Image from Unsplash

Ever since the industrial revolution, Western culture has been engaged in a near messianic pursuit of efficiency. It’s become an overarching societal obsession to which we’re all bent in one form of labor or another. But is it good for us? Is it really a wise aspiration? And what are we gaining vs. what we’re losing?

Here’s a picture of efficiency in action:

Image from Unsplash

Notice your reaction. Is it one of pleasure or unease, peace or anxiety?

Here is another picture of a very different kind of work.

Image from Wikipedia

This is Gustave Caillebotte’s masterpiece, The Scrapers, one of his most well known and beloved works, for obvious reasons. Notice your reaction again. It’s probably of a kind with hearing birdsong or looking at a natural landscape. The breath slows, the body calms. Note the natural light, the conversation underway between two of the workers, the bottle of wine and half empty glass. There is work being done, but also life being lived. The two, it turns out, go together, and can be hugely satisfying when done at a human pace within reasonable hours. It’s hard to look at the painting and not sense that.

As a housepainter, I’ve done this very work, and can tell you it is immensely satisfying to pull a well sharpened scraper across old varnish and feel it curl up under the blade as the newly exposed wood blushes in fresh light. I’ve also had conversations that were likely much the same as the two in the painting. Conversation comes naturally in a work environment. Whatever self consciousness might arise between two people sitting across a table or desk vanishes in such a situation. I guess the term would be comradery.

As part of this series, Caillebotte produced a study of a father and son. The father is sitting with his back against a wall sharpening a scraper, with his young son standing beside him doing the same. I couldn’t find a copy online to share, but the comfort and familiarity between the two is palpable. When I saw it I thought of Robert Bly’s Iron John, about the crisis of masculinity he saw in modern culture. Bly pointed out that for generations, fathers and sons worked together, with the father passing his knowledge to the son, and the son getting to know the father in his prime, physical years. (Similar stories can be told from a feminine perspective, but Bly was specifically concerned with the masculine.) Industrial production and the obsession with efficiency, he said, ruptured that bond, with fathers now pulled away all day to factory or office building, and the son sent off to school, not having the benefit of seeing his father work and doing the same work beside him.

Again, what is being gained and what is being lost? We know we’re losing species. We know we’re losing languages. But are also losing depths of relationship that we’re now so far removed from that we don’t even realize it.

There’s a lot more that can be said about our adulation of efficiency. Books can and have been written about it. Here, I offer something different, an imaginary tale of efficiency as a person, who like any person has a life span. I wrote it while taking a course in ecological economics, taught by Stanford educated Fred Jennings, who has his own take on economics, what it is and how it might better serve us.

Now seems a particularly appropriate time to share it.

The Death of Efficiency

Yes, he’s had a quite a run,
and he thinks he’s just getting started.

“Soon I won’t need hands!” he cries.
“Or even wires. Remember cable?” 
He chuckles, looking up
with eyes of cool blue calculation
     peering through the black for Mars,       
            icy, radioactive Mars
like it were a lover.

“You’re dying”, I say.
He looks at me, incredulous.
“It’s natural. Things run their course.
You’ve run yours. Eventually
nobody will want you anymore.”

His eyes narrow like streams of digits
“I own you,” he says, 
“clunky little craftsman
with your slow toad hands.”

“Oh,” I say, looking at them
and moving my fingers.

“I own more than you. I own your dreams.”

“The sleeping ones 
or the waking ones?” I ask.

“You waste time!” He hisses.

“But there’s a difference.
One I receive. One you peddle.
One arrives unbidden 
as water up from a spring.
The other crawls out of an advertising studio
gets passed around like a playing card
till it’s edges are worn, numbers smudged.
Then it’s cleaned up, sold all over again.
Till people figure out the game.”

He looks over my head. 
“Apparently you don’t see 
the masses behind you. They run towards me.”

I look into his eyes, round and floating in sea brine.
Apparently, you haven’t noticed 
the shape of our home, and everything on it. 
They will pass us both, and then come around again.
Round Earth. Round life.
And when they realize
they are racing nowhere 
while you take everything
what then…? And by the way, 
what is the strange pleasure you get
cheating life of time?

He returns his gaze to mars.
"One day I’ll link
my brain to a computer. 
Then I’ll have it all."

