To the editor:
As a follow-up to Robert Moore’s excellent article on resource sustainability [WWF June 05], I offer a public policy explanation with three historical references from my home state of Connecticut. Being rather small and lacking direct ocean access, its ports were not able to sustain the colonial “slash and burn” agricultural economies, which were dependent on our thin glacier soils. Connecticut’s farm economy would collapse several times as the soils were systematically exhausted (read unsustainable) and farmers migrated westward. Forestry then supplanted those new dollars lost by agriculture so that by the time General Lee was surrendering at Appomattox, Connecticut’s landscape looked like the moon. Connecticut’s forestry, it seemed, had its limits.
As the farm economy again reeled, the state looked to manufacturing to fill the economic void. With the watersheds altered and streams culverted to provide water power to fuel these economic marvels, this led to devastating washouts, dam failures and catastrophic flooding losses. What was missing was a public policy balance. We learned that the mostly thin glacial soil could sustain dairy farmers, that managing forests for the long term required selective cutting and water diversion had long-term resource implications. These three examples of resource exploitation proved to be not sustainable but at the time, were publicly acceptable, if not encouraged. In the end, the “social cost” would far exceed the “capitalization benefit.”
Today, we still seek to restore watersheds and natural drainage that was destroyed two centuries ago, and the cost in today’s dollars is tremendous! The completion of dams across the Connecticut River for economic development was once celebrated as a civic event. Now, the destruction of these same dams is celebrated as their habitats become part of the Fish and Wildlife Service’s effort to restore the Connecticut River salmon run. Now that’s a change in public opinion! Unfortunately, the last free-run salmon caught in the Connecticut River was in 1798. The fishery won’t be fully restored until 2090 (estimated). It seems resource sustainability, public opinion policy and economics are balanced by time, not people. History shows that today’s economic necessity is often tomorrow’s environmental nightmare. At least this was the case in Connecticut.
Timothy C. Visel
Ivoryton, CT