Thought Terminating CAOs

With respect to the CAOs, many of our residents have asked for a long time, "What is the problem?" We have been at a loss to understand why new restrictive environmental regulations are needed here, of all places.  Why would we need giant buffer strips more suited to areas of large-scale crop production?

The truth is that none of us in the San Juans are causing any widespread problems to the San Juans. Global and regional problems may affect us, but the scale of those problems far outweighs our poor power to add or detract.

When the logic of the CAO proponents has been exhausted, they usually resort to a thought terminating cliche. We have heard them say, "Our hands are tied", "We have no choice", or my personal favorite, "It won't be that bad". 

These easily memorized and easily expressed statements are used by the speaker to quell their own cognitive dissonance, and they are symptomatic of an absence of thought. Thought-terminating cliches are just one more example of a seemingly endless stream of fallacious arguments used to advance the CAOs through our local system. When it comes right down to it, there sometimes seems to be little support at all for many CAO proposals except fallacious arguments. When we hear our public officials say things like "Our hands are tied", they are using a convenient phrase to advance the CAOs and end discussion, not make a point.

This is where our public officials have really let us down, in my opinion. When we hear them use celestial teapot arguments, thought terminating cliche's, and all the other gimmicks of avoidance and distraction, we know we are dealing with folks inculcated in a belief system. We are dealing with zombies and the psychology of totalism. 

The question really isn't "What is the problem?" anymore.  The question is "What is the problem with our public officials?"

Feeling himself unable to escape from forces more powerful than himself, he subordinates everything to adapting himself to them. He becomes sensitive to all kinds of cues, expert at anticipating environmental pressures, and skillful in riding them in such a way that his psychological energies merge with the tide rather than turn painfully against himself. This requires that he participate actively in the manipulation of others, as well as in the endless round of betrayals and self-betrayals which are required. But whatever his response - whether he is cheerful in the face of being manipulated, deeply resentful, or feels a combination of both - he has been deprived of the opportunity to exercise his capacities for self-expression and independent action. - Psychology of Totalism

Venn Diagramming Our CAO Woes

Many of you already may be familiar with the clever, cheeky graphs of the Indexed blog. Below is my effort to cast our CAO woes in a similar vein.

Why Nitrogen?

At a March 6 meeting of the Planning Commission, Mike Carlson asked Dr. Paul Adamus a simple two-word question, "Why nitrogen?"  Mike was referring to the fact that Dr. Adamus' buffer proposal in the wetlands CAO draft had used nitrogen as a proxy for all other pollutants. Why did Dr. Adamus base all his wetland buffer calculations on nitrogen?

You can watch Dr. Adamus' reply in this clip. Referring to the 2007 Mayer meta-analysis of nitrogen, Dr. Adamus says, "Simply because it's the only published meta-analysis that there is out there. It's Best Available Science, so that's basically why we went with that."

This is not the first time Dr. Adamus has made this claim. Frequently, he has said that there is one and only one published meta-analysis that evaluated the relationship between buffers and pollutants: the Mayer 2007 paper which examined nitrogen.

The troubling aspect to Dr. Adamus' answer is that it is not true, and he apparently knew it wasn't true.  A few weeks after the March 6 meeting, a "new" meta-analysis of buffers with respect to four pollutants came to the public's attention, although it really wasn't such a new paper after all.  The peer-revewed "Zhang paper" had first been published online in 2009 and in print in 2010, old enough to make its way into our County's adopted Best Available Science (BAS).  When confronted with the Zhang paper at the next Planning Commission meeting, Dr. Adamus admitted that he knew of it, knew it was in our BAS, but preferred the Mayer paper, because, he added, Mayer's paper had a larger sample size.

Regardless of his reasons for preferring Mayer over Zhang, it does not explain why Dr. Adamus never mentioned the Zhang paper. Never.  It does not not explain why he repeatedly said there was only one published meta-analysis when he apparently knew that wasn't a true statement.

It turns out, had Dr. Adamus' buffer proposal been based on the Zhang paper instead of the Mayer paper, the resulting proposed buffer calculations might have resulted in smaller buffers.  As a result, I have a new question for Dr. Adamus?

Why hide Zhang?