*

Begging to be remembered, 
Efficiency sits on a curb
that’s slowly being overtaken by moss
and the star-shaped purple flowers
that grow in the moss. Watching the people 
walking by, he grimaces 
as they choose the slowest, most meandering
          routes. 

A father and son come along.
He looks up at the man. 
“You gonna raise that boy lazy
like everyone else around here?” 
The boy looks up at his father
who looks down on the old man.
"For generations you divided us
took our common growing years
and best daylight hours
and fed them to productivity.
But my grandmother
was among the ones who figured it out
found the language trails
through your spells.
And my father peace-stormed with the Water League."

He swept his arm in a wide gesture of abundance.

"All this plump soil, flowing moisture, rising green
was waiting all the time.
You should wander it awhile
see what you’ve been missing."

The two ambled on
while Efficiency sat fidgeting
eyeing his watch.

That’ the Fix Our Forests Act, a logging bill disguised as a fire fighting bill. The tell is in the numerous and creative ways it would obstruct citizen input, from delaying citizen review until after the trees are cut to reducing the statute of limitations for filing lawsuits from six months to 120 days, seriously straining the ability of small citizen groups to apply legal restraint. It waives NEPA protections on fire-sheds as large as 250,000 square acres and allows loggings to proceed even if courts find the logging plan violates the law. There are no limits on the size and age of trees to be cut and the language is so vague that even clear cuts could qualify as “fuels treatment.” If passed, it would open millions of acres of forests to logging without scientific review or citizen input. A better name for this legislations would be the Fix It So We Can Log Without Citizen Oversight Act.

Introduced by Bruce Westermann, R Ark,, and having passed in the house, it’s now being rushed through the Senate in an attempt to capitalize on the heightened fire concern surrounding the tragic LA fires. A vote is expected any day now.

The bill claims to “protect communities by expediting environmental analyses, reducing frivolous lawsuits, and increasing the pace and scale of forest restoration projects.” But if protecting communities were the really the goal, this bill would pour resources into the only methods proven to do that: hardening homes and defending immediate space.

Most homes don’t catch fire directly from the flame wall, but from embers blown ahead of the fire. Simple measures like screening vents, covering gutters, and pruning vegetation directly around buildings dramatically improves their fire resilience. Thinning vegetation in the immediate surroundings, within 100 feet or so of the dwelling, can also help. These were among the recommendations of the Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission. But rather than heed those recommendations by investing in boots on the ground to harden homes and educate communities, it diverts resources to backcountry logging.

The US Forest Service has spent years making the argument that “mechanical treatment” of forests reduces wildfire. Independent research, however, comes to different conclusions, that thinning harms the forest and actually increases the very conditions that favor fire — heat, dryness and wind. The reasons are fairly obvious. For instance, removing trees makes it harder for forests to slow wind, increasing wind speeds and thus the speed of a fire’s spread. It also allows more sunlight to reach the forest floor, heating up the ground. Even more importantly, it dries forests out. Trees don’t just stand around soaking up sunlight, they also cool and hydrate their surroundings. It’s called transpiration, but can be understood as a kind of sweating, just like we do to keep cool in the sun. A single tree can have the cooling power of up to ten air conditioners.

But that’s really just the beginning. Those trees also help make rain. By sweating water vapor they not only cool the air, they deliver water vapor to the sky, feeding the formation of clouds. Even more remarkable, they seed that vapor with biochemicals such as terpenes (the forest scent) and other bits of biota that provide the seed grains for eventual rain drops to condense around. Forests make clouds. Those clouds then rain back down, watering other forest, hydrating soil and vegetation, increasing resilience to wildfire. Cut the trees you cut hydration.

In other words, what the Fix our Forests Act calls dangerous fuels are also air conditioners and humidifiers, rain makers and rain catchers, as their needles gather and slow the falling of rain, allowing it to seep into the ground and make its way to aquifers, which will prove critical during the dry season. Of course, older, deeply rooted trees are best able to tap this water, but there are no protections for them in the Fix Our Forests Act.

