WMOD00398 - Laserfiche WebLink

Home Browse Search

,. 1. of the U.S. Forest Service are of this sort. A transect study of vegetational gradients across the High Plains is in prospect. Issues related to direct effects on animals appear to be tractable on a project-by-project basis, and they are being approached this way in the Sierra Cooperative Pilot Project. The small number of species considered important by the conference and the existence of game-management alternatives suggest the limited nature of the practical problems involved. As we examine the data delivered to us by the socioeconomic group, we find that the items focus around concem for the sociology of the investigative and innovative process in which Skywater is engaged. It is clear that our advisers wish us well, and they would like to help us change for the better the institutional setting within which we are striving to develop the technologies of snowpack augmentation and summer-convective shower management. We shall heed well what they have said, though how we may translate it into action remains uncertain. There are certain modes of action within a bureaucracy that can prove embarrassingly self-limiting. What we have sought and not found is some indi,cation of the impact that widespread and prolonged precipitation management might have, through more or less well understood processes, on the structure and functioning of societal and economic institutions viewed as components of the total environment, whether we or others were to be the agents of innovation but definitely presuming that application will not be our function. In this lack we see four possible answers. Perhaps, despite the clarity and prominence with which the NSF Special Commission raised the problem more than a decade ago, we faned to express our concern for it in an adequate way. Or perhaps the workshop group, in its eagerness to be helpful and its conviction that what it had to say about institutional arrangements for research are important, did not hear the need we expressed. Or perhaps there simply is no adequate basis for presuming that precipitation management will upset any of the existing societal or economic institutions. Finally, there may be concern for the impact of weather modification but no way of getting at it within the present state-of-the-art. The Special Commission's question is still on the table, and we shall still look for a way of dealing with it. The issue of seeding agents clearly is taking on a new perspective. Always precautionary rather than substantive in nature, the issue has now boiled down to investigation of possible concentration processes operating in nature-chemically, physically, or biologically -that might locally increase the availability of silver. It is also clear that the best setting for undertaking the field phases of such studies will be where there have been releases of silver into the environment on a vastly larger scale than any resulting from cloud seeding, that is, releases from industrial processes and through the use of silver-bearing fertilizers. Thus, while weather modification may continue to be the issue that keeps silver in the spotlight, the potential environmental impacts, if any, will arise otherwise. These conclusions are quite in keeping with the messages received. The efforts at silver monitoring have discovered large fluctuations in background levels of silver without identifying any component attributable to cloud seeding. No field evidence of any effect of silver on an organism has been found, whether from natural or anthropogenic origins, nor in areas having natural silver concentrations many orders of magnitude greater than average, except possibly within a few meters of a ground-based smoke generator. Neither the Environmental Protection Agency nor the Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, having documented the long-continued dispersal of silver into the environme:nt from industrial and fertilizer sources at 27