Ideoblog

The Nature Conservancy: a trip to Peoria

When you’re an academic you get summer vacations, and you can do all kinds of cool things, like go to Peoria.

Peoria?  Yeah, on the Illinois River, where we stayed in the Mark Twain Hotel.  I like the slogan, based on a quote from Mark Twain:

It is irksome to me to behave myself.  I had rather call on people who know me and will kindly leave me entirely unrestrained, and simply employ themselves in looking out for the spoons.

Well, they did in fact look after the spoons. But the real reason we were there is to see some projects of The Nature Conservancy, whose work I’ve supported for several years. 

I really am a sort of environmentalist, contrary to the impression one might get from this blog concerning my other interests. This is what I spent most of my time in law school preparing for (only to become a corporate/securities lawyer instead – note to entering law students).  And my wife and I do spend just about all of our free time outside, hiking in various places around the world, but mainly in Scotland and at our place in Virginia, which borders on Shenendoah National Park.

I just don’t like the way the government tends to approach environmentalism, which is mainly by catering to interest groups that want a piece of the environment, by taking property from unwilling sellers (the sad history of the Shenendoah National Park, for example), relying on the bad science of the moment, and often screwing things up.

I’ve studied and observed The Nature Conservancy for awhile, and I believe it does it better.  In addition to the trip this weekend, we also spent a week two years ago at their Pine Butte ranch in Montana.

You can get an idea of their work from their website.  Among other things, they emphasize market-based solutions, working with neighbors and other organizations, and dealing with willing sellers and donors.  They also work on a big scale, with entire environments and eco systems, setting up model projects and persuading people that they work, rather than bludgeoning them into complying.

This weekend we visited two projects in central Illinois, both connected with the Illinois River – Emiquon, a project where the land acquisition is just completed and the environmental work is just beginning, and Spunky Bottoms, where the environmental work has been ongoing for a few years.

Both projects are aimed at returning the Illinois River floodplain back to what it was before corn significantly altered the landscape. They want to use these projects as models to show what can be done in similar places all over the world.

A couple of pictures will indicate the kind of work they're doing.  Here’s Emiquon, showing the current state of agriculture in the floodplain.

And here’s Spunky Bottoms, showing a nearly identical landscape not far away only a few years into the development.

Although TNC has kept the levee and therefore the river basically at bay, just by allowing more water in by not aggressively pumping it out, they have turned it into a flourishing wetland, complete with hundreds of additional species of fish and waterbirds, plants and other animals. They worked with the locals, apparently with good results, primarily by increasing fishing and duck hunting opportunities, and by demonstrating to the local town of Havana, a typical depressed central Illinois town bordering on a nice bit of the Illinois River, the potential benefits of environmental tourism.

Hattie Carroll redux: Now's the time for your blogs

I’ve been a little slow to pick up on this. Orin Kerr relates this sad story of injustice in Texas – white men not punished for the brutal beating of a black man in Texas.  He says it sounds more like 1955 than 2005. 

More like February 9, 1963, when Hattie Carroll was caned by the wealthy William Zanzinger. She was immortalized by a song in her name Bob Dylan recorded the following year, which included the following lines: 

In the courtroom of honor, the judge pounded his gavel
To show that all's equal and that the courts are on the level
And that the strings in the books ain't pulled and persuaded
And that even the nobles get properly handled
Once that the cops have chased after and caught 'em
And that the ladder of law has no top and no bottom
Stared at the person who killed for no reason
Who just happened to be feelin' that way without warnin'.
And he spoke through his cloak, most deep and distinguished,
And handed out strongly, for penalty and repentance
William Zanzinger with a six-month sentence.
Oh, but you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears
Bury the rag deep in your face
For now's the time for your tears.

This was the sort of thing that got my generation all riled up and in the streets.  Then we got perspective (i.e., old), learned to apply the tools of, say, public choice economics (maybe it’s elected judges), got off the streets and blogged about it.

Junior, do your videogame

Last month I wrote about how modern TV and other supposedly low culture aspects of modern life are making us smarter.  Malcolm Gladwell reviews this work, Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad Is Good for You, in this week’s New Yorker. Among other things, Gladwell puts this phenomenon in the perspective of modern education:

One of the ongoing debates in the educational community, similarly, is over the value of homework. Meta-analysis of hundreds of studies done on the effects of homework shows that the evidence supporting the practice is, at best, modest. Homework seems to be most useful in high school and for subjects like math. At the elementary-school level, homework seems to be of marginal or no academic value. Its effect on discipline and personal responsibility is unproved. And the causal relation between high-school homework and achievement is unclear: it hasn’t been firmly established whether spending more time on homework in high school makes you a better student or whether better students, finding homework more pleasurable, spend more time doing it. So why, as a society, are we so enamored of homework? Perhaps because we have so little faith in the value of the things that children would otherwise be doing with their time. They could go out for a walk, and get some exercise; they could spend time with their peers, and reap the rewards of friendship. Or, Johnson suggests, they could be playing a video game, and giving their minds a rigorous workout.

The return of the troubadour?

I am often confused by James Surowiecki’s economics in his regular New Yorker column.  The May 19 column, “Hello, Cleveland,” is no exception.  He says that, with the decline of the recorded music industry because of illegal file sharing and other reasons, musicians are making more money by going on the road.  This is making the "music business" – promotion and distribution – less important than the "musician business." Surowiecki  says that “the value of songs falls, and the value of seeing an artist sing them rises, because that experience can’t really be reproduced.”

I don’t follow this.  Live and recorded music are substitutes, albeit imperfect.  Therefore, all things equal, if the price of one falls, so should the price of the other. Or if you raise the price of one, the demand for that should fall and the demand for the other should rise.  If there were no file sharing and CDs cost more, would people have less desire to see musicians live?

Surowiecki points out that the supply of live music can be expected to rise as artists get more money from doing that than from recording. But as the supply rises, shouldn’t the price fall, assuming no increase in demand?

Given all this, why are ticket prices for live performances rising? Maybe because the shows are getting better because they're more important to artists’ careers. So that may be why the troubadour is returning.

Will we see this effect in other areas -- a resurgence of live theatre?  The big-time lecture tour, like the ones Dickens and Wilde used to do? I sure hope it doesn't mean that everybody in the intellectual property business will suddenly have to work for a living.

Humiliations

There seems to be a new game sprouting up – “ten things I’ve never done.”  Althouse, Taylor and Bainbridge have played it. 

The Althouse and Bainbridge results aren’t that remarkable, though I’m intrigued by Althouse’s never “used cocaine or heroin.”  I’m not sure what the rules are.  Is this like “never ate a cocker spaniel” or “never killed my aunt”?

I was much more interested in Taylor’s list, in which he confessed, among other things, that he’s never “been out of the Western Hemisphere,” “seen any of the Godfather films,” “been to New York City,” “read any of Ayn Rand’s novels,” or “taken calculus.”

Wow.  You beat me. 

This reminds me of a more interesting game that David Lodge wrote about in Changing Places, called "Humiliations," in which the players have to admit, truthfully, books they've never read. You get points for each other player who did read the book. There is a hilarious scene at a faculty dinner party in which a young literature professor is torn between his social climbing self, which wants to win the game, and his career preservation self, which doesn’t want to admit the sort of appalling ignorance that would gain a victory. The former self wins and he admits that he never read Hamlet, much to the detriment of his career.

This game could be played on the Web – and was, on Slate a few years ago, though it didn't seem the contestants were quite in the spirit of the game. 

Tree blogging

There's no hidden agenda here, just springtime trees, taken last weekend in Virginia.