Posted on 04/17/2003 10:57:21 PM PDT by kattracks
NO but they can and will call the county to come and cut the weeds because of the fire hazard. They will come out and cut it but I assume they charge the land owner for it.
My next door neighbor passed away 3 years ago. His inheriting relatives live in another state. They do not take care of this yard. The next house over is up for sale. They have done minor work on the unkempt yard to reduce the impact on the resale value of their house.
There is. I believe Carry_Okie has been talking about it.
They not only harm the real estate, they force the owners to considerable time and expense. Further, they hose chemicals all over the place in their defense.
As I see it there are several options:
I almost completely eradicated hemlock and I had the thistles on the run. I eradicated two infestations of starthistle. I would explain to anybody who would listen what the threats were. I did it all for free. I have asked for permission whenever I could find the landowner and once was threatened with being shot if I did it.
It was a big hassle, but if I could have just enlisted about three other people to help, we could have knocked it and kept the mowers out entirely. That would have released $45,000 per year for road maintenance that is currently being paid for mowing. The road is a disaster. It really needs serious drainage work and paving. We could really use that money.
These days I don't commute the road any more and I have a deal with the county that they won't mow anywhere near my place. Guess what's happened? In two years, the thistles are totally out of control, the starthistle has encroached two miles, the catsear has formed an absolute mat wherever the starthistle isn't and everybody who has a lawn is running around with every legal chemical available, which means every minimally effective and outrageously expensive chemical available. The hemlock is coming back (but thank God there's one guy who helps). The English ivy is headed down the watershed but hey, my place is still OK.
For the first time, this year, a high powered realtor approached me and asked if I would hold classes at the local school. Once these people understand the consequences of this mess what will they do? Will they scream to the torporviziers that they want the County to stop the weeds on the road? Fat chance of that ever happening in this financial climate.
The problem is that once the weed escapes the roadside, it's almost impossible to recover. The land is so steep and so wild with everything from poison oak, to yellowjackets, to rattlesnakes, to mountain lions, and soon BEARS, that I honestly don't know how we'll save it. It'll be just like Dog Gone's damned tumbleweeds.
Virtually everybody who lives here moved to this place because of its natural beauty, but with their unreasonable expectations of County services (such as road mowing) and because of the lack of accountability as landowners for their own damned roadside brush, they've brought this mess upon themselves. Maybe there's a reason the land was better off as rural ranch and farmland.
Now it will take real focus to fix it. I honestly don't know what kind of human density it will take to have sufficient focus to get it done, but if we don't, we can kiss off the asset everybody paid bucketloads of money to enjoy, not to mention the coastal ecosystem that supports human habitation in general.
If anybody doesn't believe that, consider the pictures of the hemlock above. Come on over and breathe deep!
I love it when lawyers reserve to themselves the power to define all terms of public debate as if the words don't have meaning by themselves to be found in a dictionary outside their tortured system of special interests.
I'm not playing. There is an objective accountability here, whether the law yet recognizes it or not (which it soon will in one form or another). If we don't get it handled as a matter of civil accountability, I promise you, the Federal government will shove a system down our throats. It will not work to satisfy its objective and will be so costly as to destroy a large fraction of our nation's currently depleted ability to support itself.
It's already passed the Senate, DG, and is now in the House as HR-119. Wake up.
It's not enough for you or anyone else to wave their arms and shout "negligence" even if you can point to specific harm. These are real-life legal principles which are part of our law, and you just can't blow them off like you're trying to blow me off.
It looks to me as if you are projecting. Show me where you have really addressed one point I've made.
Well you're gonna sure as hell get some real life legal principles here, and it's gonna come as a bureaucrat at your door instead of a knock from your neighbor operating from a negotiating position with a little leverage.
Take your pick.
Maybe instead you'll actually read that book and understand that it didn't have to be this way and that this all could have been handled by pricing, but one thing is certain, people are accountable for the way they use their property. It's either that, or we lose it to the government.
I'll be back this evening. I get to spend another afternoon... weeding.
Every suggestion or objection I've ever made regarding this topic has been utterly dismissed. Perhaps you have it all figured out, but there's not the slightest doubt that you believe so.
I read the first three chapters of your book, CO, and stopped when I came to an impressive but incomprehensible chart. It wasn't an easy read to that point. You had defined plenty of your own terms in the early chapters. I set it down, and although it's the lone book on my coffee table in the living room, I haven't picked it up lately. So shoot me.
I'm not an engineer. I'm a lawyer (you know, that "tortured system of special interests"). Perhaps we are trained to think and communicate in somewhat different ways. Perhaps we are far more in agreement than either of us realize. I certainly am in agreement with you that the current system of environmental regulation and law is actually harmful to the environment. And maybe if someone translates your book into legalese, I could debate it more to your satisfaction.
