Opposite perspective time.

Dr. So and So sometimes is a local. A local who has hard data collected fairly regularly since ~1950 that shows that Chesapeake oyster/blue crab/whatever populations have been in steady decline due to a combination of over-fishing, and massive increases in nutrient levels due to runoff. And yet many water-men resist any sort of limits on catch and fishing methods tooth and nail.

You are probably right in some cases, but "locals" are nearly always the bloody problem. And when you leave them alone, without intervention, they tend to completely destroy whatever resources are near bye. Look at the coral reefs in Cuba for instance vs the protected reefs off the Florida keys.

I'm not saying the having a PhD makes you correct. There are tons of arrogant idiots out there and some of them are definitely wrong, but when the two sides of the argument are leave it alone vs don't leave it alone (and also maybe stop dumping so much chicken poop on your crops), I tend to think that leave it alone is the healthier option a good percentage of the time.

I made this post because I have seen this attitude before so many times, and it is so often combined with a willful ignorance of the situation. The government doesn't spend an obscene amount of money raising and releasing oysters so that "natives", who are often no more native than the people raising and studying the oysters, can scoop them out of protected areas, inhibit the process, and claim that nothing is wrong and they know the bay better than those arrogant scientists.

My story and your story aren't mutually exclusive. You are correct that often locals can be the problem. I don't want to give the impression that they are always right or always know better, but at the same time, I think it's worth acknowledging a certain amount of wisdom from them regarding certain subjects. I probably could have chosen my words to that effect more carefully. That's why I gave that particular example about the forest fire as a result of not listening to locals.

There has to be some middle ground between the two, some meeting place, (usually the best done with education programs for the locals), but most of the time, neither side in this debate is completely right or completely wrong. I don't know anything about oceans or bays so I'll just say I do see that type in the forest as well, the "nothing the scientists ever do is right" type, but that's not who I am defending or talking about in this case.

> usually the best done with education programs for the locals

Agreed, although that sort of outreach is surprisingly difficult because the people on both sides that you most want to interact with each other are usually the people least interested in doing so.

The point is still excellent though. People really hate being told what to do without being told why, or feeling like they had input in the process, so involving them is the best way to get people on board.

When we start letting anecdotal experiences override scientific knowledge and rational thinking, we are limited to more primitive modes of thought like group think or stereotypes. This includes even those with PhD's who often have a higher prestige of themselves due to said accomplishment, and may look down on those without. Education is key, I agree, and just cause someone has a PhD doesn't mean they should stop learning, or they are the end-all-be-all.

for example your idea on over-fishing. this over-fishing is generally done by the larger fishing companies. local fisheries have incentive to keep the population in check as they cannot just migrate to another fishing area. that means that over generations those locals will have learnt a lot about this very thing. usually bigger business is a bit more careless, as they generally have more options to go to if one is depleted.

That spiecies are declining due to human impact is a bit of a tough conclusion to draw and i'd like to see how specifically this is proven. Not to say that this doesn't happen, but people are often quick to judge eachother and look at human impact on things, all the while spieces have been going extinct and new ones have been rising up from long long before humans were around.

this study and data since 1950, most likely looks at the impact of fisheries on the area. no doubt. but did it look also at the time before fisheries to see what was happening tot the population then? Is there a good baseline made? I'm pretty sure they won't have the same data pre-fisheries and compare the two, but only look at the data they gathered while the fishing was already going on.

Don't take this as an attack on your opinion, i'm a bit skeptical on anything really, and don't disagree that humans ofcourse in areas have negative impact on nature due to their disregard of it. It jjust pains me to see a lot of small local businesses getting hurt because some studies point to them as a source of a problem while often these studies are fairly shallow. even 50 years of data has potential to be a 1-sided data collection, aimed at proving a specific point instead of trying to show data which might prove OR disprove it. (in a lot of these situations it's practically impossible to gather good baseline data to compare to, as human interactions have been present from before the data collection started, i am aware of that.)

When I was growing up in Oregon the biggest forestry controversy was a halt to logging in national forests to conserve habitat for the endangered Northern Spotted Owl. Outside of the Portland area, it seemed like most news outlets and people were against this intervention. I kind of went along with adult sentiment and thought that the federal government shouldn't destroy our state's logging jobs with their meddling.

As an adult, I have a completely different perspective. Loggers had been cutting down old-growth trees faster than they grow back for generations. If they'd been managing the forests sustainably all along nobody would have forced them to do things differently. Blaming environmentalists and government for the end of old growth logging is like blaming the gas gauge for your empty fuel tank. The underlying resource was depleted and the logging community plan was, apparently, to ensure it ran out completely before changing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_spotted_owl#Controver...

