sell to the rest of the world.

And that made me feel great.

But that word exploit always bothered me.

It means use what's available. It doesn't necessarily mean take advantage of something or someone and leaving the target or the environment bereft. It means using. And using is not necessarily bad. It's possible to replenish the things that are used. Not everything, of course, but most of it.

So this is something we all understood from a very early age.

This simplified rather naïve national economic view carried forward through life. I thought nothing could change it. Nothing could assail it. Nothing could challenge it. Nothing could move it to other countries. Nothing could supersede it. Nothing could stop it.

No political conceit could halt it.

Then about high school conservation and environmental groups gained outsized political clout and turned the information in that encyclopedia near worthless.

Now to still hear politicians and Democrat political party attack the economic activities is distressing. Such as coal. And now oil and gas and fracking.

Fracking wasn't even invented at that time. Neither was solar.

Fisheries, forestry, mining and farming all attacked.

My precious little children's encyclopedia outdated. It's information made worthless.

You know, that stupid ass children's encyclopedia provided quite a lot of answers to Jeopardy! questions through the years, actually quite a lot of questions to Jeopardy! answers, that game being reversed.

And now with Trump as president, singularly, no other president could do this, we've come full circle cycling back to the basics, not moving backward through time because so much new information and so much new economic activity undreamed of then replaced the old activity, the books would be nearly worthless today, rather, forward while still returning to our strengths. That's conservation. How to exploit, but exploit wisely and with all other geopolitical things well-considered. Not conservation as if in a vacuum.

3 comments:

edutcher said...

Surely, someone will complain they can hear the land screaming at this rape of Gaia.

ricpic said...

Encyclopedia Brittanica may have been the prestige encyclopedia but it was dry as dust, a real turnoff to kids. I too had, was given, an encyclopedia full of wonderful almost mesmerizing illustrations. I'm ashamed to say I can't remember the name of that encyclopedia. There was one fantastic illustration comparing the fastest animals: cheetah out front followed by gazelle followed by ostrich. Thrilling to a kid.

MamaM said...

We had a 1957 set of red World Books with a blue band across the spine. And we used them for everything. I loved the feel of the pages. They were the arbitrator of arguments and the font of knowledge in our house. Reports were based on them. Worldbook also sold a set of Childcraft books designed specifically for children, but that was not for us. Our set was there to engage and support growing minds, with our parents using them mostly for verification.

When the SonsM were small I bought a used green and white set from the 70's for our shelf.
That set had lots more tranparencies but they mostly sat on the shelf unopened as the internet opened more doors than I could have been imagined back in the days when information was bound.

I mark Earth Day 1970 as the turning point for me, when the process of exploitation which previously seemed like a good and necessary thing was pointed out as something irresponsible people were doing.

The height of counterculture in the United States, 1970 brought the death of Jimi Hendrix, the last Beatles album, and Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” War raged in Vietnam and students nationwide overwhelmingly opposed it.

At the time, Americans were slurping leaded gas through massive V8 sedans. Industry belched out smoke and sludge with little fear of legal consequences or bad press. Air pollution was commonly accepted as the smell of prosperity. “Environment” was a word that appeared more often in spelling bees than on the evening news.

The idea for a national day to focus on the environment came to Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson, then a U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, after witnessing the ravages of the 1969 massive oil spill in Santa Barbara, California. Inspired by the student anti-war movement, he realized that if he could infuse that energy with an emerging public consciousness about air and water pollution, it would force environmental protection onto the national political agenda. Senator Nelson announced the idea for a “national teach-in on the environment” to the national media; persuaded Pete McCloskey, a conservation-minded Republican Congressman, to serve as his co-chair; and recruited Denis Hayes from Harvard as national coordinator. Hayes built a national staff of 85 to promote events across the land. April 22, falling between Spring Break and Final Exams, was selected as the date.