James Watt Saw that “Environmental Extremists” Want “Centralized Planning and Control of the Society”

(p. A20) James G. Watt, who as President Ronald Reagan’s first Interior secretary tilted environmental policies sharply toward commercial exploitation, touching off a national debate over the development or preservation of America’s public lands and resources, died on May 27 [2023] in Arizona.

. . .

In one of his first official pronouncements, Mr. Watt declared that Interior Department policies over the years had swung too far toward conservation under the influence of “environmental extremists,” and away from the development of public resources that he said was needed for economic growth and national security.

He soon transferred control of many of the resources to private industry, restoring what he regarded as a proper balance to the nation’s patrimony. He opened most of the Outer Continental Shelf — nearly all of America’s coastal waters — to drilling leases by oil and gas companies. He widened access to coal on federal lands, and eased restrictions on strip-mining, which scarred landscapes and was cheaper than cutting deep mine shafts.

He increased industry access to wilderness areas for drilling, mineral mining and lumbering; gave private owners of hotels, restaurants and shops wider rights in national parks; curtailed the program to protect endangered species; cut funds to acquire land for national and state parks; and added money to build roads, bridges, hotels and other man-made structures in the parks.

. . .

He accused his critics of using sham environmental concerns to achieve “centralized planning and control of the society.” He told Business Week: “Look what happened to Germany in the 1930s. The dignity of man was subordinated to the powers of Nazism. The dignity of man was subordinated in Russia. Those are the forces that this thing can evolve into.”

For the full obituary, see:

Robert D. McFadden. “James G. Watt, 85, Dies; Secretary Who Favored Developing Wilderness.” The New York Times (Saturday, June 10, 2023): A20.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date June 8, 2023, and has the title “James G. Watt, Polarizing Interior Secretary Under Reagan, Dies at 85.”)

Xi’s Communist Assertion of Control of Private Firms Dulls the Entrepreneurial Innovation and “Unbridled Energy That Powered China’s Explosive Growth”

(p. A3) Just a few weeks later, Mr. Xi personally intervened to block the $34 billion initial public offering of one of China’s biggest private firms, Ant Group, partly out of concerns it was too focused on its own profits rather than the state’s goal of controlling financial risk.

The message isn’t lost on entrepreneurs, who are reorienting their businesses to appease the state or giving up on private enterprise altogether.

“For us small businesses, we have no choice but to follow the party,” says Li Jun, a 50-year-old owner of a fish-farming business in the eastern Jiangsu province. “Even so, we’re not benefiting at all from government policies.”

Mr. Li recently closed down a seafood-processing plant because it couldn’t get bank loans—a persistent problem for private firms, despite Beijing’s repeated pledges to make credit more available for them.

The risk for China is that Mr. Xi’s vigorous assertion of statist prerogatives will dull the kind of innovation, competitive spirit and unbridled energy that powered China’s explosive growth in recent decades. The economic policies that helped nurture e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., tech conglomerate Tencent Holdings Ltd. and other global success stories seem to be at an end, say economists inside and outside China. As a result, they say, Chinese companies are becoming less like American ones, which are driven by market forces and depend on private innovation and consumption.

. . .

In one of the clearest signs of China’s direction, more state firms are gobbling up private companies, redefining a government initiative called “mixed-ownership reform.” The original idea, dating back to the late 1990s, was to encourage private capital to invest in state firms, bringing more private-sector acumen to China’s often-bloated state-owned enterprises.

Now, under Mr. Xi, the process often works the other way around, with big state companies absorbing smaller ones to keep them going, and reconfiguring the smaller firms’ strategies to serve the state.

For the full story, see:

Lingling Wei. “Xi Ramps Up Control of China’s Private Sector.” The Wall Street Journal (Friday, Dec. 11, 2020): A3.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date December 10, 2020, and has the same title as the print version.)