Fine, legal terms don't mean anything special,
It's that they do mean something special, as opposed to general, that I refused to allow the constraint. Legal terms are too malleable and narrow for purposes of debating a hypothetical change in the law. "Neglect" in that legal sense is defined as anything the lawers say it is. Lawyers use that kind of crap all the time when it comes to "Constitutional" and the general effect has been to ignore the intent of the Framers in deference to the guys in black robes, ignoring anyone else who reads the document who has an ounce of "common" sense.
There are all kinds of neglectful acts that aren't listed in a specific legal category as "neglect." It even varies by jurisdiction (see malleable) and certainly within case law. Some acts become legally neglectful by precedent subsequent to some lawyer "waving his arms" in a courtroom (see guys in black robes).
Given that the failure to control invasive weeds is on the cusp of falling under regulatory jurisdiction and has already met the test of significance in the Senate, for me to allow you to exclude it from a common understanding of "neglect" on the grounds of its current legal status just to allow you to get out of this debate thinking you won is a concession that I am not going to make. Given that status, my arguments have hardly been "arm waving."
and I haven't addressed a single point you raised in this thread. It seems as if it's always that way when we get into long discussions.
I listed several conditions for how civil management subsequent to a local ordinance was substantively and functionally different than Federal regulatory empowerment by an act of Congress. You not only ignored all of them and refused to concede the distinction, you made all sorts of unsupported and wild claims of how people would sue at the drop of a hat, all rational explanation of how high the threshhold was to the contrary, nor did you address the substantive creteria of that threshhold.
Every suggestion or objection I've ever made regarding this topic has been utterly dismissed. Perhaps you have it all figured out, but there's not the slightest doubt that you believe so.
I don't know about "ever." Your objections on this thread represented such extremes that they earned that kind of response, and it wasn't just from me. Nobody is going to spend $20,000 and goodness only knows how much time collecting and processing sufficient data to win a case on weeds (i.e., that the defendant is culpable and that the plaintiff has suffered harm), without having a damned good reason. If the potential plaintiffs are transmitting weeds off their own property they are unlikely to do so anyway.
I read the first three chapters of your book, CO, and stopped when I came to an impressive but incomprehensible chart.
That picture is nine chapters into the book. You might have missed something. Its only functional purpose for being in the book is to illustrate that systems engineers have devised a mathematics to manage complex system behavior (it's also a joke for the engineers out there, because the type of function in the picture is called a "plant" :-). There are VASTLY more complex transfer functions just like that one in any modern automobile and your understandable lack of training in control system mathematics doesn't keep you from driving one. The same would be true for a property owner wishing to market some intangible good from the land. They don't necessarily need to understand the math much less the biology; we'll have the software and GUIs for that later.
So, at some date in the future, the landowner might buy a package of sensors, wireless transmitters, and software to keep tabs on the performance of the asset under observation capable of confirming that it's meeting the terms of the contract services the land is supposedly providing. Without that contract however, the product would never happen and neither would the instruments and software.
That next chapter is all about how land uses might be bundled into marketable units, not about software or mathematics. There's no math in the book except for what you saw in the picture.
Remember: with this book, I had to convince people who are in academia that the principles and mechanics upon which its proposals lie are totally capable of taking on the outrageously and seductively complex task of modeling system behavior in real habitat as a product for sale. The essential point is that no matter how complex the system we are modeling may be, we're better building the simulation from the bottom up on real data, than we are by running the kind of top-down crap we've been seeing in the global warming debait. That's why the picture is there; it's a visual 2x4 between the eyes for the real control freaks.
The picture was located where it was because I had to start chapters on odd numbered pages and didn't want to pay for printing another signature of sixteen pages in order to put it somewhere else. It would have cost me another $800 in paper. Sorry for the confusion.
You had defined plenty of your own terms in the early chapters. I set it down, and although it's the lone book on my coffee table in the living room, I haven't picked it up lately. So shoot me.
Never once did you do what you did in college when you ran into something you didn't understand: you didn't ask a question. I guess that's more common in engineers because nobody gets through a technical curriculum that's worth a damn without going through routine total consternation bordering upon despair.
The drawing immediately precedes the chapter that explains how such land uses are bundled (as modeled by various types of descriptive means, including mathematical functions similar to the one in the picture). That explanation, includes a brief review of all those "interminable terms" defined in Part I, Chapter 1 and also relyies upon the definition of a control boundary in Part I Chapter 3 (in case you missed that). It's the second toughest chapter in the book and immediately precedes the fun part.
