Home Off the Range
Today's Washington Post has good news about subsidized grazing on federal lands in the Northwest: there's momentum for buying out some ranchers who are ready to take their cattle off of the public range. (See a related post here.)
The National Public Lands Grazing Campaign, founded by Sightline friend and Oregon firebrand Andy Kerr, is clearing the brush for the buyout.
The article also neatly summarizes the problem:
"Last year the Bureau of Land Management took in nearly $12 million in grazing receipts, officials said, but it spent $50 million administering the program. Critics say the true cost is at least twice as high, noting that the figures do not include expenses such as range development and predator control."
Crime and Astonishment
No matter how hard we try, the crime problem just keeps getting worse and worse.
Well, that's what you might think if you get your impressions of crime from the "if it bleeds, it leads" TV news. But that impression is just wrong. In reality, crime rates (in the U.S. at least) are maintaining their 30-year lows.
The disjunction between actual crime trends (improving) and people's perceptions (worsening) has widened in the past several years -- possibly because 9/11 eroded people's feelings of security. In both 2002 and 2003, at least sixty percent of respondents to a Gallop Gallup Organization poll responded "yes" when asked if crime rates had increased over the past year. In both years, less than a quarter of respondents believed it had fallen. Actual rates of violent and property crimes declined in both years, and homicides held roughly steady.
In some ways, the belief that crime is worsening -- despite evidence to the contrary -- is a reversion to the historic norm. Crime rates fell by half from 1993 through 2003. But throughout the 1990s, a majority of poll respondents still thought that crime was increasing. It was only in 2000 and 2001 that the general public started to realize that crime rates were falling. Now, with crime basically at a standstill, people are inclined to believe that it's surging again.
To be fair, crime doesn't seem to be at the top of the public's agenda during this election cycle, at least in national races. The economy and international security loom larger on the public agenda. But the bigger point -- that the beliefs of the public are all too often in opposition to the facts -- is probably a real concern in just about every realm of public policy.
Iceless? Pineless?
Two climate things.
First, climate change is melting Washington's glaciers, as the Wenatchee World reports (The World requires subscription, but the piece is republished here.) The article notes:
"Nearly all of the state's 700 glaciers are receding rapidly, and others have disappeared in the past few decades."
(Note the throw-backish disclaimer late in the article: the Wenatchee World's editorial line dictates that the human role in climate change be termed an unproved theory, despite the declarations of the National Academy of Sciences and many others.)
Second, the global-warming-accelerated spread of bark beetles in British Columbia, which we posted about here, has worsened, according to the CBC. The province's chief beetle killer says that beetles could wipe out four-fifths of the province's full-grown pine by 2013. Of course, the announcement could be political: Victoria is using the beetle infestation as cover for a massive log-o-rama.
Some day soon, I hope, Cascadia's media will begin to frame each such story as part of the larger pattern of changes wrought by our overreliance on fossil fuels. Presented as isolated incidents they do not form a cohesive narrative that helps citizens to understand their world and act.
Disappearing glaciers and endangered pine forests--along with traffic deaths, air pollution, oil wars, and oil spills--are costs of burning fossil fuels. The people who burn the fuels ought to see those costs included in the sticker price.
