Hacker News Reader

The name of the organization is probably based on an essay called "Thinking like a mountain" by Aldo Leopold. Writing in 1949, Leopold is considered to be one of the first ecologists. It's a beautifully poetic and prophetic text.

I happen to be living on a mountain in southern Tuscany. A place where wolf where hunted to the brink of extinction and the deer population is exploding. This essay resonates with me in profound ways.

The essay (PDF): https://www.ecotoneinc.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/aldo-l...

PS. the whole book is worth reading.

Thanks. It's possible the tagline was Thinking like a mountain rather than seeing like a mountain.

I want to say the organization was called Denali but that is now the name of a mountain in Alaska that was formerly known as Mt. McKinley. That change occurred in 2015. So searching for Denali gets me results for that specific mountain and things related to it, not for an environmentally oriented charity.

I am failing to find verification that there ever was such an organization. So I don't know if I am misremembering the name.

Denali is the original name of the mountain. Given by the indigenous people living there. Some dude just started calling it Mt McKinley for political reasons and everyone just accepted that, this decision was simply reversed.

> Given by the indigenous people living there.

Well, some of them called it something kinda-sorta close to that. Other groups of indigenous people called it by other names. Alaska Natives aren't one homogeneous group, by any means.

It's quite large, so it was visible to many different groups (on a good day I can see it from here, and it's about 130 miles/200 km away).

But Denali is definitely better than McKinley, no question about that.

According to Wikipedia, the name was officially changed back in 1975 by the Alaskan Government. However it wasn’t recognized by the federal government until 2015. Apparently the state of Ohio (which does not contain the mountain) opposed the name correction and successfully resisted for 40 years.

Since Alaska was already a state in 1975 I would say that the mountain’s name was officially recognized as Denali in some states from 1975. However it took until 2015 for the rest of the country to officially adopt it.

FYI: Ohio's interest stemmed from the fact that William McKinley, for whom the mountain was renamed, was born in Ohio and served as its governor before becoming presidents.

As you have written before, most of us who have worked with environmental issues in the real world, have long tried to 'value ' the environment. Forests, wetlands, waterfronts, etc. Common scenario, let's say there is a beautiful bay. Many tourists visit to see the view. Condos are built around the bay. Now there is no view. There are no tourists. Water quality in and around the bay degraded. But when trying to stop the development, the only arguable economic value, is the amount of the taxable value of condo, and 'housing starts' . There is no present way, (still - after 50 years of talking about this) to place a value on the view, waterfront, water quality, etc.

There is no present way, (still - after 50 years of talking about this) to place a value on the view, waterfront, water quality, etc.

It's been a lot of years since I took the class, but those things can be valued. One of the things I did in my case study of Suisun Marsh was quantified how much the marsh cleans up the water and what it would cost if humans did it with a water treatment plant.

Suisun Marsh is also a historic birding area and the rails go through there for that reason. It brought tourism.

You can place dollar values on tourism, water quality and other things. It doesn't get done a lot but can be done.

A lot of places with such assets are small town or rural. Planning jobs tend to pay better in the big city so your best talent tends to end up designing cities and planners often hate their jobs because they don't get to do what they wanted to do.

Planning something good for people and the environment that makes economic sense and gets buy in from enough pertinent stakeholders is hard. So, all too often, "money talks" instead.

> There is no present way, (still - after 50 years of talking about this) to place a value on the view, waterfront, water quality, etc.

The sub branch is "environmental economics." My cousin got his PhD in it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_economics

There is still ample view in the Bay Area, while we're in the midst of a severe housing shortage. The marginal loss to the view / waterfront / water quality from a new development is more than outweighed by the marginal gain in housing availability.

Why would the water quality have to degrade when there is residential development around a coastline? The views are still there and the tourists still come. Many are skeptical about "enivornmental" issues being used to prevent housing development, because it's most often used to stop it in heavily developed areas, replacing parking lots and single family houses. It's more environmentally friendly to have density than the alternative SFH sprawl. If you want to keep nature nature, make it a park.

> It's more environmentally friendly to have density than the alternative SFH sprawl.

I saw a Nature study on HN recently and I think it called this thinking in to question? I’ll go search for it and update this comment if I find it.

EDIT: No luck finding it. EDIT2: found it! https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-01477-y

I know you couldn't find it, but what was even the basic principle? It's hard for me to imagine that dramatically increasing land use, transportation and infrastructure costs could be environmentally beneficial.

They looked at total land use required to support cities and other areas and found that while the city footprint is small, the supportive infrastructure for the city is large. They found that when accounting for this, land use per capita is about the same regardless of density. Wish I could find it but there are a lot of Nature papers submitted every week.

EDIT: found it https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-01477-y

They didn't go into US cities in this analysis as far as I can see right, just chinese and european ones? Also do they focus on total ecological footprint or just land use equivalent, such as more energy usage from suburban housing, more emissions from car ownership and driving vs. things like every human needs this much farm land to feed them?

That study doesn’t address your argument. The land use of a city isn’t simply the physical land taken up by that city. Per capita energy expenditures significantly drop as city density increases, even if we moved to solar power that would still represent land use.