Crisis in Wind Industry Due to Inflation, Regulatory, and Grid Connection Hurdles

(p. B5) The wind business, viewed by governments as key to meeting climate targets and boosting electricity supplies, is facing a dangerous market squall.

After months of warnings about rising prices and logistical hiccups, developers and would-be buyers of wind power are scrapping contracts, putting off projects and postponing investment decisions. The setbacks are piling up for both onshore and offshore projects, but the latter’s problems are more acute.

In recent weeks, at least 10 offshore projects totaling around $33 billion in planned spending have been delayed or otherwise hit the doldrums across the U.S. and Europe.

“At the moment, we are seeing the industry’s first crisis,” said Anders Opedal, chief executive of Equinor, in an interview.

. . .

The holdup of projects that could generate 11.7 gigawatts—enough to power roughly all Texas households and then some—likely pushes 2030 offshore wind targets out of reach for the Biden administration and European governments.

. . .

(p. B11) The list of woes is long: inflation, supply-chain backlogs, rising interest rates, long permit and grid connection timelines. The increasing pace of the energy transition has created a loop of escalating costs.

For the full story, see:

Mari Novik and Jennifer Hiller. “Wind Power Stumbles as Problems Mount.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, Aug. 8, 2023): B5 & B11.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Aug. 7, 2023, and has the title “Wind Industry in Crisis as Problems Mount. The online version says that the title of the print version is “Wind Power Stumbles as Cost, Logistical Problems Mount.” But my print version of the national edition had the shorter title “Wind Power Stumbles as Problems Mount.”)

Will Humans Flourish if Easements Restrict How Inherited Property Is Used?

My mentor at Wabash College, Ben Rogge, was a friend of Pierre Goodrich, the founder of Liberty Fund. They both were great admirers of Adam Smith. Adam Smith believed that inherited property should not be encumbered with restrictions on how future generations used the property. The practice is sometimes called ‘ruling with a dead hand.’ When Liberty Fund was proposed, Rogge suggested that it be set up so that all of the funds would be exhausted at some pre-established time after Goodrich’s death. On this one proposal, Rogge failed to convince Goodrich of the wisdom of Adam Smith’s advice.

Rogge was a supporter of Schumpeter’s idea that we flourish through creative destruction. Progress through creative destruction is harder to accomplish if inherited property is encumbered by ‘ruling with a dead hand.’ Rogge feared that as the decades passed, the inheritors of Liberty Fund would eventually, and substantially, diverge from Goodrich’s original values and hopes. Liberty Fund money helped Rogge make a movie on Adam Smith. Rogge sadly joked that eventually the inheritors of Liberty Fund would probably support making a movie on a famous socialist.

(I can’t remember the name of the socialist who Rogge jokingly mentioned, but I vaguely, vaguely think it might have been Ethel Rosenberg.)

(I base the lines above on my memories of comments by Ben Rogge in conversations and lectures.)

(p. M1) “After me, there won’t be any others,” says Roland Reisley, absorbing what it means to be the last original occupant of a Frank Lloyd Wright house. Reisley is sitting in his hexagonal living room on a rocky hill near Pleasantville, N.Y.

. . .

(p. M4) Despite the house’s pristine condition, the one thing he can’t do is turn it into a museum. It is part of a Westchester County neighborhood laid out by Wright himself in the late 1940s. The community, which Wright named Usonia, never achieved its founders’ ambitions—to become a kind of exurban co-op where everything was owned in common—but it is still a tightly knit community of 47 homes with shared amenities such as a pool and tennis courts. “The residents would not agree to a museum,” Reisley says.

. . .

But if he can’t turn it into a museum, he can execute a preservation easement, a legal document that will prevent future owners from making changes to the house.

. . .

Asked why he hasn’t executed an easement yet, after talking about doing so for years, Reisley says he is “trying to find language that protects what’s important but allows for some reasonable changes to be made. I am going to do it,” Reisley says. “I just haven’t gotten around to doing it. I’m a procrastinator.”