Nobody talking about old growth logging... so many strawmen attacks today.

I'm not trying to tell you what happened where you grew up. I'm describing what happened where I grew up. We're both just sharing anecdotes.

The PhDs and environmentalists forced changes on timber communities in the state where I grew up because locals weren't good stewards of the national forests. If the PhDs listened to the timber town Oregon natives, the remaining old growth forest would stay open to logging too, the owls would have lost the last undisturbed habitat, and the post-timber economic cratering would have only been delayed for a bit.

People who have grown up near extractive industries may have a lot of experience of how those industries work that PhDs lack. But people who grow up around extractive industries may also be poor judges of the sustainability of those industries. Anything you grow up with seems "normal" and it's comforting to believe that there's a good, familiar kind of job waiting for you when you grow up. Locals may see things very unclearly when clear vision would reveal big challenges and changes ahead.

Ok, sorry for the defensiveness, I got into that mode due to all the attacks. You make fair points.

your points are fine. people don't understand we live in a dynamic ecosystem. if we have been active in the forest doing things for a long time, it will get used to this ,and the whole ecosystem of the forest will adjust to it. like you said, if it stops, as your example, an infestation of some insect or plant which is generally kept in check by the human interactions might ruin everything.

humans are natural, and their interactions generally are also natural, and nature can deal with nature just fine...

on another note: people seem to think they dominate this earth all over, but most of the earth is uninhabited and a lot is still unexplored. if you want to 'save' something, go after big corporations who do things on 'unnaturally' large scale. not forestry services and loggers who are doing it small scale. they are the people who know things and should be listened to, their experience is invaluable, more important than some phd paper or science project from some dweeb who has hardly seen a naturally grown tree in their life.

completely agree with your points thanks, that happens only very rarely on here! :D

>Then after the forest service or BLM phds have fucked things up

>The PhD environmentalists came to dominate the forest service

What forest exactly? Because this reads like a really bad forwarded email.

Most BLM "PhD's" are from the area they're protecting. They don't shift them around all over the country. Like, I'm not even sure what lead you to think that.

Your arrogance is not as good as someone else's knowledge. And that's all your post really gets at. "I've lived here my entire life, so clearly without devoting any actual effort to studying the ecosystem I know what's best because hey, the trees look pretty good to me!"

I've worked with the BLM many times out West and your characterization does not comport with my experience. For example, during my many interactions with BLM in rural Nevada, an astonishing number of the local employees were New England natives that had recently graduated from environmental science programs. True locals were rare. (It was strange -- even the old timers that seemed like natives originally moved there from New England and just never left. Why always New England?)

BLM long-timers in the region were easy to work with and understood the nuances of the ecosystem well. Most of the conflict was when some recently transferred idealist with no experience in the high desert ecosystem decided that they needed to dramatically change how the ecosystem was managed, mostly just to show that there was a new sheriff in town, without understanding why things were managed the way they were. Normal human condition stuff. And yes, this occasionally produced real ecosystem destruction because they didn't understand the ecosystem interdependencies and weren't interested in listening. This always sorted itself out over time, they either quickly recognized that they didn't understand the ecosystem nearly as well as they thought they did and started listening to locals or they transferred back to the east coast, but there was always a steady stream of fresh young graduates cycling through to create new drama.

Can you provide a concrete example of this happening? Location and timelines would suffice.

> Most BLM "PhD's" are from the area they're protecting.

Citation needed. In my experience this has not been the case, but I was on national forest land, not BLM land, so there may be a difference in management practices.

> "I've lived here my entire life, so clearly without devoting any actual effort to studying the ecosystem I know what's best because hey, the trees look pretty good to me!"

That's not at all what my post said, you are attacking a strawman.

BLM -- Bureau of Land Management?

Correct.

>Citation needed.

Where are your citations for anything you've said?

Cattle are good for forests? I'm sorry but you're going to have to backup that statement.

I can't speak for what the OP meant, but at least out West cattle fill a critical role in the wilderness ecosystem vacated by bison. If you remove the cattle, you would need to find a suitable replacement with similar grazing patterns.

As a well known example, pronghorn antelope benefit significantly from coexisting with cattle/bison populations, due to reduced predation and increased food supply (they have complementary feeding patterns). Grazers create ideal habitat for pronghorn, so pronghorn populations tend to track grazer populations. These days, that is cattle.

I am talking about out west. I hadn't thought of the bison angle, but thats a good point. (I'm a geek, not a rancher, so my knowledge on these things is anecdotal from listening to the old timers)

I thought we were talking about forests, not grasslands.