What the consternation you just expressed exposed is the need to tell the reader what I've just told you (about the transfer functions in your car). That's why I need people to ask questions. It helps me do my job of teaching people how it works. If you don't understand something, please ask questions.
I'm not an engineer. I'm a lawyer (you know, that "tortured system of special interests"). Perhaps we are trained to think and communicate in somewhat different ways. Perhaps we are far more in agreement than either of us realize. I certainly am in agreement with you that the current system of environmental regulation and law is actually harmful to the environment. And maybe if someone translates your book into legalese, I could debate it more to your satisfaction.
It'll be a cold day in hell before I do that, :-) and there's a pivotal reason that does touch upon the differences between your special education and mine. One is that I'm not qualified to do it. The main reason is that the book starts with principles and observations of reality that precede the ancient observations upon which the law is founded. In fact, it couldn't have been written unless I ignored specific constructs of ancient common law because ancient understandings of physical and economic reality upon which the law was founded are clearly wrong. I can thus understand why you find it so difficult to read: it's quite possibly ripping at the foundations of your understanding of the world based upon an understanding acquired through a legal education. The only lawyer I know who read this book easily was my patent attorney; all the rest were busy trying to fit its precepts into their understanding as founded in the law. The patent attorney has a degree in chemistry, so perhaps there is something in his education that helps him understand both perspectives. I've never talked with him about the influence of legal education upon perception though, and after this conversation, I surely will (as long as the meter isn't running; I'm broke). Such a conversation would help me a great deal in communicating with lawyers which is something I am eventually going to have to do a great deal if this idea is to be successful in restoring civic respect for the sanctity of unalienable private property rights. Perhaps we are touching upon the reason why I have seen so many web-hits on my patent application coming from law schools.
I hope you understand that I am not making light of this. In fact, this response reflects upon how seriously I do take your objections seriously and why I won't relent upon them insofar as the principles in the book are concerned one bit. The problem of mobility and continuity in either resources or nuisances runs very deep in legal history. It has been the source of endless regulatory patches and conflicting overlapping requirements. The power freaks have used those ambiguities to create and build the regulatory government that so threatens individual liberty (something both immiscible and irreconcileable with continuity). It will need enormous amounts of work to fix the errors in its foundations, but the work has to be done. As Garrett Hardin himself said, "the alternatives are too horrible to contemplate."
I had to go downstairs and check the bookmark. It is after Chapter 3, but what I hadn't noticed until now is that you have several Chapter 3s in the book, under several Parts. You wrote the book in outline form. I made it about half way through the book before I quit studying.
And that's what it is, studying. I don't mean that as a criticism, and I've told you before that the book would make an excellent textbook in any college course that you would teach. I don't remember what your objection to my observation was, although if it was that the chances you'd be allowed to teach such a course in your area are nil, I'd accept that. It never hurts to try, though.
In this thread, you initially proposed an ordinance, tossed in the threat of a Federal "solution" which I mostly ignored, and suggested several other alternatives. It was a moving target, and I generally focused my remarks on the obstacles to seeking a legal remedy to intrusive plants crossing property boundaries under US law today. I didn't argue with your points about the entry costs to prosecute such a claim, because I totally agree with that. That's such a given in the legal world that I didn't even consider the point important. By using the dandelion example, I was trying to reduce it to the absurd in order to demonstrate the legal principles which are at stake. You used a chart to make your point, and I used a lawn weed. Both are extremely peripheral to the main issues which are at the core of environmental and property right issues.
To be fair to you, I shouldn't have made any sweeping reference to "your system", or however I phased it earlier on this thread, because I haven't finished your book. I was responding only to what had been suggested on this thread. I do see problems with pursuing a purely legal approach based on either common law or an ordinance written by a County Board of Supervisors (or whatever your local equivalent is). But it's unreasonable for me to argue against your position when I haven't taken the effort to find out what that position is. Frankly, I don't even want to argue, although that is an instinctive reaction from any attorney. We get some sort of thrill from playing Devil's Advocate.
Preferably, I'll become your advocate, assuming I don't see any major flaws in the second half of your book. I don't think we're on opposite sides on this matter. I haven't disagreed with what I've seen yet. However, my brain is hard-wired differently than yours and I've found it difficult to understand some of the things you've written.
This thread has been motivation enough, though, to pick up the book again. I am ignoring that chart; you can't force me.
Scuse me fer buttin in, but... As mentally lazy as I am, he eventually forced me!!!
Wunce I plowed thru it, I felt like "The A-Team!" (ya know... "Don'tcha just love it when a plan comes together?")
