I’m reading John Cassidy’s remarkable book How Markets Fail (2009), which includes a brief aside on economist Kenneth Arrow‘s fundamental work on “‘social’ ordering” – the problem of “converting individual preferences over a set of [possibilities]…into a consistent ordering for society as a whole” (p. 62, in Cassidy’s paperback edition). To paraphrase Cassidy’s eloquent summary,…
Read MoreHidden scale dependency in conserving working woodlands
I’ve been sitting on this post a long time, in part because I haven’t known how to write it up. A couple of years ago, I wrote this manuscript and submitted it to two different peer-review journals (in series, not in parallel) as a sort of commentary piece. The first outlet rejected it with a…
Read MoreStacks on stacks on (sea)stacks
Back in May I was invited to the BBC Cymru Wales Broadcasting House in Llandaff, Cardiff, for a quick spot on Good Evening Wales (BBC Radio Wales FM), the “drivetime round-up of the day’s news, sport, weather and travel.” I was asked to comment on a story that had appeared earlier that day in the…
Read MoreTimber liquidation – an example up close and personal
In the late 1970s, when my parents bought the land I grew up on in rural midcoast Maine, two of the three adjoining woodlots had just been cut over. Along our back property line, ruts from the skidders are still evident after 40 years. Their scars, which I slopped around in as a kid, have…
Read MoreChannel migration and beach erosion at Popham Beach, Maine
I grew up going to Popham Beach and its wilder neighbor across the outlet of the Morse River, part of the Morse Mountain Conservation Area maintained by Bates College. In late February, 2010, the Morse River became a state-wide news highlight (in the paper and on the radio) after it avulsed at its outlet during…
Read MoreHarold Fisk’s #Mississippi
I didn’t discover Harold Fisk’s legendary maps of the Lower Mississippi channel belt until two years ago. Now I find myself returning to them with regularity, as to a favorite kitchen cookbook or to an album whose sounds keep getting richer. I encountered them through this New York Times article by Isabel Wilkerson, part of…
Read MoreContinental divides
I had the opportunity during holiday time with family back in the States to bop around in the Sangre de Cristo Range, near the Spanish Peaks, in southern Colorado. If you count the Atlantic Ocean as one (kind of) continental divide (lowercase) west of the UK, we were atop the next one over (uppercase) –…
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