One of the primary benefits is that cattle help clear underbrush, which therfor produces more productive stands of timber. If kept in one area too long though they will begine to damage trees, so proper rotation schedules should be followed. Split hooved animals also aerate soil which helps with natural seed planting and growth. There is an entire focus on the use of ranching and forestry together with lots of science behind it, it used to be called silvopasture, but is now referred to as agroforestry.

Of course they can be destructive when not managed properly. The main cause of this correlation in most peoples minds imho is the fact that in the Amazon, such as Brazil, cattle ranchers were causing deforestation simply to create pastures. That is obviously wrong, but its not what happens in the US.

Do you have any references for this? I've honestly never heard of cows or cow-like grazing animals living in forests. I've only ever heard of them in grasslands.

To your second point, native biodiversity is definitely destroyed to graze cattle, that happens in the US and everywhere in the world.

They can be with proper handling and rotation. They are also vital for grasslands, not just forests. However, industrial raised beef is not good for forests, it's very very bad.

>One of the best examples I can give, though I have many, is this: my grandfather was a logger and firefighter in this forest in the 70s. During my lifetime though, the PhD environmentalists came to dominate the forest service, and as logging waned they stopped listening to the old timers about how to take care of the forest. My grandfather would try to tell them they needed to let loggers thin the forest out, and to do more control burns and let them burn longer.

This is just flat out false, anti-science disinformation. Fire suppression as a policy started in the 1930s and actually reverted in the 60's and 70's.

>The first national fire policy came after several years of severe fires between 1910 and 1935. In the context of the ecological theory of the time, fire exclusion was believed to promote ecological stability. In addition, fire exclusion could also reduce commodity damages and economic losses. In 1935, the USDA Forest Service instituted the “10 AM Policy,” wherein the objective was to prevent all human-caused fires and contain any fire that started by 10 a.m. the following day. By the 1960s, fire management costs were increasing exponentially. The 1964 Wilderness Act, Tall Timbers Research Conferences, and Southern Forest Fire Lab research demonstrated the positive benefits derived from natural and prescribed fire. As a result, national fire policy began to evolve to address both the economic and ecological benefits of not aggressively controlling, and even using, fire. In February 1967, the USDA Forest Service permitted leeway for early- and late-season fires. In 1968, the National Park Service changed its policy to recognize the natural role of fire, allow natural ignitions to run their course under prescribed conditions, and use prescribed fires to meet management objectives. In 1971, the USDA Forest Service 10-Acre Policy was added, which set a pre-suppression objective of containing all fires within 10 acres. In 1977 a new fire policy was selected by the USDA Forest Service that replaced both the 10 AM and 10-Acre policies. The new policy encouraged a pluralistic approach — fire by prescription. Even for suppression, once initial attack failed, alternatives to full suppression were to be considered. Fire suppression became fire management.The 1994 fire season with its 34 fatalities (14 at South Canyon, Colorado) precipitated the 1995 Federal Wildland Fire Management Policy & Program Review (1995 Report). This review again affirmed the positive benefits of fire. It recognized that fire was part of a larger problem, one of several symptoms of natural ecosystems becoming increasingly unstable due to altered ecological regimes. It talked about the needs for landscape-level resource management, the integration of fire into land management planning and implementation, and the involvement of all affected landowners and stakeholders.[0]

[0]https://web.archive.org/web/20070810191055/http://www.nifc.g...

> This is just flat out false, anti-science disinformation. Fire suppression as a policy started in the 1930s and actually reverted in the 60's and 70's.

No it's not. I didn't say fire suppression as a policy started then. I said they stopped listening to locals for advice about, primarily, the control burns, and the needs for forest thinning. You are attacking an argument I never made. Strawman fallacy.

But they did allow controlled burns, thats what his link says. So you created a strawman in the scientists.

The 1964 Wilderness Act, Tall Timbers Research Conferences, and Southern Forest Fire Lab research demonstrated the positive benefits derived from natural and prescribed fire. As a result, national fire policy began to evolve to address both the economic and ecological benefits of not aggressively controlling, and even using, fire. In February 1967, the USDA Forest Service permitted leeway for early- and late-season fires. In 1968, the National Park Service changed its policy to recognize the natural role of fire, allow natural ignitions to run their course under prescribed conditions, and use prescribed fires to meet management objectives.

I never said they didn't allow control burns at all either. They were stopping them too soon, doing them too little, etc. Which is why I said they stopped listening to locals for input on those policies, not that they stopped them completely. So no, I did no such thing, and in fact, it is you who created the strawman. That seems to be the theme of the day today, because I'm starting to sound like a broken record.

Your comment above mine says this

" I said they stopped listening to locals for advice about, primarily, the control burns, and the needs for forest thinning."

It doesnt say the need for MORE forest thining. Its says needs for forest thinning, which implies it wasnt happening