Environment

Quote of the Day

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I have been writing and reading a lot about the resurgent cougar population here in North America. The story of the cougar being shot in the city of Chicago by the CPD interests me greatly. I am still waiting to hear if this is the same cougar that had been spotted here in Southern Wisconsin. If that is true, that cat walked from South Dakota, through Minnesota, Southern Wisconsin, perhaps through Wilmette, IL, and south to Chicago. Amazing.

I am no defender of the famously corrupt CPD, but they did the right thing by shooting that animal. If they did not it would only be a matter of time before the lion started eating dogs, cats, and humans – especially in an area like Chicago that doesn’t have enough of the lion’s normal things to chew on, like small game and most importantly, deer.

The Chicago cops could have made up the story about the cougar charging the officers before they put it down, but it could also be true. Either way they did everyone a huge favor by killing it. I am interested to see the reaction by many people on blogs and in the media. Many, many people who don’t understand how these animals operate are beating up on the CPD for their actions.

As I was reading some of these reactions I came upon this gem from this story in the LA Times:

I am totally disgusted by Chicago Police and will report them to PETA for their horrible attack on an innocent animal.

After cleaning up my computer screen from the spray of vitamin water that I expelled, I chuckled for about five more minutes and then came up with four words to respond to this poor, misguided individual: GOOD LUCK WITH THAT.

Cross Posted at LITGM.

Book Report: The Beast in the Garden, Part Two

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Part one is here.

As mentioned in the part one post I am doing more of a book report rather than the typical ChicagoBoyz book review. The reason for this is that I am just in the beginning stages of learning about cougars, their habitat and their ways. IMHO you can’t really review a book if you don’t know the subject. Recently a cougar was shot dead in Roscoe Village, just outside of Chicago. As of this writing it appears that this cougar was wild, not a released pet.

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Book Report: The Beast in the Garden, Part One

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Part two is here.

Some time ago I put up a couple of posts here and at LITGM that highlighted what I propose is a huge comeback by wildlife – specifically near and in cities. Most all commenters agreed that they see many animals on a daily basis in or near cities that would hardly ever be seen twenty years ago.

I find this topic absolutely fascinating. One commenter suggested that I pick up a copy of “The Beast in the Garden” by David Baron. So I did. Most of the time here at ChicagoBoyz book reviews are done. Well, I honestly don’t know enough about wildlife and biology to fairly review this book, so I have decided to do more of a book report, and interject a few things that relate to me locally here in Southern Wisconsin. The book is divided into three sections – The Peacable Kingdom, Borrowed Time, and Plague. This part of my book report deals with The Peacable Kingdom.

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Keeping Austin Weird

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George Will looks at Austin’s campaign to keep itself weird. A useful contrast between the two flagship schools and the communities that house them might be interesting – community participation, generosity, attitude toward the “other.” Of course, analyzing levels of religious commitment, political philosophy, and applied citizenship in such minor commitments as voting and jury duty and larger ones such as enlistment would also be interesting. Last night, we watched Michael Apted’s Amazing Grace. He chooses to focus on the application of Wilberforce’s beliefs in the practical realm of politics, but the undercurrent (as certainly was true) was that the driving force that impelled him was his belief in the universal rights of man, his belief in a God and the God-given nature of those rights. But, of course, he was someone who was interested not just in believing but in acting. There is nothing more beautiful nor more useful than the practical application of the great beliefs.

Packing my boxes to move, I kept writing Austin, Nebraska – but once there, well, it felt like home for me as for so many others. Soon, Willy was setting up the first of the Dripping Springs concerts and I was reading manuscripts by the great twentieth century writers in one of the best two or three libraries in the world. Fromholz described himself as a rumor in his time and people claimed he’d run for governor (I don’t think very seriously, but who knew then). It’s cooler and dryer than much of the state and more laid back than about any place. Still, when both my kids packed up to move last year, they also felt they’d lived there long enough. I guess, in a way, so had we over twenty years before. It’s a good place to be young, but walking the dog down streets full of broken glass was getting to our daughter who lived in West campus; the rents had raised from our day but the druggies still dealt on the drag; the street people had gotten sadder (or maybe we’d just gotten older).

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“Which Is Greener?”

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Rand Simberg discusses discusses John Tierney’s NYT column in which Tierney compares the amounts of energy used in “green” and “not green” transportation. Tierney argues that green transportation methods may use more energy than do automobiles and other high-tech vehicles, whose use environmentalists want to discourage.

But really, most of these calculations are worthless because they do not take account of the value of people’s time. How can you compare the relative efficiencies of different processes if you don’t consider the value of a significant input in those processes? You can’t — unless you are homo antieconomicus, a modern environmentalist, and therefore place great value on every natural thing except humans and the things they create. But I digress. People using cars for short trips makes sense because people are productive, and the more productive they are, the more costly it is for them to be delayed by slow, cumbersome transportation. It does not make economic sense for Bill Gates to ride his bicycle to the office. Nor does it make sense for central planners to decide how different individuals should travel, because no individual or organization has enough information to make such decisions for others (see: communism, failure of).

The sensible way to handle such issues is to allow prices to fluctuate, and by fluctuating to communicate the current relative values of various inputs. Then everyone can accurately evaluate his own unique set of costs and benefits and make the best decisions for himself and, in the aggregate, society. (Note that we’re not talking about externalities here, but rather about production costs for goods and services that we use in our travels from place to place. Most of these costs are fully internalized in the prices of the respective goods and services.) But such individual decisionmaking is anathema to the control freaks of the enviro Left, for whom your time spent walking to the store counts for nothing, so they create rituals of correctness to enforce their norms on everyone else. You must recycle/bicycle/carpool/use mass-transit/save energy/etc. And it’s all bullshit — or, more precisely, a con job to get you to follow someone else’s preferences which, too often, are unexamined.

Tierney’s argument is a step in the right direction. It would have been a much better argument if he had raised questions about whether cost/benefit comparisons of various transportation methods can be made without considering the value of people’s time, and about whether such analyses can even be made by anyone besides travelers themselves.