Sanity has not perished from the earth, or even from the United States Supreme Court. Yes, it's an endangered species, but it shows up every once in a while. The big questions: can it survive, can it regrow, can it thrive? One sighting of sanity occurred today when SCOTUS ruled, unanimously, that a piece of land in Mississippi that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had designated "critical habitat" for the endangered "dusky gopher frog" was no such thing. "Why?" you might ask. Because … [Read more...]
What Is Man, that We Are Mindful of Him?
The Associated Press's report today on the continuing volcano eruption on Kilauea, the main island of Hawaii, which has destroyed hundreds of homes, included the sentence, “Those who live or vacation in the area were mourning the loss of popular tide-pools where kids enjoyed swimming," which got me thinking: If, as they do, natural processes routinely replace one habitat with another, why is it, as so many environmentalists think, wrong for humans to do so? Is it because humans aren’t … [Read more...]
Time to Replace the Antiquities Act?
Yesterday President Donald Trump announced 2 million acres of reductions in the size of two tracts of land---Bears Ears National Monument and Grand Staircase-Escalante, set aside by President Obama as national monuments under the 111-year-old Antiquities Act. Predictably, Green lobbyists are up in arms. Ordinary citizens---not so much. Conservatives are celebrating, particularly because Trump's action is a move back toward federalism. As Shawn Regan writes in National Review, the act "allows … [Read more...]
Why do Ranchers Grouse about Federal Regulations to Protect Sage Grouse?
One of the basic principles of environmental stewardship is that the people closest to a problem are likely to understand it best. Yes, there might be exceptions when experts from outside can come to understand it better, but what really happens in those instances is that the outsiders get up close. If they don't, they won't. A great illustration of this is the unintended consequences of federal regulations meant to protect sage grouse, an allegedly endangered species in some of the American … [Read more...]
Did We Run Out of Planet Last Week?
Today, 2nd August, we have collectively consumed all of the planet's renewable resources. So said Nicolas Hulot, France's Minister of State for Ecological Transition, in a YouTube video published August 2 by Transition ecologique et solidaire. Sometimes people we assume are intelligent say things that are so blindingly obviously stupid we can't persuade ourselves to treat them that way, so we think, "Maybe I'm the blindingly obviously stupid one," and we dig hard to try to figure out the … [Read more...]
Does the Bible Require Common Ownership of Land?
Does the Bible validate private property in land, or does it require that land be communally owned? With Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, a self-professed socialist, doing surprisingly well in the Democratic Presidential primary campaign, such thoughts become increasingly common. Someone recently wrote: It seems to me that a theology that takes Creation as evidence of a Creator ... would recoil at privatizing Creation as a private income-generating asset. The way I come at environmental … [Read more...]
The Haunt of Jackals
Various passages of the Bible set forth the complete elimination of human habitation in a land as the epitome of God’s judgment. I have long found it remarkable that much of the environmental movement sees as ideal what Scripture depicts as hideous. One place that does so is Isaiah 34, in which God through the Prophet Isaiah foretells, in sometimes apocalyptic poetic language, His judgment on Edom and the other pagan nations that oppressed Israel and Judah: 1“Draw near, O nations, to hear, and … [Read more...]
One Small Step toward Reining in the EPA
A Cincinnati-based federal court recently put a hold on the federal EPA's controversial "Waters of the United States" rule that would have put farm ponds, drainage ditches, and similar waters, by no means navigable, under its rule, constituting a huge expansion of EPA authority at the expense of states' sovereignty and property owners' rights. As Larry Bell writes, Applying EPA’s interpretation, the agency defines waters of the United States so broadly that they could regulate virtually any wet … [Read more...]
Obama in Alaska: He Didn’t Let Kivalina’s Crisis Go to Waste
The Arctic, like the rest of the world, experiences natural cycles, and some of them can be pretty radical. While most of the world enjoys a pretty stable 24-hour cycle of sunrise and sunset, with the sun visible roughly half of each day, a little longer in summer, a little shorter in winter, the Arctic (like the Antarctic) goes from 24-hour sunlight in mid-summer to 24-hour darkness in mid-winter. Long-term geologic records indicate that it also experiences larger swings from warmer to colder … [Read more...]
Extra! Extra! Missing AGW Intensifies California Drought!
The Old Gray Lady's (aka New York Times) perennial climate alarmist reporter Justin Gillis eagerly reported a new paper, “Contribution of anthropogenic warming to California drought during 2012-2014,” published in Geophysical Research Letters, claiming that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) might have intensified the current California drought by 15 to 20 percent. Alas, nasty facts get in the way, like these: The drought started in 2012, but there's been no statistically significant global … [Read more...]