Then, too, his only living child has expressed concerns. Robert Reisley, a 65-year-old entrepreneur and private-equity investor in Philadelphia, says, “I don’t have an issue with a preservation easement on the exterior of the house.” But he says it’s possible he and his wife, or one of their adult children, might want to live in the house. “We might need to make a few necessary changes to the interior. And we might not be able to get permission. That’s my hesitation.”

For example, he says, “The hallway to the bedrooms is very dark. Wright was practical. If we’d asked him, he would have said, ‘Put a skylight there.’ But Wright’s not around, and the conservancy might not allow it.”

. . .

In Minneapolis, the Olfelt house was on the market for two years before a local couple with grown children bought it for $1.2 million in the Spring of 2018. Several months later, they filed plans with the city to add a 1,500-square-foot, $2 million wing to the original 2,600-square-foot house and alter some of the original interiors.

. . .

The Juneks created a website, olfelthouse.info, to explain their intentions. “The impetus for the addition and the minimal interior renovations,” they wrote, “is to address the meager space allocated to the master bedroom, to expand the kitchen to accommodate a large multi-generation family, and to ensure that the home be comfortable, accessible, and safe for aging in place.” The renovation was designed by the New York architecture firm Thread Collective. Photos on the firm’s website show a dining room in a space that used to contain Wright’s tiny galley kitchen, and a spacious new kitchen in what used to be two children’s bedrooms. The addition, which contains a master-bedroom suite over a new garage, is visible mainly from the back of the house. “We have now been living in the house for three years, are very happy with the results of the project,” John Junek wrote in an email.

. . .

Robert and Mary Walton chose not to burden their six children with a preservation easement, the same choice made by Gerte Shavin, Bette Pappas, and the Olfelts. All of them died knowing they had no control over the future of their houses. “Its fate is entirely in the hands of the next owner,” Paul Olfelt told me in a phone message after vacating his house in 2017. Sounding emotional, he added, “I think we were good stewards of the house, and we assume that anyone who buys it will be the same.”

Reisley still has a chance to execute an easement. Will he? The easement would operate in perpetuity, and perpetuity, the 99-year-old homeowner says, “is a very long time.”

For the full story, see:

Fred A. Bernstein. “The Last Original Owner of a Frank Lloyd Wright House.” The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, June 30, 2023): M1 & M4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated June 27, 2023, and has the title “Frank Lloyd Wright Built 120 Homes Near the End of His Life. Just One Original Owner Remains.”)

Fred Siegel Went from Liberal to Conservative During the New York Blackout of 1977 When Looters Burned Stores, Restaurants, and Civility

(p. B10) Fred Siegel, a passionate urban historian whose rejection of the liberal establishment’s response to crime, poverty and public civility transformed him from a spokesman for the Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern in 1972 to a voter for Donald J. Trump in 2020, died on Sunday at his home in Brooklyn.

. . .

His ideological evolution was evidenced in the titles of his books: “The Future Once Happened Here: New York, D.C., L.A., and the Fate of America’s Big Cities” (1997); “The Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York, and the Genius of American Life” (2005), which he wrote with Harry Siegel; and “The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class” (2014).

. . .

And, perhaps more in sorrow than in anger, he quoted former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York as saying that his fellow Democrats had “rewarded the articulation of moral purpose more than the achievement of practical good.”

. . .

. . . in 1991, Mr. Siegel argued: “Middle-class citizens, rightly or wrongly, have become convinced that modern liberal urban government is mostly about letting the poor misbehave at the expense of the middle class, and paying public employees very well to deliver services very poorly.”

. . .

Mr. Siegel’s metamorphosis — from a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, a fellow of the Progressive Policy Institute and a voter for the independent John Anderson in 1980 and the Democrat Walter F. Mondale in 1984 (each time voting against the Republican Ronald Reagan) — reached its apogee (depending on one’s political point of view) in 2020.

