<< Back 12/4/02 Naturalist's Corner By Don Hendershot I was headed to the office around 6:30 Sunday morning to get some writing done in the quiet early morning hours. I had just left my soon-to-be 1-year-old daughter, who, much to Mom’s chagrin, was ready to start another day. It’s not too bad, though, because Izzy always greets the day with coos, gurgles, giggles and smiles. I hit the four-lane to town and there in the southeastern sky was a sliver of crescent moon and just below it, Venus, sparkling like a gem underwater, radiating cool blue light across the December first horizon. The mountains loomed dark in the background, sporting the rosy halo of dawn. The column that had been fermenting behind the frontal lobes for the past few days was a short discourse on the present administration’s environmental perspective as evidenced by actions like the rollback of the “new source review,” a tool devised to bring old coal-fired utility plants into compliance with current EPA standards. Or, perhaps, the billion dollar cut in discretionary spending for the environment and natural resources. There is little doubt that industry is flexing its muscle in this administration. (To see how the energy industry virtually wrote its own ticket under Cheney’s energy task force visit the Natural Resources Defense Council website at www.nrdc.org.) But as I looked at my pile of notes and newspaper clippings, the dawn sky and Izzy’s giggles kept creeping back into my mind. I thought I must be missing something. Surely these people advocating drilling for oil in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge or Padre Island National Seashore and endorsing the roll back of the new source review — surely these people have seen Venus swinging under the crescent moon on a cold autumn morning. And surely these people have seen the brown haze that swirls around cities or that descends upon the Great Smoky Mountains National Park on a hot August afternoon. And surely these people have listened to the giggles of their own children and dreamed of the dawn when they would see Venus for the first time. Certainly, I am not the only one who wants my child and her child to walk through 200-year-old forests and paddle clean rivers and swim in clean lakes. I think anyone would want this for his or her children. Then I look at my notes again and see the name Allan Fitzsimmons. Fitzsimmons is the Bush administration’s choice to head the new Healthy Forests Initiative. The HFI is the president’s plan to save our forests from catastrophic wildfires by having timber companies thin the fuel load by removing small diameter trees and brush, and, oh yeah, since they’re already in there they might as well cut enough of those large, fire resistant trees to pay for their troubles. Fitzsimmons is a Ph.D. in geography. He has a B.S. in math. His main claim to environmental fame appears to be his idea that ecosystems don’t exist. According to Fitzsimmons, ecosystems are theoretical concepts: “They do not breathe, emerge from wombs, or spring from seeds. They are not real, organized entities consciously seeking to perpetuate themselves against internal or external threats to their existence.” He has a point, you know. Ecosystems and ecology are theoretical concepts. Like math and geography, they are intellectual tools developed to help us understand, qualify and quantify the actual world we live in. But Fitzsimmons apparently knows something about the intertwining of nature and has a plan for the management of natural resources: “...public recreational benefit is the principal reason for conserving natural features,” he wrote in a memo while working as an aide to the Assistant Secretary of the Interior. And Fitzsimmons has a heads up on biodiversity also. He notes that 1,201 species are on the U.S. Fish and Wildlife’s endangered and threatened list. He writes: “Conversely, at least 4,500 non-indigenous species have established free-living populations in the United States over the past few hundred years, so that on balance, this part of the world has seen an increase in biological diversity.” There you have it. We may have lost the American chestnut, but we gained chestnut blight. We lost the passenger pigeon, but so what. We gained the balsam woolly adelgid and the hemlock adelgid, a two ’fer. So I think of Venus and I think of Izzy. And I think I must be missing something, and I think I need a cup of coffee. (Don Hendershot can be reached at don@smokymountainnews.com)