Lorne Fitch

First paragraph is priceless!

Yep! It ate all the cabbage first. Photo: Nopparat Kingkaew - Bangkok Post PCL

I love Lorne’s metaphors as he weaves them into his writings. I also appreciate that he is truly one of the wonderful philosophers of our time, speaking in terms of understandable logic and reason. He continues to impart wisdom which I am always happy to share.

Why the elephant photo? Because the first paragraph really cracked me up!

Creating Hell to Get to Financial Heaven

Lorne Fitch, P. Biol.

An English housewife in the 18^th century encountered an elephant, escaped from a circus, in her garden. Alarmed, she rushed to a nearby police station to report this strange beast, the likes of which she had never seen before. To a police constable she explained that this massive grey beast was in her garden, picking up her cabbages with what she thought was its tail. When asked what it was doing with the cabbages she replied, “You wouldn’t believe it if I told you!”

Such is the case with observations and perspectives. For some, forests, minerals, biodiversity, soil, water and air are just commodities to be used and exploited for economic gain. To others, too few it seems, these are assets to be stewarded, not mere fungible articles. I thought about this as I passed a farm field on one of my regular routes.

The eroded gully in the field, about a meter deep and almost a kilometre long was the result of one summer downpour. Sediment poured into a permanent stream and muddied it to the point my hand disappeared as soon as it was immersed. Whatever the incremental crop gain might have been, by cultivating through the grassed drainage, was negated by one rainstorm. Removing vegetative cover likely allowed a century, or more, of soil development to be flushed away, according to the calculations of my soil science colleagues. I pondered the rationale.

As humans we need food, shelter, and security, not just in the short term, but for the foreseeable future. What we want is all of that and more—much more. In that pursuit, verging more on greed than need, we exhaust the natural resources arrayed around us. What farm, what nation can afford to lose soil at the rate in that cultivated field? A little introspection and understanding might be helpful.

A drained wetland, a lost copse of aspen and willow represents money in the bank (sometimes for the bank) of increased canola or barley yields. Conversely, without the moderating effect of a sponge of native vegetation and wetlands, spring melt rushes off to rivers, building bigger floods, decreasing water quality, and exacerbating later summer drought. Deer, song birds, and frogs see foreclosure, not profitability.

Another urban subdivision—where a developer cuts down the trees and names the streets after them—adds to sprawl but is a profitable thing to do. Of course, someone else pays the price for traffic problems, lack of open park space, and flooding from too much impervious concrete and pavement.

A headwaters forest, as an intact watershed, collects, stores and slowly releases water. Turning the trees into dimensional lumber and digging holes in the mountains to extract coal would seem to be profitable, at least in the short term. But downstream water users might see a different picture. One of more droughts and floods as well as water contaminated by an accumulation of released toxic elements.

Put all of that into an economic spread sheet, to get a true accounting of the perceived benefits of more cultivated fields, more pavement, more 2X4s and more exportable coal. Those benefits might be illusionary, even negative in the larger picture. How did any of these decisions improve our need for the basics of food, shelter and security?

Stewardship desperately needs to be added to our daily diet, like essential vitamins and minerals. We can start to understand the implications to us as both producers and consumers of the quick buck attitude and the reality of long-term soil depletion, erosion and water contamination. Inevitably we are all losers with poor farming, logging, and mining practices. It could be said that believing in endless growth in the face of a physically finite place you must be either mad, or an economist.

We can extract the value from our natural resources quickly, in a fire-sale mentality, with predictable results. It is the stuff of boom and bust. It feeds investment and the sense to be nimble enough to move on quickly as the profits begin to wane. It is an ethos of plunder. And then to where?

In an airport waiting room I saw an advertisement for an investment firm. The image was of a little mountain cabin, beside a placid brook nestled in a pristine landscape. The message was—invest with us and this could be your reward for leveraging maximum returns on dwindling resources. It could be, until the feller-buncher shows up to cut the timber, the dragline to extract the coal or the real estate developer to sell more get-away retreats.

Heaven isn’t an outcome of financial net worth—a robust bank account—especially if it leads to a landscape left in tatters. Our observations, perceptions, and conclusions about well-being need a serious adjustment. Being truly rich is a function of a world where we have not exhausted all the inherent possibilities, where we aren’t subject to toxic realities, and where we measure our well-being in ecological integrity.

Some don’t believe the elephant in front of us, even with the evidence at hand.

Lorne Fitch is a Professional Biologist, a retired Fish and Wildlife Biologist and a past Adjunct Professor with the University of Calgary. He is the author of Streams of Consequence: Dispatches From the Conservation World and Travels Up the Creek: A Biologist’s Search for a Paddle.