After a lifetime of sitting out presidential elections or mostly voting for losers, he cast his ballot for Mr. Trump.

He listed his reasons for doing so in 2020 in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, lauding Mr. Trump for “crushing ISIS, pulling us out of the Iran nuclear deal, moving our embassy to Jerusalem and making fools of those people who insist that the Palestinian issue is at the heart of the Arab-Israeli conflict.” He also favored Mr. Trump, he said, for displaying an “ability to withstand a prolonged coup attempt by the Democrats and the media” and for championing “bourgeois values.”

In an online tribute this week, Brian C. Anderson, the editor of City Journal, wrote that Mr. Siegel had identified what he called a “riot ideology” that took hold of public officials in major cities, “making them reluctant to confront public disorder and crime for fear of violent opposition.”

. . .

The essayist Irving Kristol famously defined a neoconservative, a breed Mr. Kristol epitomized and popularized, as “a liberal who has been mugged by reality.” But Mr. Siegel’s conversion wasn’t the result of a single personal experience, his son said — even though a thief once grabbed a bag of $100 worth of kosher meat from him on the subway and several of the family’s cars were stolen.

If Mr. Siegel approached a philosophical epiphany, though, it was during the blackout of 1977, when looters raged through parts of Brooklyn, stripping stores of merchandise and setting them ablaze in a night of rioting.

Mr. Siegel, whose favorite restaurant, Jack’s Pastrami King, was among the places destroyed, reflected in 2017: “The city itself had been mugged, I realized. I’m still haunted by that moment from 40 years ago, when my political re-education began.”

For the full obituary, see:

Sam Roberts. “Fred Siegel, 78, Urban Historian And a Former Liberal, Is Dead.” The New York Times (Saturday, May 13, 2023): B10.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary was updated May 15, 2023, and has the title “Fred Siegel, Urban Historian and a Former Liberal, Is Dead at 78.”)

The most recent of Siegel’s books mentioned above is:

Siegel, Fred. The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class. New York: Encounter Books, 2014.

An Hawaiian Wants Land She Can Own and Control, Even if Not in Hawaii

(p. 1) When Pauline Kauinani Souza was a child in Hawaii, she spent early mornings watering her grandfather’s watermelons and papaya trees.

Her family lived frugally, eating homemade bread and heating water over a fire for bathing. But the no-frills life came with the ultimate perk: living near the beach and drifting off to sleep at night to the sound of waves gently crashing on the shore.

Now, at 80, Ms. Souza lives in Las Vegas, a desert city of neon reinvention far from the ocean and her ancestral home. It is not paradise, but it is full of Native Hawaiians like her who have flocked there in recent years for the endless entertainment, reasonable cost of living and something few people can find in Hawaii: a house they can afford.

“I own it outright,” she said proudly of her two-bedroom, ranch-style home in Las Vegas. “In Hawaii, there aren’t many people who can say that.”

Increasingly, Las Vegas is drawing Hawaiians who came to visit and decided to stay, convinced that an affordable faux version of the islands is better than an endless struggle to make ends meet in the real thing.

Between 2011 and 2021, the population of Native Hawaiians and (p. 19) other Pacific Islanders in Clark County, Nev., which includes Las Vegas, grew by about 40 percent, for a total of nearly 22,000 people. That was the greatest number of newcomers in that demographic in any county outside Hawaii, according to population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. In that same period, the total population of Clark County grew by about 17 percent.

For many, the draw is real estate: Houses in the Las Vegas area have a median listing price of about $460,000, compared with about $800,000 in Honolulu, according to Federal Reserve Economic Data.

Americans migrating for cheaper housing is not unusual, as seen most dramatically in the decades-long shift from the Northeast to the Sunbelt. But this migration from the impossibly lush natural landscape of the islands to the brash desert of Las Vegas is a particularly vivid glimpse of how the search for housing remakes the country in sometimes surprising ways.

. . .