With my forty years as a "died-in-the-wool" insurance man in all positions from field flunky to top executive and then... my recent trial by fire as County Supervisor in as huge a growth/no growth battle as Santa Cruz county, it held a special fascination for me which also helped keep me wading through the everglades to see where it (the book/process) was all gonna end up. (sorry for the longest sentence on record)
My initial kneejerk reaction is that I don't like aggravating activistist shreaking about their perception of some threat, or other, either.
It takes time to wake people up and they do NOT like to be disturbed!!! C.O. is probably first perceived as some kinda "weed nut!" I know he's not, but I'm just thinking how typical folks would react to him.
I've just about eradicated the vicious STAR THISTLE on my property with chemicals.
God, I hate that stuff.
And that's what it is, studying. I don't mean that as a criticism, and I've told you before that the book would make an excellent textbook in any college course that you would teach. I don't remember what your objection to my observation was, although if it was that the chances you'd be allowed to teach such a course in your area are nil, I'd accept that. It never hurts to try, though.
Actually, I have zero resistance to the book being used as a text, but I do have a problem with teaching it as a full course. I think a three to four day multi-media lecture presentation to introduce it while remaining available to students with questions would be a better use of my limited time and resources, especially because I am educating my kids at home. It might also work out better with the university bureaucracy because I have NO credential at the post-graduate level, so in that respect, you are correct in my presumptions: I consider the teaching option an unlikely outcome.
As you clearly understand, it is a book best adsorbed at an academic level and slowly. That would mean that I would have to get it accepted by some prestigious professor. I've been working at that for over two years now. It's been almost impossible to get these too busy academics to read it and it is so multidisciplinary in nature many academics find it intimidating and are afraid to comment on it (an outcome I hadn't considered).
The market I had really hoped for was as a book that isn't required for graduation but that people read during college to keep their brains alive. There were several such works I read while at school: Godel Escher Bach, Parable of the Tribes, Laws of the Game, and On War.
Natural Process is now being considered at University of Washington, Berkeley, University of Missouri, and New Mexico State University as a text. I would really like to get it into Stanford but so far no luck. There was a glimmer of hope at Yale, but that one fell through. So far, nobody among these various professors has finished it. The best I get is lip service, although some of these folks have become distant friends.
For me to get famous enough to have anybody listen it would have to be written up in an academic journal. Getting anybody to write something is even harder than getting them to read it.
Think tanks are even worse than univeristies. Those guys are so busy with their hustle that they don't have time to consider something completely new requiring deep consideration and thought. I continue to send them review copies, but I don't expect anything to come from it. One of them is hustling money to buy 500 copies for Congress, but that's been going on for over a year.
It's been a dispiriting process, so I guess you should understand that I get upset pretty easily when people talk about my system without having read the whole book. There are times when I get downright depressed about the whole thing. It's partly because I've done such a bad job of communicating it, but I think that it's also a problem with having used an exository book as the medium for communication. It was a necessary exercise toward thinking through the idea in the first place, but it is a poor tool for getting people to visualize the possibilities.
The people who have really clicked on what I'm talking about are either independent thinkers, engineers with an interest in nature, or people who have come here and walked my land with me. The latter is what most motivates me toward multi-media or a possible novel. The latter is what people have encouraged me to try, but it's something with which I have ZERO experience (such as in writing dialogue or developing characters) although they assure me that I do have the raw ability (as you'll see in Part IV). I have serious doubts that I could afford it without a publisher already lined up. I have considered looking for a co-author, but that just hasn't clicked.
Take your time in the chapter ahead. There are a lot of important concepts in it that at first seem obvious, but taken together, and when combined with the principles discussed in the chapters on insured certification, present possibilities that are not so obvious.
When it all clicks, It'll seem so obvious, you'll wonder why it was so difficult. You'll wonder why (or how) I managed to make it so diifcult. It is an obvious and simple idea, but one has to reorient one's own perpsetive in order to see it. That isn't so easy for some people because it involves dropping a number of cherished assumptions and loyalties.
It's an extremely long shot, I know, but maybe PBS could do something with your book. They made a wonderful series last year which you might have seen. It was called Commanding Heights and it was about economics. That is usually considered an abstract, sometimes tedious, and non-visual topic, but they turned it into engrossing television.
I'll let you know when I finish reading your book, and then perhaps we can discuss it more fully.
Now, go get some hand lotion.
The PBS series upon which I would like to model would be James Burke's Connections. His penchant for pulling together the seemingly disconnected with the occasional visual surprise was spell-binding.
I don't know where any of this is going to go, but it has to be done. Someone has to crack this "leave it alone" paradigm wide open.
Oh, that figures, LOL.
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