Captain Future's Log

Politics of the Future

Do people care about the future? We all live in the present, and so we value it. We think we can count on a certain number of tomorrows, so we make decisions based on that. But do we care about a future we may not live to see?

I think it's a question that is alive deep in many situations where it might not seem to be. Beyond politics of the present, isn't that part of the debate over the expansion of presidential power? The Bushites say it is necessary to protect lives in the present, meaning the very near future. At least some if not most of those who oppose this are thinking about the long-term damage done by precedent today, and weighing the present risks against the future (although there's also a real question that the Bushite expansions make anyone safer.)

It may even be part of a disagreement in today's news concerning science and money, politics and trees. A 29 year old graduate student at the Oregon State University's College of Forestry led a team of researchers in examining southwest Oregon forest areas devastated by wildfires in 2002. The area involved in the Biscuit wildfire has since been aggressively logged, under the working theory that such logging actualy helps the forest restore itself. But three years later, Daniel Donato and his team found that the opposite was true. As the AP reports, "Donato's team concluded logging slows forest recovery. They found that logging after the Biscuit fire destroyed seedlings and littered the ground with highly flammable tinder."

Their report was impressive enough that the prestiguous journal Science sent it around for peer review, and when it got good marks, announced it would be published in the journal. And that started a wilfire of a different order.

For Donato's scientific conclusion went directly against Bush administration policy, and advocacy for logging as an instrument of returning forests to health by several current and former highly placed professors in his own college.

His Dean, who had testified before Congress in favor of this logging remedy, led a group of nine OSU professors who teamed up with no less than the Bush administrations' National Forest Service to object to the study's publication. They questioned the science, and the peer review, and asked that Science not publish the article.

The editor of Science stood firm. "There was no failure of peer review in this case," he said, "I'm sorry they don't like the outcome, but I think they have a misplaced case here." He even referred to their attempt as censorship.

It might be at least partly an actual disagreement on scientific grounds, and at least partly on ego of senior professors who take umbrage at being contradicted, and established scientists who normally defend their theories to the death. And at least partly it's about politics and money, namely the Bush administration's willingness to back the science that makes money for their corporate pals and donors, when they are notably unwilling to admit to science that their corporate cronies feel might have the opposite effect.

That something fishy is going on concerning the forests is suggested by another of the objections the professors had to Donato's study. Despite their own conclusions about the efficacy of logging to restore forests, they maintained that no one could actually yet conclude that forests restore themselves best if you leave them alone. This conclusion was "premature," and (in the AP report's words)"the true test of efforts to restore forests will require decades."

So in addition to the values of present ego, corporate funding for your institution, possibly cushy contracts with logging corporations, the Bushite government and its associated think tanks, there's the question of whether you're willing to risk cutting down the forest in order to save it and decades later find out that you're wrong, or whether you do no harm and let the forest restore itself as it has for millenia, so the future has something it desperately needs, in all kinds of ways that have nothing to do with lumber. (Though some brush-burning etc. may enhance forest growth, this logging remedy is not the same.)

There's also the question of whether politics of the situation is wholly in the present, or if there is such a thing as politics of the future. I think there is and there has been before. It's so deep in our past that it is part of our nature---our human nature. And it's in recent enough history, in the fiftful and not always adequate urges of conservation, to be part of memory. Not just academic memory either.