In 2022, Hawaii had the highest cost of living out of all 50 states and the District of Columbia, according to data from the Council for Community and Economic Research. The state imports the vast majority of its food, making everyday groceries especially expensive. And strict regulations on building have contributed to housing shortages and prices out of reach for many.

For the full story, see:

Eliza Fawcett and Hana Asano. “Priced Out of Paradise’ But Hawaiians Thrive in Desert.” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, May 21, 2023): 1 & 19.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date May 20, 2023, and has the title “There’s No Ocean in Sight. But Many Hawaiians Make Las Vegas Their Home.” The online version says that the print version has the title “Desert Provides A New Paradise For Hawaiians” but my national print version has the title “They’re ‘Priced Out of Paradise’ But Hawaiians Thrive in Desert.”)

William F. Buckley, Sr. Spent $100,000 to Fund His Son’s Entrepreneurial Start-Up: National Review

In my Openness book, I give reasons why risky innovative start-ups at fragile early stages almost always need to be substantially self-funded. When close relatives invest, I include that as self-funding.

(p. A15) . . . “William F. Buckley Sr.: Witness to the Mexican Revolution, 1908-1922,” [is] a fascinating if uneven book by the independent historian John A. Adams Jr.

. . .

The business climate in Mexico was promising for foreigners like the Buckleys, thanks to the pro-development policies of its autocratic president, Porfirio Díaz, who would rule the country for more than three decades.

Buckley’s prominence among the American expatriate community made him a natural conduit between officials in the U.S. and Mexico once the latter country was plunged into chaos following the ouster of Díaz in 1911. Buckley was Zelig-like, cropping up repeatedly at key moments. He visited the U.S. Embassy in February 1913 during the Decena Tragíca (Ten Tragic Days), when Francisco Madero, Díaz’s successor, was overthrown in a coup led by Gen. Victoriano Huerta, instigating a spasm of violence that killed thousands in Mexico City.

. . .

Buckley favored Huerta, serving as the regime’s legal counsel in negotiations with the U.S. aimed at preventing hostilities between the two nations. He was thus dismayed by the ascendance of Venustiano Carranza and, later, Álvaro Obregón. Both leaders endorsed the Mexican Constitution of 1917, including Article 27, which asserted national ownership of natural resources while circumscribing the economic power of the church. These provisions horrified Buckley, who was a staunch believer in free-market capitalism as well as a devout Roman Catholic. In the bulletin of the American Association of Mexico, an advocacy group he founded in 1919, Buckley denounced the “dangerous Bolshevist movement” that had taken root in Mexico.

. . .

. . ., Mr. Adams consulted with several Buckley family members, including a descendant based in Mexico City, as well as Judge James L. Buckley, the sole survivor among the 10 children born to Will and his wife, Aloise. Judge Buckley, who recently celebrated his 100th birthday, contributed a foreword acknowledging the importance of Mexico to the family’s understanding of itself, writing that “it had somehow permeated our DNA.”

. . .

As another of his offspring once said, Buckley’s experience in Mexico “deepened his frontier suspicions of autocratic [leaders] (and big government in general), and this attitude dyes all his children strongly.” Surely that was true of Buckley’s favorite son, William F. Buckley Jr., who, after serving a short stint with the CIA in Mexico City (he, too, was fluent in Spanish), founded National Review in 1955, which remains one of the leading voices of the conservative movement. The elder Buckley helped fund his son’s upstart venture with a $100,000 contribution from a fortune that traced its origins to Mexico during the most tumultuous period of that nation’s history.

For the full review, see:

Andrew R. Graybill. “BOOKSHELF; Conservatism’s Mexican Roots.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, March 27, 2023): A15.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed word, added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date March 26, 2023, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘William F. Buckley Sr.’ Review: Conservatism’s Mexican Roots.”)

The book under review:

Adams, John A., Jr. William F. Buckley Sr.: Witness to the Mexican Revolution, 1908–1922. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2023.

