What do you think about paying farmers for water conservation? Oh my gosh! Now RMPBS is fact-checkin! The availability heuristic.
What do you think about paying farmers for water conservation?
The Aspen Times article linked below gives a pretty lengthy profile of a Wyoming landowner who is not using her water rights as part of a water conservation program (I assume temporarily, not much details about the program are forthcoming in the article and I think the details depend on the agreement between landowner and government which may change on a case-by-case basis).
That is, she sold her water to the government and is not growing anything.
I realize that this is in Wyoming, but the program covers more than just Wyoming. I have read (and posted about) efforts like this on the Western Slope. I'm always interested in this particular topic because of my own ambivalence about it.
I thought I would also open this up to your thoughts and comments. I would especially love to hear from people who work in production ag. Speak up if you feel moved to do so.
As I said above, my own thoughts here are pretty mixed.
I am not in agriculture and don't have land. This doesn't mean that I can't have a perspective here, but in trying to think this through I find that I'm caught on a couple separate thoughts.
While I appreciate the fact that payments like these make more financial sense than leasing land to grow things, the article says that Leslie Hagenstein (the landowner who is profiled) is making 13 times more revenue by selling water than selling land, it saddens me greatly to see what effect efforts like these have on rural areas. Areas which are already thinning out. When you buy a resource and it doesn't stay in a community to be used to generate economic activity, you just give everyone there one more reason to want (or have) to leave.
That being said, I am fortunate in not having to make decisions like these. Therefore, I don't want to step in finger a-wagging to tell someone who does make this decision that they're doing something wrong. I know many of the landowners who make this decision don't do it lightly. You can get a sense of this by what the Wyoming landowner says in the article, "'I’m a Wyoming native,' [Leslie] Hagenstein said. 'I don’t want to push our water downstream. I don’t want to disregard it. But I also have to survive in this landscape. And to survive in this landscape, you have to get creative.'” If the decision isn't made lightly, and it allows someone to stay on the land they grew up on and love, what right have I to criticize?
I do know one thing I have no ambivalence about. I find myself pretty indignant that the solution to water woes in the West is to ask Ag to "do something", but not asking much of downstream mega cities. Cities need the water, they need the food, but they aren't asked to sacrifice and this is highly unfair.
Whatever you think, the payments and participation in programs like this are clearly on the rise. I copied a graph from the article and attached it as a screenshot so you could get a visual for how the participation is going up (and the tax dollars being used to fund this are as well) from 2023 to 2024.
That's what I think and take away here. How about you? What do you think?
Oh my gosh! Now RMPBS is fact-checkin!
Fresh on the heels of the Sun doing their Gigafact checks (see my earlier post linked first below) comes Rocky Mountain PBS with their Reality Check.
PBS Reality Check program (linked second below) goes beyond mere checking, however. It promises to teach media literacy while at the same time providing timely looks at hot news items. I took a screenshot of their mission statement and attached.
A commendable effort. As someone who takes it as his task to do some media literacy education myself, I'm glad to see their interest. I would say, too, that looking through some other materials (and those of their partner, MediaWise a part of the Poynter Group--keep reading), I don't disagree with their recommendations.
Yes, if you see or hear something online, you should google it. You should ask who is telling you. You should seek primary sources.
So, toward that end I emailed PBS (the general email address as well as that of the gentleman in the screenshot, PBS journalism director Jeremy Moore) and asked who besides MediaWise they're partnering with.
I was told that, "Our partners are featured on the Reality Check page." I got no reply a followup trying to confirm that the only things listed on the page were MediaWise and something alluding to the Digital Inquiry Group's Civic Online Reasoning curriculum.
With regard to MediaWise, I then looked up their parent nonprofit Poynter. I linked to Poynter's About page third below as well as their InfluenceWatch page fourth.
As you might imagine with left-leaning news outfits, they partner with left-leaning fact checkers, fact checkers who may not enjoy the same kind of trust among those that are not left-leaning. This becomes readily apparent from the very top of the InfluenceWatch page which I attached as a screenshot (the one with "nonprofit" at the top).
That is, the fact-checking here is, by virtue of it being done by a group that shares the liberal values of PBS and apparently no one else, likely to focus on what liberals care about with little in the way of balance.
I tried to get a sense of whether or not PBS recognized this by asking Mr. Moore the following in my initial email: "Also, is there any concern on your part about the message sent by choosing to partner with Poynter? In particular to those who may not share their left leaning ideology?"
I got no reply to that question.
In the meantime, the solid recommendations regarding media literacy haven't changed (and are the same for whether they come out of my mouth of PBS's).
Do your own due diligence because you shouldn't leave something that important to the hands of any single entity (this page and myself included).
https://coloradoaccountabilityproject.substack.com/p/media-sunday-being-a-part-of-the?utm_source=publication-search
https://www.rmpbs.org/specials/reality-check?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
https://www.poynter.org/about/
https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/poynter-institute-for-media-studies/
The availability heuristic
I wanted to follow on the previous post about fact checking and media by touching on something important about both.
Something to remember to prevent an overreaction to what you see, hear, and read in the news.
We humans are terrible at risk assessment. Part of the reason relates to something I've written about before: the availability heuristic. You'll find a catchy little Ven Diagram of sorts at the top of this post, but a more formal definition is attached as a screenshot from the first link below.
We fear what we are repeatedly and frequently told is a danger. We fear this regardless of whether it's an actual danger because it's top of mind, it's close at hand.
Often our media enter into this dynamic by what they tend to pay attention to and do stories on.
One of the canonical examples, and it's one I've used too, is how you are much more likely to die from heart disease than terrorism, but because stories about terrorism are easier to write, and get more views, you see a lot more frequent and vivid stories about terrorism than arterial plaques. Thus people tend to fear terrorism more.
In the previous post I talked about the basics of media literacy and here is how this ties in.
After a spate of pretty good sized hailstorms in Colorado (see, for example, a story about Greeley's storm linked second below), I saw story after story about climate change and hail storms. You know the kind I mean. Because of climate change hail storms are getting worse and worse. They're becoming more of a danger and more costly.**
Good media literacy on your part is to not take any story's word for it, and it's also not to fall prey to your own inborn tendency to let stories like this engage your availability heuristic circuitry.
Good media literacy on your part is to turn to the thing that cuts short your tendency to get lazy and use the mental shortcut of the availability heuristic-- data. Numbers from reliable sources have a nice way of showing you reality where you brain might be tempted to not see reality on its own.
Add this to your due diligence, especially when you see stories that make claims about risks and dangers.
**It may or may not be true that you see more costs associated with natural disasters, but you have to tease out the fact that where and how people live are often a MUCH bigger factor here. That is, no one cared if hail pummeled open prairie. Put a bunch of expensive houses in that same prairie because more people are moving and now we have huge damage costs. That is, with no change in the frequency or severity of storms, they now appear to be more damaging and costly. But all this is another post ...
https://dictionary.apa.org/availability-heuristic
https://www.denver7.com/weather/city-of-greeley-issues-local-disaster-declaration-following-severe-storm
Problems and solutions showing up today are the result of not paying attention when godzilla was an infant. Mistakes and cover-ups, common to all of us have continued to feed the beast.