The actual study is filled with it’s own problems such as ignoring land covered by water etc, but that’s largely irrelevant here. However the real issue is it’s looking at land use around cities which are rarely independent. The area around London for example isn’t a single city it’s a cluster of different cities of various densities that all bleed into each other. Is to use a US example is Patterson part of NYC? How about Stamford and or Newark? If not where exactly do you place the borders between each of them?

Looking at population in the heart of NYC vs the surrounding areas over time and they are fairly independent.

That’s fair. I didn’t remember the study properly.

Isn't this paper discussing land use, and not environmental friendliness? Concerns such as the cost of transport are ignored here.

Yeah I only vaguely remembered it and it seems like it doesn’t apply here.

Stormwater run-off, anything that goes onto the ground (and especially paved surfaces) eventually ends up into the water cycle. Let's say 10 cars are leaking oil in their parking spot. That oil gets washed away by the rain and ends up in the local waterways.

Think of all the paving that prevents natural runoff. The increased human loading due to higher population living pressures = waste water, waste fuels, oils, particulates (dust, tires.)

Residential developments around coastlines typically drain directly into the bodies of water the coastlines are on.

Eutrophication can occur from lawn maintenance runoff alone. For coastlines around larger bodies of water, chemicals and heavy metals can deposit near the coast, and concentrate in filter feeders and animals higher up in the food chain to the point that it is unsafe to eat things that are caught off the coast.

In an adversarial legal system, no one represents "externalities".

Parts of Australia have a deer problem, but despite cultivating a reputation for deadly animals, most of it lacks large terrestrial predators, so introducing wolves is an even harder sell than in the US.

It also has prior historical experience with introducing a species to address a previously introduced species, which then becomes a problem itself: foxes for rabbits; cane toads for cane beetles. cue Simpsons

Foxes were introduced to Australia for sport hunting, not to control the rabbit population. The presence of rabbits likely helped foxes spread across Australia.

I agree with your point, though.

Even the Devil was given his Advocate...

Interesting observation.

There was also dung beetles :https://www.csiro.au/en/research/animals/livestock/dung-beet...

Which by most peoples measure, was a success.

I don't agree with this "Swallowed a spider to catch the fly" approach though.

Unrelated to your point, I have a friend who was a wildlife biologist / game warden for a US state. At one point, at least one insurance company was trying to pressure the department of game and fish to issue many more deer hunting licenses, to reduce the number of deer-vehicle collisions.

I heard about this via a podcast before!

Just a clarification, the thing that the insurance company wanted the department in charge to do was issue (make available) more deer tags, not licenses. Hard to say more without knowing which state.

You are correct. The idea was to reduce the deer population.

(AL)

First, yes I'm for reintroduction of wolves. However, "In the US: Deer–vehicle collisions lead to about 200 human deaths and $1.1 billion in property damage every year." Really is a poor argument for it.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm USA annual number of deaths: 2,854,838. So, deer kill about .007% of USA population annually. I don't want to downplay the tragedy, but I wouldn't recommend spending a large amount of the budget on this.

Technically .007% of Americans kill _themselves_ by driving into deer. The way you worded it makes it sound like the deer are going man-hunting!

really makes me concerned for the high suicide rate in the deer population

Okay, I laughed outloud. Thank you, I'll try to word it better next time.

Thank you for your good nature on this topic. Driving is a fraught issue, in that we have all sorts of social attitudes around it that prevent us thinking critically about the necessity and costs of driving.

I've always been skeptical of driving, since I lost my best friend to it in high school, and saw others lose their friends. But. Since I've had children, I've been completely radicalized, and find it hard to even discuss the issue with a lot of people because my views have diverged so much from the mainstream. I unintentionally offend people all the time, and seeing your attitude gives me hope for finding more productive ways to express my views, like danny_codes did here.

In most deer / vehicle collisions, both are in motion so who hit whom is kinda moot. Deer are red-green colour blind and consequently there are certain scenarios where neither party sees the other until the last second.

If everyone involved were operating at the the same amount of momentum as the deer, not so many people or deer would be getting killed.

You never know. I had a deer come down on my car from above, so...

Draining lakes is a good topic right now.

Check out some articles about the floods in Canada right now; a big factor is the draining (it needs constant pumping) of a lake for farming.

draining did produce a lot of really productive fertile land. So maybe the cost benefit makes sense maybe you can do the math for us!

but we're starting to see the true cost of our actions

https://fvcurrent.com/article/sumas-lake-flooding-history/

Great points. Most people don’t understand the dangers of deer.

I grew up in a rural area of New York - from age 16-20, I hit or was hit by 5 deer in vehicles, including one that jumped off an embankment and landed on and went through my roof.

That wasn’t a uniquely unlucky track record either. If I recall correctly NY State Troopers were involved in ~500 collisions with deer annually at that time (mid 90s)

The intellect is always going to offer only a vastly over-simplified perspective.

But it's our #1 tool. So popular that we literally cannot imagine not using it 24-7.

And furthermore we invariably call that model of reality, "reality".

I mean that's just how it is.

Possible antidotes for this ubiquitous plague of profound blindness : drugs, art, disaster, meditation... What else?

A very nice video about the reintroduction of wolves in Yellowstone:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysa5OBhXz-Q

> Part of my incomplete BS

As opposed to part of your complete BS? :D (Sorry, couldn't resist!)