Initially Socialist Israeli Kibbutzim Gradually Embraced Entrepreneurial Capitalism

(p. C4) Today, in a break with . . . [its] communal past, Ms. Barnea’s kibbutz is farming for profit, and its main cash crop is medical marijuana. She recently retired from managing the greenhouse that grows the drug.

The shift at Kibbutz Beit HaEmek is just the latest sign of how much Israel’s kibbutzim are changing, as both Israel and the kibbutz movement move away from their socialist roots to become more entrepreneurial and profit-driven.

“We have to survive,” said Ms. Barnea, now 64, walking around the greenhouse as the smell of marijuana wafted past.

. . .

Facing a bleak financial future, young people abandoned the kibbutzim in the 1990s. Meanwhile, Israel’s vibrant technology sector took off, providing an additional pull away from the communes.

To reverse the exodus, Israel’s kibbutzim dismantled much of their socialist model. In 1995, Kibbutz Merom HaGolan became the first to go through a so-called privatization process, paying members salaries on a scale.

Today, most kibbutzim have undergone some form of privatization. Many members now earn salaries outside the kibbutz but pay taxes for the community’s upkeep. New members can take out mortgages with banks and buy land on the kibbutz for their homes.

. . .

Only about 40 kibbutzim still share resources and give equal allowances as envisioned in the original model. Most of these communities had created successful businesses that helped them maintain the communal way of living.

One such community is Kibbutz Sdot Yam, on Israel’s central coast between Tel Aviv and Haifa. In the 1980s, the kibbutz opened a factory that constructed quartz surfaces for tables and floors. Despite that venture’s success, the kibbutz is now considering whether to allow members—most of whom work outside the community—to earn their own salaries, rather than sharing them with the commune, said Doron Stansill, a 47-year-old member.

For the full essay, see:

Rory Jones. “The Kibbutz in a Capitalist Israel.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Oct. 14, 2017 ): C4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the essay has the date Oct. 13, 2017 , and has the title “The Kibbutz Movement Adapts to a Capitalist Israel.”)

Forest Service Banned Private Logging to Thin Forests; Then Started an Uncontrolled “Controlled” Fire to Thin Same Forests

(p. A11) SEATTLE — In a high-altitude landscape parched by drought, U.S. Forest Service crews took advantage of some stable weather in eastern Oregon this month and prepared to burn off some thick underbrush and shrubbery at the edge of the Blue Mountains, part of an expanding strategy to remove forest fuel that can turn fires into conflagrations.

The target was a 300-acre tract of woodlands in the Malheur National Forest, adjacent to a private cattle ranch. But the controlled fire that the crew set on the afternoon of Oct. 19 [2022] jumped a containment line and charred through a portion of the nearby ranch. Two sisters from the family-owned Windy Point Cattle Company made their way through the smoke-filled landscape for a furious confrontation with the Forest Service’s “burn boss,” Ricky Snodgrass, and then dialed 911.

What happened next, federal officials say, was highly unusual in the modern history of the Forest Service and its programs for managing federal lands across the country. The Grant County sheriff arrived on scene, placed Mr. Snodgrass in handcuffs and sent him to jail.

. . .

With climate change driving an increase in the size, frequency and ferocity of wildfires, the Forest Service adopted a plan this year to step up those prescribed burns, and also more aggressively thin forest stands with strategic logging programs.

. . .

The Forest Service’s operations in this part of Oregon have long been the subject of contention in Grant County, where the U.S. government manages some 60 percent of the land.

Locals have long stewed over federal land management policies, including logging restrictions that have contributed to declines in timber production and the shuttering of the region’s sawmills.

For the full story, see:

Mike Baker. “A Strategy to Protect Forests Reopens Old Wounds in Oregon.” The New York Times (Saturday, October 29, 2022): A11.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Oct. 28, 2022, and has the title “Prescribed Burns Are Encouraged. Why Was a Federal Employee Arrested for One?”)

