When Environmental Programs Backfire

In a recent New York Times article - Foul Algae in Lake Erie - the culprit which is causing the massive algae blooms in Lake Erie these days is a type of farming that is being promoted heavily by environmental specialists. No-till farming might help with erosion but it’s hell when it comes to water quality.  The problem with no-till farming, in which seeds are inserted into small holes in unplowed ground is that fertilizing is contracted to companies that cast pellets onto the bare ground from trucks, or to “factory farms” that spray liquefied animal waste on the cropland.

In the past those fertilizer pellets sank into plowed soil and stayed there. Now, rain and snowmelt wash an average of one pound of the 48 pounds per acre of fertilizer off the unplowed soil. Much winds up in the Maumee River, which feeds into Lake Erie.

The Maumee supplies only about 5 percent of Erie’s water, but half its phosphorus. And while algae struggle to digest ordinary phosphorus — only about 30 percent gets taken up — fertilizer phosphorus is designed for plants to use instantly. This means there’s vastly more algae in Lake Erie now than there was before the no-till farming practices. 

My favorite environmental plague is the wind generators. These bird killing machines are a blight on the landscape and really tough on bird populations but according to my environmental friends there are going to be some casualties of nature if we are to get off the carbon based fuels that feed our country and eventually we’ll figure out a way to make the big wind turbines prettier as well as more eco-friendly to the avian population. Until then we just have to bite our lip and put up with the massive deaths of birds and the visual ugliness of the landscape.

The way we manage forests has changed dramatically from my early years of grouse hunting. There used to be clear cut regions and you never see that anymore. The forest biologists require logging operations to use a more selective approach before issuing permits and now we have more older forests that favor turkeys over grouse. This might seem like a wonderful thing for turkey hunters but for guys like me that love to hunt grouse it’s the sad result of environmentalists giving clear-cut forestry a bad reputation.

Have you changed all your incandescent bulbs out to the florescent lamps yet? This is yet another environmental program that forces one to ignore the casualty of mercury polluting the earth for the greater good which is less carbon emissions.

What we’re dealing with here is a tremendous amount of head-in-the-sand logic that creates consequences we shouldn’t have to live with. At some point we need to realize that some of the actions we take to make the world a better place is in fact making it worse and just because the effort falls into the realm of good environmental deeds doesn’t mean we shouldn’t analyze what is happening and make changes if necessary. Maybe the true solutions, like ground tilling, nuclear power generation, clear cutting, and the more-expensive LED lights haven’t been hitched tightly enough to the environmentalist’s wagon. When the ravages of these good intentions expand to the point of no return,  we might see changes backwards to move things forward again.