Oregon has some of the nation’s best land-use planning laws. For 30 years, each city or county has been required to plan the usage of its lands lands in a way that meets 19 goals including things like housing and economic development along with preservation of forests, farmlands, and water resources. As a result, Oregon has largely won the battle against sprawl. Suburbs are kept in check by urban growth boundaries which keep development out of rural areas. Farmland is protected from development in exclusive farm zones. The planning laws have helped Oregon to limit suburban sprawl and its attendant problems – traffic, pollution, loss of natural…

→ Continue Reading

On the prophetic side… Last week I posted on trade-offs in environmental protection. This week in Science there’s a nice article (subscription required) illustrating my point: Farming can harm biodiversity. You have to clear away the native vegetation; chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides can pollute the environment; and irrigation affects waterways. But there’s more than one way to farm. High-intensity farming maximizes yields through high input of chemicals and minimizing areas left in native vegetation. “Wildlife-friendly” farming, in contrast, involves leaving some of the land as natural vegetation and reduced usage of chemicals. Yields are lower, but more native plants and animals can be…

→ Continue Reading

Once upon a time environmental issues were simple. You were either for or against clearcutting. For or against wilderness preservation. For or against nuclear power. For or against DDT. The options were straightforward and dichotomous. I think the clarity of those ideas explains a lot of the environmental movement’s success during its heyday in the 1960’s and 1970’s. The issues were simple, and the practical and moral virtues of each side were easy to distinguish. Now, though, the landscape of environmental choices is growing foggy, and the issues are anything but clear. Nuclear power avoids CO2 emissions but creates radioactive waste. Wind turbines…

→ Continue Reading

It’s easy to be pessimistic about the environment. Just look around. I’m sure almost everyone who cares about nature has seem someplace special to them go under pavement or at the very least watched the cancer-like growth of urban sprawl. Fifty years ago Aldo Leopold wrote, “one of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.” It’s truer now than ever. In the face of overwhelming evidence, anyone would be justified in being pessimistic about the state of the world. Hell, despondence would be a pretty reasonable response. So for a long…

→ Continue Reading