U.S. Forest Service Started the Most Destructive Fire in New Mexico History

(p. A10) MORA, N.M. — It started small, with a team of federal employees using drip torches to ignite a prescribed burn in the Santa Fe National Forest, aimed at thinning out dense pine woodlands.

But as April [2022] winds howled across the mountains of brittle-dry northern New Mexico, driving the fire over its boundaries and soon into the path of another out-of-control prescribed burn, it grew to become one of the U.S. Forest Service’s most destructive mistakes in decades.

The resulting merger of those two burns, called the Calf Canyon/Hermit’s Peak blaze, now ranks as the largest wildfire in New Mexico’s recorded history. Still burning in a zone of more than 341,000 acres — larger than the city of Los Angeles — the fire has destroyed hundreds of homes and displaced thousands in a region where Hispanic villagers settled centuries ago.

The painful losses have created a backlash against the Forest Service and provided a pivotal test case for how the authorities react when a prescribed burn goes badly wrong.

“I hope those responsible for this catastrophic failure are not sleeping at night,” said Meg Sandoval, 65, whose family settled in the region in the 1840s. She is now living out of a pickup camper shell after her home in Tierra Monte was destroyed by the fire.

“They ruined the lives of thousands of people,” she said.

. . .

. . . like many of her constituents, Ms. Leger Fernández said she was furious to learn that the Forest Service had started both blazes. “How could you make the same mistake twice in the same neighborhood?” she asked.

. . .

Patrick Dearen wrote a book about the Pecos River, whose headwaters are threatened by the Calf Canyon/Hermit’s Peak fire. He noted that in the 1890s, the forest around the river that is now designated as national forest was made up mostly of “old burns,” as well as meadows, open parks and barren peaks.

An inventory in 1911 showed that a typical acre of ponderosa pine habitat had 50 to 60 trees. By the end of the 20th century, Mr. Dearen said, after a long national policy of suppressing natural fires, that had skyrocketed to 1,089 trees per acre.

“Nature had done its job well, but no one recognized it,” Mr. Dearen said. Still, if the government is going to assume nature’s role of thinning out forests, it needs to own up to its mistakes, he said.

“If an individual goes out and starts a fire on purpose and it gets away, he’s probably going to go to jail,” he said. “The federal government needs to assume responsibility to the people.”

For the full story, see:

Simon Romero. “Thousands Lost Everything In Fire Set by Forest Service.” The New York Times (Thursday, June 23, 2022): A10.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated June 24, 2022, and has the title “The Government Set a Colossal Wildfire. What Are Victims Owed?”)

The book by Dearen mentioned above is:

Dearen, Patrick. Bitter Waters: The Struggles of the Pecos River. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016.

Open-Source Volunteers “May Not Have Sufficient Resources to Prioritize Security”

(p. A15) The recent discovery of a vulnerability in Apache log4j, a widely used open-source software tool, has exposed a significant security issue with our digital world.

. . .

We’ve had security issues with open-source software occur every couple of years, including the Heartbleed Bug in 2014 and the npm Left-Pad Vulnerability in 2016. According to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, in 2020, two of the most routinely exploited information-technology vulnerabilities were related to open source.

One of the primary reasons for these vulnerabilities is that popular open-source software such as log4j is often maintained by volunteers who may not have sufficient resources to prioritize security. But these volunteers aren’t to blame. What appears to be an esoteric technical problem is actually one of funding and the sustainability of the entire digital ecosystem. While some open-source projects are supported by companies and nonprofit organizations, other pieces of code are maintained and released by people who struggle to monetize their work. The open-source security problem is, at its core, a tragedy of the commons. When the underlying health of our digital infrastructure is unsound, the whole system suffers.

For the full commentary, see:

Eric Schmidt and Frank Long. “Protect Open-Source Software.” The Wall Street Journal (Friday, January 28, 2022): A15.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date January 27, 2022, and has the same title as the print version.)