Academic literature on the topic 'John Stubley'

For decades, Carl Leopold had watched rafts of pine logs swaddled together like organ pipes, from a block to a half-mile in length, float down the Mississippi from the northern forests of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. By the turn of the century, these rafts had dwindled in frequency and length. Most of the two-to five-hundred-year-old white pine forests that had surrounded the Great Lakes and the eastern seaboard had been sliced to stubble, and logging companies were abandoning these leavings for the untouched forests of the West. Carl couldn’t help but notice. His business was built on wood, and if wood supplies ran out, so would his source of income. Greed and waste were the razors of the lumber trade, and Carl knew well that the forests of the West would fall to their blades if the public did not protest. Just as he monitored the number of ducks and geese he hunted, Carl believed in guarding the number of trees cut. So, despite his longing for Aldo to follow him in the family business, he unintentionally primed his eldest for a very different profession. Carl scanned newspapers and outdoors magazines seeking forest news, expounding on his findings to his eldest. Edwin Hunger tagged along on some of Carl’s outings with his sons and described them as “lectures on the move” in which the boys learned “much about the woods in general and how they should be managed and preserved.” While Aldo was in elementary school, Presidents Benjamin Harrison and Grover Cleveland set aside millions of acres out West in forest reserves. Members of the lumber, mining, and ranching industries responded with outrage; they wanted no limits on their use of public lands. But increasingly, concerned citizens were pushing for national laws to protect the remaining forests. One prophet in the fray was John Muir. He preached a gospel of preservation: Stop the wasteful destruction and let the forests manage themselves. Cut only populous common trees, and then only sparingly and carefully, “for every right use.”

Anything to be done about human populations necessarily depends on the will to do it. But what does the word will mean? Much has been written about it, but most of the rhetoric is nonsense. Rather than add one more explicit (and probably faulty) definition to the roster I will treat "will" ostensively, that is by pointing to passages that throw some light on its meaning (Box 18-1). The contributions of academics are commonly belittled by "practical" people, who trust more in the guidance of intuition. In a classic statement John Maynard Keynes argued that such guidance often came through unconscious memory. Because of the heavy demands on their time, politicians seldom read any work of substance after the age of thirty. Their responses are, Keynes said, distilled "from some academic scribbler a few years back." Looking at the situation with a different orientation in time, we argue that it is worthwhile for the inventor or scholar to try to get his views accepted by those who are young and powerless now because some of them may have political power two decades from now, when their days of leisurely reading are long past. In the unending development of human civilization what men think will happen can influence what does happen. The connection between the original ideas and their conversion into action is not rigid, determinative, or well understood: but there is a connection, and this appeals to the ambitions of social inventors. Consequently, as Dennis Gabor says, "The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented." As concerns the size of future populations, humanity's problem is to invent the answer. What size do we want human populations to be? On what assumptions do our answers rest? Precisely how can human consent be engineered? There is no pure population problem: the problem is one of population and resources. The well-being of a population depends on the ratio of the size of the population to the magnitude of available resources. What the future holds for population considered by itself is simple enough, as Malthus knew: the perpetual threat posed by population's ability to increase exponentially. But resources? Malthus stubbed his toe on this one, and people are still arguing. The arguments center around the concept of scarcity and the relevance of statistics to predicting the future.