In balance

Some actions are obviously good and right.  Looking more widely, it may be less obvious.

Our offices here at Five Colors are not far from the Potomac River, and we take advantage of the bike path along the river as often as work permits.  This is tidewater country, with wetlands on the banks of the rivers and into Chesapeake Bay.  Wetlands are good.  They provide places for waterfowl, transient and native.  They mitigate the effects of storms.  They provide habitat for young things that grow into river and ocean fish.  Trained ecologists can tell you more, some (pardonably) waxing eloquent and enchanting.

Swamps (to use another name) can also be less enticing.  The smell of decaying vegetation at low tide is not attractive.  And in the summer they breed insects, some of which bite and carry disease.  It’s hard to picture now, but malaria was endemic in Europe until the swamps were drained in recent centuries.  We need more wetland rather than less, but there are tradeoffs.

We’ve mentioned research done on the effect of a certain class of pesticide.  It’s clear that neonicitinoids are bad for bees, at least under most conditions, and it would be good to restrict or eliminate their use.  (Even if you never put honey in your tea, it’s certain that bees pollinate some crop important to you.)  But in this world no action is isolated.  What would the farmers use instead?  Would another chemical be worse for bees, or bad for another species, or have some other unexpected effect?  If no chemicals are used, what would be the effect of lower yields or more crop failures?  Would more land have to be turned over to crops, perhaps reducing wetland?  (We’re not sure that rapeseed in particular does well in reclaimed wetland, but this kind of tradeoff certainly exists.)

Take another example: trying to eat only locally-grown food.  Certainly it’s good to avoid the costs and pollution of transporting stuff across the country or across the world, if you can produce the same thing in your backyard.  Consider, though, that an industrial-scale farm will grow almost anything with less cost (in money, energy, pollution) per unit than a small, local establishment can.  Sometimes the savings will more than cover transportation.  (Industrial farms have other drawbacks, low biodiversity among others.  The tradeoffs are rarely simple.)

We’re not asserting that wetlands are bad, or that bees shouldn’t be protected from pesticides, or that you should patronize big supermarket chains exclusively.  We wish the Potomac were cleaner, so the swamps were more extensive, and we attend local farmers’ markets whenever possible.  But every action sets off others, and some aren’t desirable.  It complicates things, but ask yourself: what are the real tradeoffs?