Given that the concern is fire, it’s remarkable how little this legislation ever mentions water, its antidote. Though I did find, in section 119, under “Watershed Condition Framework Technical Corrections,” instructions to strike the word “protection” from watershed provisions in a previous, similar bill, the Healthy Forests Restoration Act of 2003, under George W. Bush. (To see a short, simple demonstration of how plant moisture effects flammability, watch this.)

Perhaps the problems with this bill are explained by the first word of the bill’s title: “Fix.” You can fix a car. You can fix a broken plate. But can you fix a forest? Can you fix a living ecosystem of infinite complexity? Such language represents an outdated way of thinking about the living world around us, and marks the very kind of thinking that’s gotten into this mess in the first place. And one needs to ask: if our forests are broken, might it be the successive rounds of logging roads and trucks, chainsaws and feller bunchers, herbicidal treatments and industrial replanting of greenhouse grown monocrops that did the breaking?

Yes, there are instances where careful thinning of small trees and undergrowth is indicated, such as right around built communities or in industrial plantations planted too densely. But such careful and measured action doesn’t need this bill, and this bill isn’t about such practices. Rather, it proposes a massive increase in logging without citizen restraint, with big, mature trees caught in the economic crosshairs,

The following Senators have been identified as key votes: John Hickenlooper (CO), Michael Bennet (CO), Ruben Gallego (AZ), Mark Kelly (AZ, )Alex Padilla (CA), Adam Schiff (CA), Angus King (ME), Elissa Slotkin (MI), Gary Peters (MI), John Fetterman (PA)

The bill is moving quickly. Last minute citizen outcry is the only thing standing in its way.

Much has been written about certain bitter ingredients in the Inflation Reduction Act, such as the agreement to streamline permitting for oil and gas projects, which has a lot of people reasonably upset.

But there are also provisions to streamline permitting for non-oil infrastructure, like transmission lines through forests, or solar farms over high desert ecosystems. Yet no one seems bothered by those. Indeed, Democratic leadership treats it like a victory.

From Environment and Energy News: “Despite having to swallow the permitting effort to pass the reconciliation bill, Democrats insisted yesterday that any permitting reform legislation would extend further than just fossil fuel infrastructure sought by Manchin. Democrats largely appeared open to a permitting rewrite in exchange for a generational investment in clean energy — $369 billion in all.”

A “permitting rewrite?” “Democrats insisted?” For those who have ever tried to protect living places from industrial harm, the permitting process is about the only tool we have, and now Democrats, DEMOCRATS, are leading the charge to strip even these minor hindrances to the defense of what land is left, which isn’t much. Roughly half the land surface on Earth has already been converted to human use.

The current climate narrative suggests we must sacrifice nature to so called “green” infrastructure in order to save it from climate change. But there is something missing from the analysis, the fact that pumping greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere isn’t the only way we cause climate change. We also do so by damaging the land. Scientists refers to this as “land change” and it is neither new nor contested science. But the processes are too local and complex for the global climate models, which under the IPCC have come to dominate climate science. The result? The land gets left out. In its last Assessment, the IPCC devoted less than four pages out 3,885 to land change, even though the land is critical to climate. Simply put, living landscapes run the water cycles that cool, hydrate and stabilize local climates. The real green infrastructure of climate is the land itself.

I realize the goal is to reduce CO2 emissions. I share that goal, and once tried to ram a Shell arctic drilling rig with a sea kayak just to slow it down. But as far as I know, the only time we’ve slowed CO2 emissions is when economic activity slowed, as in the 2008 recession and then in response to the coronavirus epidemic. In the case of the latter, not only did emissions drop, but nature came forward in ways unexpected. Once hidden mountains emerged through the clearing skies, wildlife appeared in the most unlikely places. It was almost as if the potential for a new human relationship with the natural world emerged through the haze, counseling us to slow down, cool down, let the living world, which ultimately runs the climate, recover.

Unfortunately, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the kind of thinking that created it, takes us in the opposite direction. It will dramatically increase economic activity and as always, it’s the land, the animals, the soil, the water cycles that will pay.

These “permit reform” maneuvers are a flat-out betrayal of the land and those who fight for it. And having been negotiated behind closed doors, they’re antidemocratic. Please write your legislators and tell them no permitting reform period!

And please “share” this if you’re not down with “streamlining” away one of your only tools for protecting the places you love.