According to the old adage, "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer." But the real story is far more complicated.
Take a look, for example, at Gapminder.org, a site that looks at global economic and human development trends—and that does a fantastic job of helping people visualize complicated data. Their most recent take on global income distribution offers competing insights: material wealth has increased since 1970, but in the U.S. at least, so has income stratification.
In stark contrast to my post of yesterday about the federal government paying irrigators for their water, here’s a pay-for-water scheme that I wholeheartedly endorse: Montana’s innovative water-rights leasing program, covered last week by the Missoulian.
What’s the difference?
In the California case, the federal government signed a compensation agreement implying that it had no right to restrict water to water-rights holders. In Montana, the state government has simply made it legal for water-rights holders to lease their rights to certain other entities, such as the state or fishing groups.
The Montana program—which needs renewal from the state legislature in 2005—does not convert the water right itself into anything more proprietary than before, it simply makes the right (as limited a right as before) tradeable. It’s a subtle difference, but it makes all the difference.
We wrote briefly about the promise of tradeable water rights here.
The Bush Administration’s plan to put greater control of National Forests into the hands of local forest rangers is provoking cries of outrage from the environmental movement and Democrats, as reported in the New York Times, the Seattle Post Intelligencer, and the Bend Bulletin. I share the discontent but, unlike many of my mainstream environmental associates, I am attracted to one rather un-green reordering of public-lands governance. Just not this one.
One quarter of Cascadia is US government property, and most of that is National Forest, which makes the question of how National Forests are managed a huge issue for Cascadia’s future. The expected right-left tug of war is between development and conservation of these lands. And the form that tug of war takes is often a battle between local and national control. National Forests belong to all Americans, argues the environmental movement and the left, so they should be managed in accordance with the wishes of all Americans. National Forests are the homes of struggling rural communities, and those communities deserve a special role in managing the lands, argues the right.
The US Census Bureaureleased its population estimatesfor the year yesterday.
Highlights:
The population of Idaho, Oregon, and Washington increased by 132,000 in the twelve months ending July 1, 2004. That tally made the past year the second slowest growth year since 1987. (The year ending July 1, 2003 was the slowest, as you can see in the chart below. . . . Another thing you can see in the chart is that while the pace of growth has been erratic, it has not gone into the negative zone for even a single year in the past half century.)
The discouraging thing about invasive species generally , and microscopic ones such as P. ramorum (which causes sudden oak death) in particular, is that controlling them in any kind of elegant, systemic, fool-proof way is essentially impossible.
The dominant trends in the global economy-rising trade, travel, and migration-favor their spread. As throughout human history, when we move around, we bring other species with us. All we can do is inspect shipments of goods, scrub off invaders from the bottom of our boats, and otherwise take precautions.
So today’s New York Timesarticle, which covers new federal restrictions on transport and sales of nursery plants from Oregon, Washington, and California describes a situation that is, if sad, also predictable and inadequate.
British Columbia’s Fraser Basin Council just released its Sustainability Snapshot 2 (large pdf). The resulting report is a frustrating piece of work. It’s rich with information but fails to tell a clear story that makes sense of it all.
So, here-in two points-is my distillation.
1. There’s plenty of progress to be proud of!
2. But there are at least two glaring flaws in this made-in-Canada miracle: two facts that make the province look like a laggard not a leader, from a global and long-term view.
To me, the prescription implicit in the Fraser Basin Council’s description is this: make climate protection and biodiversity conservation the basin’s highest priorities.
I didn’t know this: the number of children under 5 in Washington State has remained virtually flat for the last 12 years. Just take a look at the graph to the right (drawn from official estimates by the state Office of Financial Management, here).
That’s surprising, given that the total population of the state has grown by more than a million over the same period—roughly a 20% increase.
Part of the explanantion is a slight decline in fertility rates (the number of children per woman) over the last decade, led by a steep drop in teen pregnancy. (More on that here.) But it seems that the bigger reason has been demographics: the baby boom generation is aging past its peak childbearing years while the much smaller "baby bust" generation born in the 1970s has moved into them.
I’d expect to see a rise in the number of kids—with an attendant increase in the burden on schools and the like—over the next decade or so, as the children of the baby boomers (the echo boom) begin to enter their most fertile years.
The Bush Administration agreed this week to compensate California farmers some $17 million for financial losses those farmers suffered when the federal government, in order to protect endangered species, denied them use of some water.
The agreement seems a relatively minor development in an arcane area of water law, but it merits the prominent coverage given it in the Los Angeles Times, Sacramento Bee, and Washington Post. The principle at stake is a big deal.
If the government takes your land-something clearly covered by strong property rights-it must compensate you. If the government takes your water, however, it needn’t compensate you. That’s because it’s not really your water. It’s the public’s water. You’ve simply been granted a permit to use some water and it’s conditional. You can use the water, if there is enough to go around, if you use it efficiently, and if doing so is beneficial for society. That’s the dominant legal tradition on water rights, well articulated by legal thinkers such as the University of Colorado School of Law’s Charles Wilkerson.
Oregon’s advisory panel on climate change has delivered its recommendations to the governor. Oregon Public Broadcasting summarizes the recommendations here. (Can anyone find the actual report online?)
Among the recommendations is a strong call for Oregon to adopt California’s clean-car standards—an idea we’ve been promoting (here, for example).
Sherry Devlin tells an inspiring tale in today’s Missoulian: the EPA has finalized its plans for removing the Milltown dam and cleaning a huge plug of contaminated sediment out of the Blackfoot and Clark Fork Rivers. This saga has been developing for most of a decade, led by citizen organizations and local government, and today’s announcement is a milestone.
One larger lesson from this Montana victory is that Cascadia has abundant economic opportunities from restoring rivers and contaminated sites: in today’s economy, polluted places are deadweight on productivity and income, as I wrote in Green-Collar Jobs.
A second is that the failure to prevent pollution-the lack of stewardship-is not a boon to the economy but a huge burden on it, even in the one-eyed accounting of dollars and cents. Had the miners who filled western Montana’s rivers with toxic-laden tailings taken fairly inexpensive precautions, future generations (in this case, us) would have been spared costs mounting into the tens of millions of dollars (plus the arguably larger nonmonetary losses to human health and quality of life). Cleaning up messes like this one typically costs hundreds of times as much as preventing the messes in the first place.
In fact, I’ve often wondered just how much Cascadia pays out each year to atone for the sins of its fathers by cleaning up the legacy of their carelessness.
